galadhir

They say 'be careful what you wish for' and I should have known better than to make a goal to learn to hope. How do you learn to hope? You get put in many situations where you have to practice hope...

Friday, I was peacefully going through my morning routine when DH texts the family group chat to ask if Son is okay, what with the flood warning.

• Son is like 'oh heck! I'm not actually at the boat. Would I lose the boat in a flood? Should I buy enough food to survive if I'm marooned on the boat and go and be on it?'
• I'm like, 'no, you shouldn't! You should stay somewhere where you'll be safe.'
• DH is like, 'maybe you should! If you were on the boat, you could lengthen the ropes if the floating pontoon reached the top of its range, and at least it wouldn't risk tipping sideways and filling with water and sinking.'
• Son and I are like 'Yeah, but what if it's swept out of the marina onto the river and Son ends up unable to find anywhere to moor up and can't sleep because he has to be on the tiller or the boat sinks with him on it? We don't fancy that!'
• And I'm like 'well, I suppose you do also have an anchor. You could drop the anchor to keep you in the marina until it subsided again.'

So eventually it was decided that Son would go back to the boat on Friday night. The flood warning said the water would be at the highest on Saturday, and should go down after that, and we decided to hope that the floating pontoons would take the high water in their stride.*

That was an intensive day of active hope, but it did indeed turn out that (so far) the pontoons are coping.

DH and I went over there today to add clips to the solar panel boxes to prevent the solar panels from being blown off again, and Son was like 'Ugh, this door lock is getting stiff.' But we got the solar panels latched down, and the final window covered in window film, and came home.

Then at 10pm when we're sitting watching TV at home, Son texts to say 'I've just arrived back from work and I'm locked out. I can't get this door lock open at all.'

Further panic - we're nearly two hours drive away and we don't have a replacement door lock. Now what?

DH orders a new door lock from Screwfix. Then Son texts back to say 'I bought some WD-40 and sprayed it and now I'm in!'

So now we're going back tomorrow to put a new door lock on.

I know I had the temerity to think there would be less boat work this year, but that was before I remembered that there was still this list of things to do:

• Take the wall panels off the inside (possibly one room at a time)
• See how terribly rusty it is behind them, and sand the rust back to bare metal
• Paint the inside hull with rust resistant paint
• Add insulation
• Put the panels back on.
• Disassemble the current bed and underbed storage, and somehow get it - and the mattress - out of the cabin. Son prefers his sofa-bed in the warm sitting room by the stove, and the bed is taking up so much room. He could use that room as an office if it was gone.
• Cut inspection hole in the floor, so the bilges can be pumped out with a hand pump.
• Do something to stop the front window wooden surround from rotting
• Get the hull re-blacked below the gunwales
• Somehow plug the holes in the doors/hatch arrangement which currently allow rain into the engine room
• Get an engineer out to fix the engine idle rate and check the engine mountings
• Put a better hatch/door lock on.

It will be years before this is all done!

*Son's friend also has a boat, moored in a marina closer to London, and they received an evacuation warning. So that confirms my initial thought that the correct thing to do - if your boat is in the way of an oncoming flood - is to leave it and go somewhere safer. Next time we will know :)

Went to visit Son at his boat yesterday. Fortunately this is not quite the adventure it used to be, now he's in a permanent mooring. Long may that last! But he had unplugged the shore power when he was at ours for the holidays (because rain tends to get in the socket and trip the breaker), and his fridge/freezer had defrosted, indicating that the solar power panels were not working. So we went along for DH to see if he could fix those.

Son had been keeping his rotary washing line on the roof, but there had been high winds while he was away and it was now missing. So the first thing we did was go fishing in the marina with a magnet on a string. Yep, there was the missing washing line, lying invisible in the mud. We got the boat hook around one of the arms and pulled it out, and after a quick wash to get the mud off it was as good as new.

I had hoped to make a start on painting the bow decoration - traditionally sun, crescent moon and diamonds - but it was raining, so that was out.

