I am a woman on the brink. I have got a coldsore sitting fat and furious on my upper lip and something that the pharmacist described, with a sympathetic wince, as stress-induced gastritis, and the last time the universe saw fit to bless me with such a charming combination was the last time I was trying to move house, and the time before that was the time I was trying to sell a house, and so the only conclusion I can draw is that this here body of mine has got something of a deep and abiding aversion to estate agents and solicitors and is making absolutely no bones about it. It is staging its own quiet protest. A one-woman sit-in, from the inside out.

Reader, I am miserable.

I am hunting for silver linings with the dedication of a woman who has read all the right books and knows, intellectually, that this too shall pass. But I do believe I am ready to pluck my eyelashes out one by one with the sheer grinding stress of it all, and the books can wait.

The weekend went past in a blur of mini family crises, each one arriving before the last had properly been absorbed, and it rather felt like my head was going to blow clean off my shoulders. I developed a cough that came with no warning and a burny, leaky nose and the particular bone-tiredness that isn't fixed by sleep, and I found myself at the very end of whatever tether I had left. So I took to my bed. Which, given the current geography of our lives, really amounts to moving to the other side of the single room we are living in and pulling a duvet up over my head and lying there trying to locate something resembling equilibrium under all the chaos.

The whole of the top floor is currently strung with wet washing. Laundered at Ben’s sister’s house and brought home in bags to dry on anything that will hold it. Jeans are flung over every doorway. Jumpers hang in a solemn row over the frame of the bed. Socks dangle from the top of the bureau like small sad flags. An entire sheet is draped, somewhat majestically, over the stepladder in the bathroom. Because of course there is a stepladder in the bathroom. And an air-fryer in the bedroom. And the olive oil that is my one true luxury here sits on the windowsill next to a tube of antacids, which is perhaps the most honest still life I have ever accidentally composed.

Is it any wonder I’m ready to pull my eyelashes out?

Then, hot on the heels of the rubbish news, came a little happy news.

The boat that we had set our hearts on was not sold after all. It is still there. And it might, should the stars align and the universe decide we have suffered enough for one season, still be ours.

A riot of lovely colour, wild wallpaper, roughshod stained wood that has the look of something lived in rather than merely owned. It is so far removed from the endless litany of caravanny boats we have been traipsing around, all beige upholstery and the faint smell of someone else’s cooking and no soul to speak of that when we first saw the photographs Ben and I both went very quiet in the particular way of people trying not to hope too much. It has a proper bath. A shower. A huge water tank and space for the dogs and a door halfway along that opens straight into the galley kitchen, which in my head already smells of whatever I’m planning to cook that evening. It ticks every single box on a long list we have assembled over months of looking at boats and knowing, each time, that this was not the one.

And so begins the nerve-wracking bit.

Will the house complete in time for the boat owners to be able to move on? Will it pass the hull survey without delivering news that makes us sit down heavily? Will the logistics of getting it from where it sits now to where we want it on the Peak Forest canal prove more of a drama than our combined and enthusiastic executive dysfunction can manage? Will someone else appear from nowhere, someone without a house sale hanging over them and a pharmacist’s note about stress gastritis, and simply buy it from under our noses, leaving Sweet Dreams to become the boat that got away, lodged forever in that particular chamber of the heart reserved for the things that were nearly ours?

It is a lot of small scary gambles stacked on top of each other, all at once, for one very big and oh so lovely boat.

But I do believe in simply deciding she is already ours and proceeding accordingly. In assuring whatever powers arrange these things, the universe, God, sheer stubborn faith, that we are already excellent custodians of the idea of her, and can therefore be trusted with the reality. It is the only strategy I have that doesn’t make my stomach hurt, when everything else does.

So we spend hours imagining. We talk about how we will eat on board and the necessity of switching to organic cleaning products so as not to contaminate the canals, and the most efficient systems for shopping and storing and reducing packaging to almost nothing. We make long lists of things we have never in our lives needed before: floating keyrings, boat ladders, solar panels, fishing nets to retrieve whatever goes overboard, life-jackets sized for dogs who would absolutely, definitely fall in. We argue gently, still, about powerbank capacities and water filters and the relative merits of various composting arrangements.

Mostly though, we talk about autopia.

About how necessary this life now seems. How the idea of shrinking everything down to something so beautifully manageable feels less like a loss than a reprieve. How it might give us the space, finally, to heal properly from all the terrible things, and to be wholly ourselves without the particular financial and social pressure that has become, somewhere in the past few years, simply too much to carry with any grace.

We talk about cats in boat catios, a word I have to keep explaining to people, and yoga on the flat roof in the early morning before anyone else is on the towpath, and wild nights moored in places we have never been, looking up at stars uninterrupted by streetlight. We talk about electric bikes for fetching food along the canal path and solar-powered fairy lights strung along the roof and all the potential muddles of living somewhere where water and electricity and diesel exist in close and complicated proximity. We imagine our life together, the two of us, and sometimes I get to feeling weepy about it.

