Despite, or perhaps because of, the clear skies and sun earlier it’s a little nippy on board this evening. Not cold enough to light the fire or have to—as a workmate was relating of a friend of their’s—lean over the side with a broom to break the ice round the hull, but I’m sitting near the electric radiator in a hoodie. I’ve also closed the windows, and the cabin feels cozy.

It can get cold here, I’ve got a reminder to top the radiator water up with antifreeze every so often. There’s a modified and mounted fire extinguisher body on the wall for just such a purpose.

The lack of entertainment, that is TV or fast enough web to stream video is getting to me a bit. My thoughts were that I would write more, or read more. But I think the lack of the option is making me miss the telly however much I wouldn’t normally have used it. I’m writing, but this blog and other scraps mainly. And constantly listening to the radio for some real-time company, Marc Riley and James Naughtie bookmark the day. They should do a show together.

I hope I’ve not got frostbite when Jim comes around again tomorrow.

Days at sea: 9

Rations: A jam sandwich, shared with the duck outside.

Stowed: The new Bob Dylan ‘return to form’, via the new pay as you go SIM I’ve had to buy as the broadband, apparently, can’t be turned on ’til October.

Yesterday morning, up early with the sun and feeling like I wanted to be busy, I set about doing some chores. I put some washing on in the hut up the towpath, emptied the dehumidifier—spilling some condensed water—, and then thought about what else I could usefully do. I’d already had two cups of tea and pieces of toast.

One thing that is sort of bothering me is if the boat it level. The first time I came to see it it was, a little but still, obviously listing to the starboard. Nice landlord josh said that was something to do with the water tank being a bit empty—it balances out the stove, sink, toilet, fire all being on the other side. When on board and standing everything seems level, but if you sit and focus on something out of the window then you’re just not sure. It was made a little worse by the rare traffic past me, there’s an event on in town and some free boat trips are part of it. I’m not sure whether to wave at the tourists as I stand partially naked at the sink. Anyway, I resolve to see If I can make sure the tank is full and level off.

The water tank is kept topped up with a hose connected to a normal standpipe type tap a little up the towpath. I’m told that you could keep it attached permanently, were it not for the possibility of people who think it’s funny to turn them on as they stumble home from the pub. I wasn’t really sure that would happen, but I did see someone do it when I was walking out after picking up the keys—not to my boat but to the tap of a curly haired James May alike who called out “Can you turn that off, please?” after us.

So I found the hose in the undergrowth and snapped it onto the fitting, then turned the tap on, not all the way but enough to make sure it was working. I then went back to the boat and pushed the mattress and some of the struts aside, opened the tank to watch the water come in.

It was slow going, so I popped back and turned the tap back on. In the time it took to have another mug of tea and swap the washing into the dryer it was pretty full. So I hopped back off, and coiled the hose up safely in the grass.

With that I was off out for the day, so I turned the dehumidifier on—unsurprisingly the air gets humid around so much moisture, you need to take steps—and hung the washing to finish off drying over the bath. Apart from it taking me ten minutes to successfully lock the door, I was feeling a proper sailor.

I had a good day out, back in Birmingham, with some old mates and was in fairly good spirits when I staggered back up the gang plank at about 10pm. Even the Boris Johnson haired, hi-vis clad, ticket inspector on the train back hadn’t really upset me. I was in need of a wee as the train pulled out and he—suspecting a jumper?—wouldn’t let me go to the bog until he had checked my ticket. I felt like asking if he wanted to come in to help me shake afterwards, such was his attentiveness.

But I struggled to sleep when I got in, there was the odd shout of young people enjoying themselves somewhere in the centre of town, there was the drink I’d taken affecting me, but after an hour or so I decided it was a constant drip which was keeping me awake. I got up, found my torch and investigated.

By the front door, and by the bed, is the lowest point of the boat. Should there be any water on board this is where you’d notice. “It won’t be canal water” says my Living on a Boat Notes. It will be one of two things:

• it could be ‘bilge’. Bilge is a great word, a very British insult for abject nonsense. And I knew it was one of the very many idioms in our language that  had somehow originated on the water. I thought it was something to do with the sanitary conditions, but it turns out to be rainwater—boats are by their nature watertight, so there’s no drainage. The boat does have a bilge pump out the back to deal with this, if it failed there could be bilge in the boat.
• it could be an internal leak, either from the water system or from rain getting in.

Days at sea: 6

Rations: Mistaken pasta salad when getting home last night. Sat heavy in the stomach as I tried to sleep and heavier in the facilities this am.

Stowed: -1 pair of sunglasses, which I ditched (hooked at eye level round a pipe in the Gents’ in the Shakespere, Temple St, Birmingham), after discovering they were scratched to hell and made me look even stupider.

When Lord Edmund Blackadder is trying to sell his un-mock Tudor home he has a spiel for anyone enquiring about “the privvies”. “When the architect who designed this house came to privvies, he said let’s make them functional and comfortable.” They were the latest in front wall elevation design combined with a wide gutter facility below.

“You mean you crap out of the window?”

The boat isn’t quite that bad, but functional and comfortable they aren’t really. What there is is a thing that looks very like a toilet but has much more in common with the ones on Dutch trains than the ones in your house. There’s no water-based flush, just a lever that releases deposited matter into a secure tank below. The tank is pretty big I assume, as I’m told you only need to make the trip up to the boat yard to have it emptied “once or twice a year”.

That’s if, as landlord nice Josh says: “You chuck wee out of the window–discretely.” So now, without actually getting any more money I do have a pot to piss in. It’s an arts and crafts earthenware jug I found in the hold that I think has been used to house pot plants. Discretely is hard, however as even emptying the washing up water out into the canal sounds like one is standing on the roof proudly writing your name in the lilies.