(An example of the kind of narrowboat bow design we're thinking of. Not Son's boat, unfortunately!)

Instead Son and I applied temporary plastic-film double glazing to all but a couple of windows. (We left a couple untouched for ventilation, since the boat is heated by a woodstove and carbon-monoxide is a concern.)

It's important that the solar panels are delivering charge to the batteries, because Son's mooring is for 11 months a year. For four weeks of the year he has to be out of the marina, and at that point he needs the solar panels to keep the batteries charged so the engine will turn on and he can have lights/charge his phone. So we were keeping an attentive ear out for DH's success in that department.

Fortunately, it turned out that the problem was just a blown fuse which had automatically turned the solar panel box off. Once the fuse was replaced and the switch flicked, DH declared it fixed. Then DH installed a light in the engine room, which had heretofore been a bit of a black hole, and we called it a day and walked into Northampton for KFC.

Not quite the Herculean and heroic efforts of previous excursions, but it is nice to make small (hopefully incremental) improvements and leave the place more functional.

I tried wearing the coat last night, and was actually very pleased with it. It's warm, and the extra material in the skirts from the two side-triangles means that when I sit down in the coat it does not gape. It just spreads out and continues to cover my knees like a champ.

Pardon DH's messy office behind me. Also I have no idea what that white stripe on the coat is. It wasn't there when I looked down at it. Some artifact of the camera, I think.

I have a nice kilt pin somewhere, which I'll use to close it instead of the morris dancing badge featured here. I'm in two minds about whether to line it with a lining fabric or just put tape over the raw edges, but the material doesn't fray anyway, so I don't necessarily need to do anything.

Also, keep your fingers crossed, but Son is currently getting insurance for fast food delivery, and once that goes through, he may actually have a source of income! Which would be both of my major hopes for this year achieved. (A source of income and a place to live.) It's not a great job, but it's better than nothing.

Ugh! Still exhausted post Covid. I guess it's only around a fortnight since I got it - only a week since I tested negative, and I shouldn't start panicking yet, but I'm still so tired.

I did manage to go to a fireworks display on Saturday with my family, and that was great. Son came down from the boat to join us, and brought his washing to put through Daughter's washing machine and tumble dryer. There are washing facilities in his marina but they cost like £5 a load to wash and the same again to dry.

Anyway the fireworks were great - they were let off from behind a screen of trees, so there was a beautiful silhouette effect where the lights shone out between the branches. Lots of new coloured fireworks this year that I hadn't seen before. Particularly the peach ones with trails of golden sparkles. And they were set very well to the music.

The new dairy intolerance made festival food even more difficult than it normally is for this vegetarian. All the non meat options were of course with cheese. So I ended up with the old reliable portion of chips, but at least that was something.

I have discovered that soy milk is fine, so I can still have a soy milk hot chocolate when I go out. Result :)

Yesterday (Sunday) we did the charity shops in Cambridge and had a choose-your-own-ingredients poke bowl in the Hanaki Cafe. (Avocado, cucumber, edamame, chilli & ginger with sesame shoyu sauce and peanuts scattered on top.) I managed to find a long coat in my size in tartan wool fabric which is very cool - a little bit punk, a little bit eccentric weirdo - and was only £15, so that was also a result.

All that activity was too much for me and today I am flattened again. But I am damn well going to belly dancing this evening even if it kills me (or more likely even if it means I have to spend tomorrow in bed again.) There are only like 4 sessions left before the end of term and I am not missing any of them.

So I tested -ve this morning. Hurray! I can now go out if I want to. I could conceivably go to the Bonfire Night display in Cambridge on Saturday, except that I still feel exhausted and dizzy and do not fancy it.

Maria from the morris is having a fireworks party of her own on Saturday and I can't say I fancy that either, but I know that DH will go. DH going to every party in existence is probably why he got covid in the first place and brought it home to me. Though honestly, if I'm going to get it anyway, I might as well go to the parties too.