Because I have not had this before. Have not ever had someone who wanted to plan every last particular of a life alongside me, who doesn’t flinch at the specificity of it, who matches me detail for detail and adds his own and doesn’t find the whole elaborate imagining of it exhausting or excessive. It is a thing I did not know I was still waiting for until it was suddenly, and improbably, here.

For now though, we wait. We order loo rolls and cat litter and things that are not beans on toast. Tonight it is curry and naan for Ben, and for me a bowl of mozzarella and fat beef tomatoes sliced thick and laid out Caprese-style and drizzled in the olive oil that lives on the windowsill next to the antacids. And. then we will assume our positions: Ben on the bed, me on the sofa, two cats arranged at either side of me with the ceremonial stillness of Egyptian sphinxes, sentinel and solemn, while I sit between them like the Queen of Sheba with my laptop on my knee to tap away at this secret little passion project of mine.

It may not ever see the light of day. But it is filling me up at a time when I need very badly to be filled.

Night will fall. Ben will light a cheap candle and I will think, not unkindly, of the gorgeous ones I have got packed away in boxes for our new life. We will watch Amandaland and drink another cup of tea and he will laugh at my constant and deeply unglamorous nervous burping and one more evening will have passed out of however many we have left to spend in this room.

This too will pass.

Autopia is just around the corner, and I have already decided we deserve it.

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Last Monday I convinced myself it was a bank holiday. I was absolutely certain of it. Rang Finley, announced we were coming, made the whole thing feel ceremonial and significant and swept Ben along with me in the general air of occasion.

But it wasn’t a bank holiday.

Finley didn’t ask why I was making such a fuss of a Monday. He just worried quietly, looking at us anxiously when we arrived, apparently convinced we were rocking up to share news of our imminent demise or ill-advised intention to start a new life in Brazil (of all places). Looking at me the way he has looked at me since he was about fifteen: with fond, slightly bewildered amusement, as if he is the parent and I am the wayward, occasionally baffling child who has turned up again with another improbable idea and needs to be fed and humoured. Watching me and Ben across the table with something in his face that I can only describe as relief. And laughing. A bemused chuckle because le laughs at us often. In a way that is entirely kind and only slightly a lot at our expense.

We ate and then Finn’s best friend, Harry, arrived and sat down and said little and I love him because he is serious and beautiful and takes everything in with a quality of attention that feels, always like well-mannered, beautifully brought up courtesy. And Finn himself: wild ringlets, talking ten to the dozen, eating even faster than he talks, which is saying something. Gesturing with his fork. Not quite finishing sentences before starting new ones, leaping between subjects with the gorgeous agility of a twenty-two year old mind that has not yet learned to slow itself down for other people. The same energy he had at seven, at twelve, at sixteen, directed now toward a life that is entirely his own and showing every sign of being a good one.

I sat across from him and felt it. That lit thing. That thing that has been burning for twenty-two years and has absolutely no intention of going out, and that I would not extinguish even if I could, even on the days it scorches.

The actual bank holiday is tomorrow. I know that now. I have made a note.

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote, in Offshore, that decision is torment for anyone with imagination. That when you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.

I have been thinking about this constantly.

We have fallen headlong into narrowboats. Not politely but with a kind of obsessive, savage interest. We are in it, completely, bone-deep, arguing via WhatsApp at ten in the morning about whether a sixty-eight footer is too ambitious for two people who have barely steered a dinghy. Sending each other listings at midnight. Whole evenings given to the question of stern design: cruiser or traditional, which is secretly a question about who we think we are and whether we are brave enough to fully commit to the answer. Every decision multiplying the things we might have done and now never will.

And Ben has noticed, with a smirk and forensic accuracy, that every single boat I send him contains a washing machine. Which is quite a stretch because so many of them don’t. He has noticed that I appear entirely oblivious to whether the rest of the vessel is held together with canal water and optimism, so long as there is a washing machine! This might be true (but don’t tell him), because I am a vintage housekeeper. I have spent twenty-one years writing about the small domestic rituals that make a life lovelier, about the joy of clean linen dried in good air so I need a washing machine. It’s not preference or aesthetic choice. Its non-negotiable in the way that the books are non-negotiable, which is to say: we may talk about it but we both know how it ends.

He doesn’t want a washing machine. He’s got objections involving water and space and what I suspect is a philosophical position about the nature of narrowboat life that he has not yet fully articulated. As if a washing machine somehow compromises the off-griddiness of the whole kaboodle, but installing Starlink doesn’t?? And I respect this position enormously. I do. But I am having a washing machine.

So we have agreed to keep discussing it. And let me hereby state that I am happy to discuss it till we are blue in the face but no washing machine = no Alison on the boat. Laundry, done properly is, I am afraid, the hill I am willing to die upon

That is of course if we ever get there. For the house sale is becoming a saga now. Because there is a man somewhere in the world who has STILL not yet signed whatever it is that needs signing and is going about his days apparently untroubled, while I feel the kind of low, constant, slightly nauseating hum of waiting I remember from pregnancy: the weird anxiety of waiting to birth a new life.