I can’t ask guests to do that, and often a bit of number one is needed to help the number two down the hole anyway. I won’t mind if I get to fire up the engine a little more often. Anything but finding out what “it can smell a bit in the summer” (from nice Josh’s boat notes) “if it’s full” means.

Days at sea: 5

Rations: toast made with the cheap tesco toaster I bought. Options include not toasting both ends of the bread or having a burnt middle. You can have that one MacIntrye.

Stowed: Some post for me and some post for the previous tenant. Sent to a variety of addresses all featuring the number 4 and some watery words, delivered to a box on deck. I’m waiting to see if the postie climbs aboard or leans dangerously over when delivering.

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?

So, I slept okay, and the Council believe I exist. At 8:30am on Tuesday—so I slept well, but not long—I walked to Oxford’s ‘Parking Shop’ to get some parking permits. To register a car for a residents permit I’d need a council tax bill and a log book to show the car registered to that address. For that I’d need a car too, but a tenancy agreement is said to be enough to pick up a pack of 25 visitors permits and those will prove to be very handy as the nearest car park is over three quid an hour. It turns out that the particular type of tenancy agreement isn’t official enough but, as my face fell, the kindly lady behind the glass said it was okay and slipped me a sheath of the permits. They look like the most boring scratchcards ever, but there’s a guaranteed prize of 24 hours parking with each one.

I’ve just ‘been met’ by a neighbour, I felt I had no control in it. Her name isn’t important, but her boat name now has slight Greek fascist connotations which I don’t think she’s realised. She introduced herself, adding the boat name as Daniel Craig might have done and was very defensive when I responded to her telling me how difficult car parking was by nodding agreement and mentioning that thankfully I wouldn’t have too much trouble. She has one, and she needs it. I didn’t really think through the lack of roads on the canal, and moving in proved to be a test of how well we could carry boxes and floppy linen from the main road loading bay to the stern. But, that done, temporary passes will do me.

Getting the internet connected is proving much more difficult, but I don’t think that the place being a boat is anything to do with that. The previous skipper had broadband and a phone, but seems to have cut it off rather than handing over the contract. This has led to the— extremely helpful—Plus Net confusingly having their attempts to connect me rebuffed. I now have my iPhone tethered, and an engineer booked for some point in the coming weeks. How they actually find the place is another matter.

Worrying about the costs of web connection means I’m feeling a little disconnected myself. Although, unlike the pump under the bed I don’t spark like a crashed scalextric car when touched.

The night before last was the first attempt to use the on-shore facilities. About three hundred yards and four boats up the towpath is a dark bricked and gated hut within which is another locked door. My mooring fees include two keys which gain me access to a washer and a dyer, and entry into a world of laundrette etiquette  added to by these being the sort of people who live on canal boats.

We’re all going to be a bit odd, right?

Days at sea: 4

Rations: A spicy cous cous salad from the Asda near work.

Stowed: Some tea towels and curtain hanging stuff from a hardware shop in Headington that had a thresholded picture of Chuck Norris to advertise the shoelaces behind the counter. Without comment that it was Chuck Norris, and without a reference to his shoes.

Nice Josh my landlord, or rather my unseen landlady’s partner, has just been round to show me how to disconnect the water pump. Last night my part-time shipmate and I were kept awake not by the part-time dog for once but regular chugs and hisses. Under the bed is a huge water tank, which means a few things:

• you can have a lot of water on board, balancing the white goods which are all one side (starboard, right—right?), which is good for baths, showers and not leaving the hose connected to the tap
• the bed is really high, far higher than one can jump without stepping up. I’m rather worried about falling out if drunk or restless, I’m rather worried about getting in, although I seem to have managed it the few times I’ve tried
• it has a pump underneath it, which in theory should only pump when the taps are on.

But that’s not what happened on my first night on board. What happened is that the new experience and other things that may have kept me sleepless were added to by a punctuation of pumping. I’m not entirely sure I slept, so vivid were the dreams I had when and if I was.

The part-time dog was a little confused by the height of the bed—unable to either climb on and cuddle or lick stray body parts that peek out of the covers. She was very good though, her first time on water and no barking or whining. I was worried, that the boat was one of the types of rented accommodation that didn’t have a problem with the ‘small and well behaved’ (I tell those letting property, when she’s technically erring on the side of neither) woofer was one of its big drawing points. If she’d have hated it that would have all been for naught. It still remains to be seen if she takes to it for a whole day on her own. One can only hope that watching the towpath is interesting enough.

Tonight, I’m alone. Radio 4 burbling about the speaker of the house somewhere in the dark at the centre of the boat. I’m sitting in the pointy bit at the front, lit by the light of the laptop screen only.

I’m not connected to the internet, fearful of running up a huge bill on my dongle and yet to sort out a ‘land’-line. One of the joys of boat living so far has been the difficulty in explaining the situation to those in officialdom. The address—I have one, postcode and all—doesn’t appear properly in website records. I hope the Council Tax goes through okay, but more I hope that I can get the web connected. To be without that (as I am without a TV, stereo, full time company) will be hard.

I’m not sure I’d contemplated that bit of the complications of living on the water: I was ready—if not waiting—for oddness with toilets and other amenities, but not sort of not existing. Tomorrow’s to-do list includes trying to get the Council to believe I exist for purposes of car-parking permits. I don’t have one, but the part-time shipmate does and I very much want her to be able to visit me as much as possible.
Days at sea: 2

Rations: Leftover Chinese, whichever red wine was on offer at Sainsbury’s.

Stowed: Some new pants and socks as a lot seem to have gone missing in the move.