Meh. I'm going to give myself another week to recover and book tickets for the fireworks display in Wilburton instead. Son will have enough notice to come down from Northampton for it, and Daughter & S-i-L have said they're up for it too. Hopefully I'll feel well enough to enjoy it too, that way.

Lovely evening at the pub tonight. We (the Ely and Littleport Riot morris dancers, along with some strays from the Sutton Masque morris dancers) normally practice on Fridays and then go to the pub afterward, which means we have our musical instruments on us, and frequently we have a sort of mini-session while we're at it. Tonight, a couple who has just moved into the area were around too, and they were so visibly overjoyed and delighted to find a music session going on that it made the whole thing seem more special to us too.

She broke out a whistle and joined in with several of the tunes. He - being a harmonica player - had a go on one of our melodeons and discovered he was a natural on it. Then we cleared some of the tables and chairs out of the way and taught her one of our dances. According to him, she had not seemed so happy for years - and of course this made us all feel excellent too.

Of course we invited them along on any further Friday they might see fit to attend, and hope to see them around again (and maybe to recruit one or both to one or the other of the morris sides involved.) I guess it must be nice, when you have moved to a new area and don't know anyone, to come across a bunch of people playing, singing and dancing, who are eager to socialize with you. But honestly even if you are a bunch of people playing, singing and dancing, it's also really nice to meet new people who think of that as something special. Everyone, I think, had a jolly good time.

Found the ugliest vase I've ever seen in the charity shop yesterday. Thought 'omg, that's the ugliest vase I've ever seen.' Then I looked at it again. And then I looked at it again and began to smile.

Then I looked at some dresses, and then I came back and looked at the ugliest vase in the world again, and decided that I absolutely loved it.

I would put daffodils in it, I thought. Daffodils would look great in that pile of elephant's dung.

So since it was only £7, I am now the proud possessor of the ugliest vase in the world, and I have put daffodils in it, and they do look great.

I am immensely pleased with this vase, and now I'm going to show it to you :)

After many engine woes, and despite the fact that Jem at the boatyard still hasn't managed to fix the idle rate so that the boat will tick over in neutral, we went down to Bates Boatyard yesterday to pick up the boat and take it away.

It went into the boatyard in September, to have the hull fixed and blacked, and the sacrificial anodes replaced. They finished doing that in about a fortnight. After which they began on the indoor work. (Making the gas piping legal and safe, fixing the shower, replacing the batteries and installing an inverter that could handle heating water for the shower.)

They did all of that by November, and we were planning to get it back then, and looking for heated sheds we could rent to do the painting. And then - when they were checking the stove to make sure it was not emitting carbon monoxide, they discovered the roof was rusted through where the stove pipe went through. So now the boat had to go back into dry dock to have the roof welded.

At that point I think, they had a look at the engine, which we had noted could not be run in neutral without stalling out. This makes mooring up very difficult. So we had asked them if they could see a way to correct the engine's idle rate. Unfortunately, as they were investigating this, the engine overheated badly, and they realized the boat could not be moved and the engine would need to be stripped to find out the cause of the overheating.

(It turned out that a couple of the pistons had been put in upside down! There was literally nothing on this boat that had been done properly.)

Of course, they hadn't budgeted time for doing engine repairs on top of everything else. So now they were having to fit in trying to repair the engine around the other jobs they had scheduled. And now it was the deepest cold of the year, the boat was frozen in, and it had been there, unheated, unoccupied, for five whole months.

(Of course the pipes burst during that time, and the boatyard had to fix those too.)

Given all that. It really wasn't in that bad a nick when we got it back.

There were some signs that people had been walking around in it in dirty boots. Son had forgotten at any point to empty the toilet, which was now disgusting. (He has a capsule toilet, and we had to lift it out, including contents, and carry it to the car to be brought home to clean.) And a lot of the bedding was moldy.

Fortunately Son had decided not to go straight back to living on board, so we have brought the moldy stuff home to be washed/thrown out as appropriate.