So in the meantime I’m obsessing about the storage unit, because I have got to keep my mind occupied and neurosis is as good an occupation as any methinks?So yes, I think about it when I can’t sleep. The fluorescent darkness of it, the specific smell of stored and waiting things. Somewhere in there are boxes of Finley’s childhood, things I couldn’t put down when he left them behind: drawings and Pokemon cards and the beautiful detritus of a boy becoming a person, lots of things he no longer needs and that I cannot release because they are evidence. Evidence that it happened. That he was small once and is large now and I was there for all of it.

There is furniture from the first shop I ever owned. A blue apothecary chest, deep-drawered and entirely impractical and absolutely coming with me onto the boat, . A teak box painted red with Indian flowers, from my Mum’s house, that smells still of somewhere like home. Books in quantities that no reasonable person could defend and that I will defend to the last. Kitchen things I am not yet sure we will need, but that I am not ready to decide about because deciding about them means deciding about the life that once used them. And I don’t want to have to decide about that, I simply want to acknowledge it and move on.

Soon, I will stand in that unit and I will have to choose, regardless.

Gaston Bachelard wrote that a house is first and foremost a space for daydreaming, assembled from its contents as much as its walls. What does it mean to reduce all of that to seven feet wide? What makes the cut? What do I hold and what do I leave in the fluorescent dark? The apothecary chest. Obviously the apothecary chest. The teak box with the Indian flowers. The books. All of the books. Every last one. And Finley’s childhood. The essence of it. Where will I put that? Is it enough to carry it with me, to carry it in my heart?

What I want, what I think I have been trying to articulate for weeks, is not a still room in a tumble down cottage. I have long give up wanting the cottagecore dream. Rather, I want the boat to be a still room. The whole thing. I want it to feel like a floating apothecary: low-ceilinged and fragrant and useful in every inch, every surface quietly doing its work. Mason jars of dried chamomile and rose hip syrup and wild garlic salt and elderflower cordial lined along the galley shelf. Bundles of lavender hanging wherever lavender can be hung. The blue apothecary chest fitting, somehow, into a space that was made for it. The books in every nook and cranny and horizontal surface the boat will offer, bookshelves built into the places most people would put something sensible.

I dream about a specific meal. Not the junk food of these transitional weeks, the quick and shameful and forgiven things we have been eating while our brains are elsewhere. I mean the meal the boat will make possible: celeriac mashed with too much butter, truffled and silky, walnuts roasting in the little oven until the whole boat fills with that warm woody sweetness, something slow on the stove, the dark outside the portholes. Ben across the table with my black glasses pushing his hair back, fairylights twinkling along the length of the boat and dogs arranged in piles the way they do when they know the evening has settled.

Whether the mason jars survive the locks is a question I keep adding to the list of things I don’t know. Do things fall off the roof frequently? Do they slide about inside? Do people on boats have ironing boards or are they just resigned to crumpled? Will icicles droop off my nose in the middle of the night, come December?

I haven’t a clue, there is so much I don’t know, but I do know that there is a speed limit on the canals. Who knew? Four miles per hour, and I find this so deeply comforting I can barely explain it to anyone who hasn’t felt the particular exhaustion of trying too hard to live at the speed of society she does’t understand. Four miles per hour. The whole country performing velocity and urgency and productivity, and us moving at four miles per hour with chamomile on the shelf and nasturtiums on the roof and a washing machine that Ben has accepted but not yet made peace with, going at four miles per hour toward somewhere we haven’t decided yet.

Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness.

Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

I read that line and felt it like a small, gentle reproach. And then like an instruction. And then like permission. I have always needed permission you know? Always sought it from anyone willing to provide it, with the kind of reassurance that says yes, you are ok, go ahead.

The roof of the boat will be covered in plants. Trailing nasturtiums and pots of mint and rosemary: extravagant, and wobbly, the whole travelling garden arriving in new places with its riot of green and blossom. Ben will forage from the towpath, because he is the kind of person who knows where the wild garlic grows and will come back with muddy boots and something edible and the quiet satisfaction of a man who has been useful in a way that connects to something old and true, and I want to be the person who knows what to do with it. Who has the jar ready. Who has the butter softening.

We agree about almost everything that matters.

We just have to sort out the washing machine.

So yes, we have done our research. We have stood on towpaths and watched the floating world go past at four miles per hour and I have studied it with the fervour of a woman who has found her new special interest and intends, as I always intend, to know everything about it before I am ready.

Ben studies technical boaty things I don’t yet understand and I study the people.

The man under the pram canopy of his exhausted, paint-blistered boat on a grey Wednesday afternoon, drinking a bottle of prosecco alone in the quietly terrible way of someone who has made a series of complicated decisions and arrived, finally, at the right time for prosecco. I understood him with my whole body: despair and lonely mess. Once glorious or not yet glorious, but either way, tired.

The barefooted couples, chaotic and gorgeous and moving in the synchronised way of people who have long since stopped explaining themselves to each other. One at the helm, one at the bow, the rope already in the right hand. Something in me looking at them and knowing the word for what I felt: not envy exactly. Recognition. Wanting to say: yes, that, we are trying to get to that.

