I’m in the fore end, I can’t really see out but as I noticed the other day people can see in. It’s okay, I’m dressed. I hadn’t ever considered I’d be doing anything like this until a few weeks ago, I’ve friends in Birmingham that live happily on the canal but I guess I always saw myself as too conventional and impractical to do anything like this.

Having, for many reasons, ended up in Oxford needing somewhere to rent I was a bit crap at finding an actual place. I sort of assumed that something would come up, a work contact needing to rent out a room or a perfect flat dropping from somewhere. That didn’t happen, I decided I needed to be in my own space at home at nearly 40, and I saw some dreadful places. They were dreadful for different reasons, some of which are worth recounting:

There was the bedsit in a satellite town, advertised on a local website by a man of African extraction. It was grotty through no fault of its own, but it was made odd by the decoration. The sub-letter, for it was he and why it was less money than it should have been, had arranged boxes of fairly cheap chocolate on a cabinet as if they were Royal Dalton. And if that were not enough, pinned on the wall beside were correspondence with various agencies detailing overpayment and fraudulent benefit claims. It was like a shrine to the consumer bits of That’s Life.

There was the niceish, if cramped, apartment attached to the spacious suburban home of South-Asian ‘Linda’ and ‘Paul’ (real names, although one suspects not ones they’ve had since birth). They were lovely, they talked redecoration and seaside holidays. They showed us their back garden. It was a lawn and a washing line. Nice washing line.

There was the hut in the garden of a lady that worked in publishing. She was a little crazy and seemed to bluster and bully her current tenant—who was messy despite having no storage space and had to get drinkable water from inside the main house. I had visions of going thirsty until I was sure she was out.

And there were numerous people who promised viewings and texted less than an hour before to cancel. I’d pretty much decided to take a couple of rooms in a barn conversion in a village near where I work, it was dark and a little too isolated but it was okay. It was the one place that the bed didn’t fill and dominate the whole living area. Then the boat became available and the lure of a decent place in the city centre (but still quiet) was too much. Oxford is I’m told the most expensive place to live in the country, taking wages in to account, but I’m just about afloat.

So I’ve hidden all my fears, about drowning, about setting fire to myself with the gas or the wood burner, about acting out too much of Young Adam, about becoming a hippy and have, I suppose, become a hippy.

I’ve also just left the Labour Party and joined the Greens, did I mention that?