We moved it down a flight of six locks and found a new mooring spot just outside Tring.

• Slight panic as the engine heated up and started smoking.
• back to the boatyard to ask about the smoke
• Jem looks at it and says it's probably just that the insulating wrappings around the exhaust pipe have got wet and are now steaming dry.
• we all agree that that's what it looks like too.
• Proceed with journey and are reassured that the smoking stops almost immediately.

The locks are only just open after being out of order over the winter, and we proceed through them in a measured and professional way. (Son at the tiller, Daughter and I manning the windlasses, opening and closing the locks.)

At the final lock a family with two small children, taking a walk along the towpath, come to watch the fun. Daughter and I explain how you have to wind the paddles of the gates up so that the water can come in and fill the lock; how you can only open the gates once the water level in the lock is the same as the water level under the boat.

We attempt to open the lock. It will not shift.

Twilight is falling. The countryside around us is silvery blue. A flight of geese passes overhead in a skirring 'v' formation.

Water is still coming into the lock, but the gates won't open. Daughter and I throw our whole backs and thighs into trying to push it. Onlookers' two children decide to help too and push with all their might while their parents look fondly on.

Eventually the parents join in too and are astonished to feel for themselves that it is just not possible to get these gates to budge.

Finally I think to myself "there's clearly still water coming in, so why isn't the water level equalizing?" and at that point I realize, "maybe it's because the water is going out through the lower gates?" I check the paddles on the lower gates, and sure enough the previous people who came this way have left them half way up.

Daughter and I roll them down, and before I can even get back to the gates, the two young infants have opened it all by themselves.

Major triumph for me and for two small children :)

That's the last lock and we're losing the light, so we moor up. I am feeling good, although exhausted. This is my first day covid -ve and it has involved quite a lot of heavy labour. Fortunately, there's a car park very close, so Daughter gets on Son's bicycle and cycles back down the towpath to fetch her car.

We load the car with moldy bedding and double-bin-bag-wrapped toilet. Then walk across the road and get a really nice, very spicy vegetable chilli and chips from the Angler's Retreat pub, before driving home.

Arrive home at 9.30pm ish with every fibromyalgic inch of my body protesting, feeling accomplished.

Today I can barely stand up, and I have promised to thoroughly wash out and bleach that toilet, but it was still worth it. It is so nice to finally have the boat back!

Went into London on Thursday evening, to stay over in a hotel so we could be dressed and ready for son's Masters Degree graduation at 9.45 on Friday morning. Son and daughter met us at the hotel and we had a nice evening just chatting at the bar.

Even with the hotel we had to get up pretty early in order to get to the Royal Festival Hall via Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee line.

Son, who has just had an operation on his foot, was in a medical shoe most of the day, but swapped it out for a normal shoe to cross the stage and get his photos taken.

Graduation ceremonies have become a lot less cold and formal since I had mine. There were people in the audience cheering as their graduate crossed the stage, and graduates doing little dances before they got their formal handshake/bow. It was a change I approve of, I think. We ought to be able to enjoy our triumphs, I think, instead of making even our celebrations feel like an ordeal.

There was still an awful lot of clapping to be done!

Nice speeches and a very warm atmosphere. And of course we(me, DH, daughter) were all extremely proud of him.

Then we went to Kintan (Japanese barbeque restaurant on Oxford Square) for lunch - which is a great option for the three meat eaters, and does spicy vegetable noodles and barbeque-your-own halloumi for the vegetarians :)

After which we caught the new Elizabeth line back to the DLR, mainly so we could check out London's newest tube line (very like all the other tube lines except cleaner and roomier.) And thus back to the cars and back home.

Then it was Saturday, and DH got up and got dressed for the Mark Jones Day of Dance and then half way through tying string round his knees he said "You know, I don't actually feel very well."

He was testing negative only the day before, and I was testing negative until yesterday, but he got the red line on Saturday, and I got it today, and to cut a long story short, we are now both grounded with Covid.