The serious older pairs in their matching hats. Sensible, sometime silly hats. Moving along the water with the quiet efficiency of people who cracked some code the rest of us are still puzzling over and who are now simply getting on with it, together, in the right hats. I want their competence. I want their ease. I might even want a hat though let it be known that I am the kind of woman who looks like she has had her head hammered into her neck whenever I so much as debate one and that Ben will probably have to leave should I decide I want to be the kind of boater who wants to wave at passers-by as we sail down the canal smug and certain.

The woman in the yellow anorak steaming along the towpath at a pace that suggested an argument recently vacated or possibly one being rehearsed for later, looking at me when I said hello as if I had said something entirely inadmissible. I think about her and hope she found what she was looking for at the end of that towpath.

And finally a man on the roof of his tatty, glorious, completely magnificent boat. Wild beard, bare feet, arms slightly out from his sides in the posture of someone who has absolutely nothing left to prove to anyone. He didn’t notice me at all and I could not stop staring at him. A pirate of a man. A wild thing. As free as I want Ben to be

I don’t know which of these people we are going to be, though I suspect I am secretly auditioning for all of them. We are too old, probably, for the beautiful barefooted bohemians, or at least past the age of doing it without a flicker of self-consciousness. Too young, definitely, for the matching hats. (Too chaotic. Too much hair). And maybe the pirate on the roof is the dream but being him requires a level of not-caring we haven’t quite achieved. Because I think we might be fussing about things not yet ready to reveal themselves?

Case in point: the Dryrobe thing. From a purely freezing point of view we want the kind of Dryrobes we sometimes borrow in Abersoch. We want them because we are always cold, because warmth is the thing I pursue above almost everything else, and because the vision I return to most often is standing on the towpath in something enormous and fleece-lined and completely, unashamedly cosy while the canal goes past at four miles per hour. But Dryrobes feel bougie. And people make entire Instagrams about people who wear them anywhere other than on a beach. Will the real narrowboaters look at us, with our carefully curated apothecary jars and our orange Le Creuset kettle and our Dryrobes, and simply know? Will the pirate on the roof see us coming and move along the water away from us, knowing we are pretenders, that we have the right objects but not the right history, that we chose this rather than arriving at it through necessity or long slow accumulation of canal knowledge?

I care about this more than is probably reasonable.

“Decision is torment for anyone with imagination.”

What it will mean to be together, the two of us, in seven feet of width, all day and all the hours of the night?

People ask with that delighted alarm, as if this is the detail we have overlooked in our enthusiasm. We haven’t. We have discussed it for at least as long as we have discussed the shocking price of canal-side launderettes. Because here is what I know: we have foraged this life together from whatever grew in the lives we had before we met. His life and my life, the things that survived and the things we put down and left in the past they belonged to. We composted some of it and were glad to. And from what remained we have made something that feeds us, something that is specifically ours, that nobody else could have made from these exact ingredients.

The person you can be in seven feet with.

Ben pushes his hair back from his face when he is thinking, digs his fingers into his scalp, a gesture I have memorised without meaning to, that I would know in the dark. He makes me cups of tea at the exact right moment, which sounds small and is a little bit everything and he laughs at me, laughs at things I say that I was not entirely sure were funny, which does more good for my nervous system than he knows. All of this a kind of fluency it takes years to build, and we haven’t had years and I do not take that for granted.

Seven feet seems, on reflection, like plenty.

Now, tonight, on this specific cloudy Sunday in May. I am alone, writing this.

The clouds have been low all day, the kind of grey that sits just above the rooftops and makes everything feel interior and close and bewildering and we have eaten something terrible for lunch. The kind of thing that sinks to the bottom of your tummy and won’t let you forget that your diet has entirely slipped. I have been mildly, persistently stressy about this, and I know the stress is only partly about the food. It is harder than usual, lately, to untangle what I am feeling from what I am not feeling from what I am feeling about what I am feeling. This is the muddle of a neurodivergent nervous system under pressure: the emotions don’t come labelled. Something is happening in my chest that could be excitement or could be dread or could be a third thing without a name, something akin to anticipation, tingly and slightly unsteady, like standing at the edge of something very high up and not being entirely sure if you came here to jump or just to look.

I know this is the right direction. I know we are in the right place. I just sometimes can’t tell joy from vertigo, and I have had to teach myself to trust the direction even when the feeling is illegible?

And now he is back, whistling and carrying arms full of fallen blossom branches gathered on his walk. Arranging them in a jug without making a ceremony of it. So I find myself leaning in into him, the smell of him, dogs and aftershave and something green and outside, something that smells like the whole world should, and I am giddy about the blossom in the way that is slightly embarrassing and completely genuine, the way of a woman who has not yet become too blasé to be undone by small and freely offered things.

The branches are everywhere in this room now. This imperfect, temporary room that is not yet the boat and not anymore the before. Blossom floating over the table, loose and extravagant, and pale pink and fuzzy and smelling of something sweet and alive and fleetingly here.

