Spring’s sorting out is going on all around us. Many birds are busy nesting, female ducks are once more putting their lives at risk as the mating season begins (males can and often do drown the females if they mate in the water), buds are busily forming on shrubs and trees, and early bulbs are beginning to delight us with splashes of colour, lifting the dark days of winter.
For us, our first winter mooring is nearing its end. In just a few days, we will be at the end of February, and that is the expiry date of our winter sojourn. It’s been many things – an education, a delight, a chance to explore, to reacquaint ourselves with places and people we haven’t seen for a long time, and crucially, an opportunity to make changes to the boat that will see us into the next decade.
It was in November that we finally made it onto their chance to do regular school pick ups, join the support team on football training and match touchlines, help at his Beaver scout group, join school activities and help with homework projects which have taught us too.
The boat has been upgraded to a new battery system which has totally changed how we can live aboard, and another revolution in onboard living and working is being constructed on land as I write, ready for installation in early March.
Before then, we have much to do – ripping out, clearing, reducing unnecessary items, and that’s not been constrained to our floating home/office. When we left bricks and mortar over five years ago, we put some items we couldn’t bear to part with in store, and these past months have been the time to review them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, but it can also make the resolve grow stronger. If it hasn’t been used or even missed in five years, then maybe it should go.
Once more we’ve created the piles of keep, donate, and dispose. Once more we’ve made good use, while we still have it, of the car. EBay, facebook marketplace, charity shops, Vinted, and as a very last resort, the local tip, have been destinations of choice and necessity.
After the next major work on the boat, we will do a final sweep of the boat and the store, and I’m sure more will come to light. It’s a major way of spring cleaning, I guess, but vital. It is surprising that on the boat, even though it is such a limited space, items accumulate and get forgotten. I’ve been appalling in sticking to the maxim of one on, one off, and have smuggled all sorts of things on board. In the same way it is easy to leave items in store that just sit there because you can’t decide what to do with them. Now we need to be brutal, and no doubt in a few years’ time we will need to do the same again!
It’s interesting how one’s perspective changes with time. Things I considered just five years ago were essential to keep have found their way to charity shops this week. Partly, I suspect, because we’ve changed our views for now about moving back to bricks and mortar.
A few weeks ago, we met up with a couple we helped during the long final lockdown. Both remain continuous cruisers, both will celebrate their 80th birthdays this year and both are not in brilliant health but they too feel even though they could buy a bricks and mortar home tomorrow, that they would lose a wonderful way of life by doing so. They are inspiring, and in a way, their recognition of the beauty of narrowboat life as ccers is comforting. At the same time, we are seeing stories I’m sure many of you have seen this week of a boat that has apparently been stripped and sunk on the Coventry Canal. There has also been the seasonal flurry of boats for sale, just as the usual annual bricks and mortar flurry of homes for sale at this time of year.
It’s the way of things, the changing of the seasons, and we all need to clear out, sort out, and spring clean, ready for the blossoming of a fresh new year. We all need our nests to be functional, well structured, and safe at this time of year, whether they are up in the treetops or floating on the water.
Pickingupducks 