Outside the window the canal exists somewhere. Four miles per hour and the plants on the roof and the jars on the shelf and the wild garlic on the towpath. Inside this room the blossom is falling open and the cats are arguing and the clouds are pressing soft and grey against the glass and nothing is settled or signed or resolved.

But I am learning, slowly, to follow Tilda’s example. To let the future be the future. To find the happiness that is available right now in this room, in this light, in these branches, in the smell of this specific person.

It is, I think, a practice. Like everything worth having.

Tomorrow is the actual bank holiday. We might drive out to a canal we haven’t visited yet, and stand on the towpath, and look.

Just look.

Four miles per hour. So it’s going to take years to reach Brazil, Finn. I promise.

We might have reached peak preposterous.

In this life, there are two things most of us rarely, if ever, lose. Their place in our days is both defined and specific and we rarely go a-wandering with either the kettle or our toothbrush. And yet this week, Ben and I managed to mislay both, somewhere in the muddle of dismantling the temporary landing-kitchen and the particular dark chaos that a bathroom becomes when you are living inside a renovation and have stopped knowing which end is up.

I was on the phone to Finn, reporting the mysterious disappearance of my pink toothbrush, when Ben came in and announced that he had LOST THE KETTLE.

(And without it, he would DIE.)

Finn paused mid-speech. “What did he just say?”

“He has lost the kettle.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

But oh yes he had. The Toothbrush had run away with the Kettle and we were perplexed and so tired we could only wander around gawping at each other, trying to decide if one of us was gaslighting the other in the most traditional sense of the word, or if something supernatural was having a chuckle at our expense and would at any minute start throwing coins at our heads.

Finn tutted. He despairs of us, and he is probably right to. “They will turn up,” he said, and he was of course right, because turn up they did: the toothbrush standing to attention in a plant pot in one of the bedrooms, and I kid you not, the kettle being used to prop a door open in the hall. Neither of us has any explanation for either situation beyond a sort of shared amnesia, and the perpetual air of bewilderment we both wear now, in lieu of the certainty we once had about the ordinary shape of a day.

Because if we cannot keep track of the kettle, how on earth are we going to keep track of oblique matters like purpose and meaning and future?

Anyway. It has been a busy week.

In celebration of sunny mornings, we have been getting in the car and following the canal network to pretty places. Marple, most recently, wandering the towpaths with the dogs kerfuffling at our feet, discussing in long, looping, circular conversations the merits and possible downfalls of life on a narrowboat. Establishing which canals would mean we could get to the kids in both Lancashire and Manchester without too great a faff. Arguing over willow trees versus moorings with good amenities. Standing on bridges and measuring boats with our eyes, trying to decide whether we could manage something as long as seventy feet, which would give us the two bedrooms we need, and still not feel like we were living inside a pencil.

Because it has been decided. We are going to buy a narrowboat.

An extended summer on the cut, tootling. A project to consume our days completely as we gut a boat and make from it, however temporarily, a home. A thing that may stay a summer holiday or may quietly become a whole different kind of life. We are holding it loosely, which is easier than it sounds when you have lost the kettle and no longer trust yourself with certainties.

I have been so very torn.

On one hand, the canal has become, over the past two years, something of a special interest. I hoard images of beautiful boats the way I used to collect interiors magazines. I watch bohemian women fashioning calm, creative lives on the water, their boats full of trailing plants and good lamps and paintwork in colours that make you stop. I have entire Pinterest boards dedicated to dark wood floorboards and cool cream walls and Moroccan tiles in a galley kitchen. I have peeked at Instagram accounts stuffed with narrowboat lives until I swooned.

And on the other hand, I have had the oddest, most persistent sense that I wouldn’t dare. That it isn’t for me. That a house should not be that shape. That the whole enterprise is fraught with danger in the form of marauding swans and the horror of heavy locks and spiders in every crevice and belongings nicked from the roof and the let’s-not-talk-about-it situation with boat toilets.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be for always, does it?

If we hate it, we sell it and go back to land. If I hate it and Ben loves it, we find a plan that accommodates both truths. Nothing about this decision is permanent. Nothing about any decision is permanent, though we spend an extraordinary amount of our lives behaving as if it is.

And more than that. I am always urging you to be the woman who says yes to the oblique idea. The woman full of derring-do and gloriously messy adventure, because life is short and time is marching and love, above all else, matters.

I should probably do that then, mais oui? Drink my own medicine. Be brave and wild and true!

So here it begins. Our gloriously messy adventure.

We have already spotted a boat we are considering making an offer on. We have chosen which pair of canals to start our continuing cruising journey. For those who don’t know: there are two ways to live on the water. You can have a Continuous Cruising licence, which allows you to travel any canal as long as you keep moving and don’t stay in one spot for longer than a fortnight. Or you can have a permanent mooring, a fixed home base you come and go from at will. We will likely start as continuous cruisers, feeling our way along, and revisit the mooring question in the autumn.

Nothing is set in stone. We are both just feeling our way to peace after all manner of grief and sadness, and it takes longer than you think, and the remedies are stranger. A narrowboat is, it turns out, quite possibly one of mine. So I am choosing to look at it as a gorgeous project. I am filling notebooks with questions about water filtration systems and inverters and how much solar panel a person actually needs. I am conducting long debates about washing machines and wondering whether the unspoken law of the canals really does require the ownership of an orange Le Creuset stove-top kettle, so ubiquitous on every boat we pass that I genuinely suspect they write it into the licensing terms.

Till then, still here. Still waiting for the slowest solicitors in the land to find their urgency. Tonight there are pitta pocket pizzas planned, because we have cheese and Italian meats left over from a picnic tea we ate last night after returning home, tired and happy.

Then later, an early night, coming to the end of a book I have been deep inside for weeks and having big thoughts I haven’t quite arranged into sentences yet. Letting my eye wander over every single object I own and asking do I need it? Really? Not in a minimalist, clear-the-decks way. In the way of a woman who is about to live in seventy feet.

Candles lit. Stars to be wished upon later.

Bright orange kettles are, at least, hard to lose.

Hysteria has set in. We start our mornings giggling and we go to bed still laughing and in-between we sing and dance and make merry with various dodgy meals cobbled together from whatever is available in the local garage. A quote from A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the worst of times and the best of times” always just a moment away from our lips, for what could be more apt?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Last night, just for a moment, while Ben took the dogs outside for a quick bedtime mooch over the cobbles, I stood in the main window and looked out. The Victorian street lights on the unadopted road threw pools of soft yellow light that made everything look deliberate, theatrical, …

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Once upon a time, a few months or maybe even years ago, who knows, I dreamt that I was keeping a spider down my bra I had christened “Little Jimmy” and ever after, every spider I come across is a “Little Jimmy” and right now the Jimmy’s are inundating Chez Brocante and trying to set up home wherever they see fit.

So colour me appalled. For while I am a woman often dallying with ludicrous notions in my dreams I wouldn’t tolerate in real life, a clutter of spiders is not something I’m willing to entertain at all, having only recently managed to persuade the mice that ours was a hostile environment complete with lazy cats who might just work up enough energy to swipe them into next week. And yet all of a sudden we are indeed inundated with Little Jimmys visiting in droves and I have gone a bit high maintenance about the matter so Ben is having to climb ladders and do his bailiff bit and I feel wildly proud of his bravado and disproportionately ashamed of what has been something of a life-…

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I slept like a lamb and woke at 6.20am, as always, because my body has decided that 6.20am is simply what happens now, non-negotiable, regardless of what time I went to bed or what I ate or drank or how sincerely I pleaded with it the night before. Poking me awake and shattering a dream in which I was wandering through a house that was mine, making a slow inventory of everything in it, touching things, and naming them. The same old dream. Always the same house, always the same time, always the same faint sense that I am checking something is still there before the day gets its hands on it.

Mornings have been odd lately. Full of weather, full of portent, full of the kind of atmospheric drama that makes me feel like the slightly overwrought protagonist of a golden-age domestic novel. A windowsill of rooks last week, all apparently seconds away from genuine violence. Then snow I initially mistook for ash falling from the sky, as if the world wasn’t just metaphorically ablaze, but had set …

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I lost twelve days. Not to anything interesting. No adventure, no scandal, no sudden and glamorous reinvention. (Damnit). Rather a stay at Ben’s sister’s to keep her busy household running while she recovers from a operation, coinciding with a terrible thyroid flare up that had me feeling like my legs were made of concrete and the rest of my body was on fire - as if that very body went, Oh! We are staying somewhere lovely are we? Ok. I am resting now, and there is nothing you can do about it? And so it was. I stopped. The doctor upped my medication, and I’ve since spent night after night, (after lovely days with proper showers and wonderful kids), snuggled up on the sofa watching cosy nonsense, cuddling a posse of cats and Mable (aka the best dog in the world) and finally catching my breath.

In-between times. A visit to a flat that may or may not be ours. Two lovely storeys over an Art Cafe (be still my beating heart!), huge rooms, two bathrooms and more in a truly gorgeous part of Man…

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Hello. What’s new? Here at Chaos Central, Meep has contracted the plague (a cold) and appointed himself Supreme Guardian of a bit of plastic the size of my thumbnail. While I am self-medicating with narrowboat videos - these slow, hypnotic canals being my current drug of choice, all over again, and Ben has escaped to the wilderness with his spanielly mates.

It is Sunday. I have committed the crime of sleeping through morning. Then I drank enough coffee to fuel a small village, which naturally made me immediately comatose (because my body is hilarious), so I slept again. And then, plot twist, I felt absolutely zero guilt about any of this because I am a proper grown-up who can sleep whenever she bloody well pleases.

Except that’s a lie.

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It was a blustery night. Rain lashed at the windows and there I was, ears pricked like a watchdog’s, straining to catch the sound of scavengers returning for the tumble dryer. You see, they’d already made off with the washing machine being stored in the garden, bold as brass in the dead of night, and I was out for revenge.

Though quite what I was planning on doing if they did rock back up, all (North Face) striped t-shirts and swag-bags I couldn’t tell you, I only know that they would likely have had to deal with a very naked me screaming like a fishwife, and would forever more tell the local criminal fraternity to avoid our house because Titty Faloo lives there and she is fierce.

Yay, then for the kind of glorious news that has had me practically levitating with relief: we've sold the house! Hands shook, contracts due to be signed at any moment! I can scarcely believe it. The thought of no longer having to wash my knickers in a bucket has had me so giddy that any passing scrap-hunting…

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Sometimes I get a feeling I can’t explain. A sort of stop the world, I don’t want to get off, but I do want to sit down and take a magnifying glass to all that has gone before. To look at the richness and calamity of a life less ordinary, to rip it up and search for reason in the cracks and to just, I suppose, breathe, before the next chapter begins.

It feels enormous, this muchiness inside me. Unexamined, like thoughts and moments, and tragedies and joys have all just been chucked into a garage willy-nilly while so much of me longs to have the time to go in and index it all, pack it boxes befitting of sentiment, and take some of it to the menders shop to put it all back together, exactly the way it should be.

For the next chapter is just around the corner now. And its a good job really, because holding my breath in anticipation of it, was starting to gi…

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And there you have it. Another Christmas done and dusted. I’m not sure how it happens: one minute I’m a frantic headless chicken ransacking TK Maxx and the next, boom, its the 5th of January and all I want to do is bury myself in blankets and wallow in the snuffly nothingness of what feels suspiciously like the kind of incoming flu a person invites when she ventures out of her domestic rut and indulges in festive shenanigans of which she probably needs another holiday to recover from.

(I’m not sure I was designed for socialising).

Anyways. Would I recommend a Christmas spent in a hotel room? Ummm. Allow me to untangle my feelings on this one, for there is much of me that wants to say oh hell yes, and a stubborn little bit asserting never again, and like so much else in this life I really don’t know where I stand because frankly it was a tiny bit wonderful and not at all the chocolatey-box Christmas as it was supposed to be. On Christmas Eve, Finley and I found ourselves sitting in a des…

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Heavens to Betsy, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and as my Dad is so fond of reminding me, there isn’t a child in the house washed. Not a scrubbed face, a tree, or even a present gift-wrapped and stacked waiting for Father Christmas to collect.

Ours is the house that Christmas forgot, and I’m really not sure how I feel about it. For there is a kind of peace in not jumping on the festive bandwagon, alongside something I’m struggling to name? Not FOMO exactly? More like the peculiar shame of having failed one's festive exams and being sent to sit in the dunce room while the world glitters beyond the door in a snazzy sweater and a pair of reindeer deelly-boppers.

Is the woman tired of Christmas, tired of life??

I rather feel like I'm watching a film I'm no longer cast in. The world is preparing, hanging wreaths, lighting up anything that stands …

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It was almost three in the morning, and there we were, eating biscuits in bed and talking politics as though sleeplessness were a duty that had to be endured. A clattery hum rose from next door bugging us, insistent and metallic, while a lone light blinked its way into our room from somewhere across the frosty tin roofs of the garages. And so it went on, through jammy dodgers and Russia, chocolate cookies and ancient civilisations until eventually sleep gave in, and I fell into a dream in which Ben insisted I dress as a Japanese Geisha so he could introduce me to his friends as his very own “young whippersnapper”.

I wake up feeling appalled, amused and plagued by the kind of tiredness that has my eyes stuck together. A lost morning follows and much of the afternoon given over to chasing energy much threatened by the very idea of Christmas looming. Ring Dad for reassurance. Have mad and inspiring conversation with gloriously mad son, decide to eat soup in bed. Sit there together looking…

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I love foggy mornings here. This room, still smelling of fresh plaster, hasn’t yet earned curtains, so the fog just wanders in like uninvited poetry. Through the two tall windows, the almost-winter hangs itself in great grey swathes, all cinematic sulk and vaselined melancholy. A feeling that is less like waking and more like surfacing from someone else’s dream.

So I stay still. Let the world unspool. Listen to Ben breathing like the sea at low tide. Thumbing through the notes on my phone, and tossing worries into digital purgatory before they start staging a coup in my mind. For that way survival lies, because survival, don’t you know, sometimes looks like romanticising the absolute hell out of everything before it has the chance to drown you.

I lie still under a terrible navy quilt, sipping the tea we wander on to the landing to make, and I see the day declare her arrival: sometimes full of icy-sunny promise, sometimes moody and hazy as hell, and in this way I see too, how the temper…

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Hello, I’m Alison, how lovely to see you here, in a little corner of Substack, where I am stitching neurodivergent mid-life together with stories, lists and tales of everyday joy the BrocanteHome way.

At the heart of everything. I do here is the BrocanteHome Way: a philosophy for women in their renaissance - those of us who are done pretending, who crave beauty but demand truth, who are learning that homemaking can be both rebellion and repair.

Subscribers to BrocanteHome will receive a probably eccentric, but oh so lovely myriad of posts about seasonal homemaking, daily joys, an ongoing exploration of what home means, midlife change and the small acts of noticing that nurture the soul in a life less ordinary. For those who want to dive deeper, you are warmly invited to join the Library, or shop my extensive collection of printables, workbooks and courses..

So pull up a chair, pour something comforting, and make yourself at home - BrocanteHome is where the ordinary becomes luminous.

Start…

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Hello, I’m Alison, how lovely to see you here, in a little corner of Substack, where I am stitching neurodivergent mid-life together with stories, lists and tales of everyday joy the BrocanteHome way.

At the heart of everything. I do here is the BrocanteHome Way: a philosophy for women in their renaissance - those of us who are done pretending, who crave beauty but demand truth, who are learning that homemaking can be both rebellion and repair.

Subscribers to BrocanteHome will receive a probably eccentric, but oh so lovely myriad of posts about seasonal homemaking, daily joys, an ongoing exploration of what home means, midlife change and the small acts of noticing that nurture the soul in a life less ordinary. For those who want to dive deeper, you are warmly invited to join the Library, or shop my extensive collection of printables, workbooks and courses..

So pull up a chair, pour something comforting, and make yourself at home - BrocanteHome is where the ordinary becomes luminous.

Start…

Read more

Hello, I’m Alison, how lovely to see you here, in a little corner of Substack, where I am stitching neurodivergent mid-life together with stories, lists and tales of everyday joy the BrocanteHome way.

At the heart of everything. I do here is the BrocanteHome Way: a philosophy for women in their renaissance - those of us who are done pretending, who crave beauty but demand truth, who are learning that homemaking can be both rebellion and repair.

Subscribers to BrocanteHome will receive a probably eccentric, but oh so lovely myriad of posts about seasonal homemaking, daily joys, an ongoing exploration of what home means, midlife change and the small acts of noticing that nurture the soul in a life less ordinary. For those who want to dive deeper, you are warmly invited to join the Library, or shop my extensive collection of printables, workbooks and courses..

So pull up a chair, pour something comforting, and make yourself at home - BrocanteHome is where the ordinary becomes luminous.

Start Here | Join the Library | Browse My Printables | Read My Diary…

After so many years spent tearing my hair out in an effort to fall gently to sleep without all manner of lotions and potions stuffed into my bedside drawer, to actually find myself simply lying down and waking up the next morning without all sorts of insomniac shenanigans feels nothing short of miraculous.

I get into bed, pick up my Kindle, and two minutes later conk out. As if someone’s been scattering sleep-dust on my pillow. I surrender, gently, without the nightly huffing and puffing, without tangling myself up in emotional drama and the damn quilt wedged between my legs.And the next day my energy is constant until I get into bed and sleep lands just as it should. I tell you, it is nothing short of beserk!

Have people been living like this forever? Just drifting off like it’s the easiest thing in the world? Is this what it feels like to have a body in rhythm, fully entrained, circadian, and blessedly obedient? Because honestly, if they have, I’m furious! I feel cheated. How different would life have been if I hadn’t spent the last twenty-five years dragging my tired bones through the day?

Trouble is, now easy sleep is mine I’m worried sick about losing it because I have no clue what sorcery this is. My body is, as usual is just doing its own thing, and will not, by hook or by crook, explain itself. No recipe. No instructions I can pin to the fridge and follow to the letter for the rest of my life.
Though I suspect that this is one part quiet house, one part the reduction in surgey, demented hormones and one part finally feeling emotionally safe despite it all.

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Last Saturday night, I was alone and the heavens were hammering on the roof. The tall window a slab of black glass, save for one lit chamber in the turreted house across the lane, while I was curled up with a hot chocolate and a dog, watching one film after another, the way I used to when life was simpler, when I still remembered how to disappear into other people’s stories.

Later, I cranked the heating up, and sat at the wrong end of the sofa, so that every so often I would catch a glimpse of my own reflection in the window and almost feel my heart stop in fright, and then laugh at myself and do a little chair dance along with a gorgeous couple falling in gentle, complicated love in Bradford.

Dusk drifted into dark and still the rain came. I flung open the windows to try to achieve unicorn-comfort: both toasty warm and still able to breathe fresh air. …

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We have gone quite stir crazy. We really have. Language has devolved into muttered silly insults and meals are no more than tins of soup tipped into tall mugs and microwaved. We are not proud of this, but it makes us laugh - and that laughter is a relief in a situation that’s anything but funny. A temporary limbo with no end in sight as the house sale rumbles on like distant thunder.

Thank heavens then for the kind of respite that comes with five bathrooms and the cutest dog you have ever seen. For I am housesitting all by myself and it is bittersweet bliss. At once so comfortable, and simultaneously the most stabby of reminders that my life isn’t what it was was. For one of the things most true about rock-bottom is that it all too quickly becomes a comfortable rut and anything else feels both frightening and overwhelming in comparison.

For isn’t it true that there are seasons in life when the tide rolls out so far it feels as though it might never return? I think I must be in one of th…

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It’s the oddest thing you know, living without things. Making do with the bare minimum. Diluting life down to just a couple of floaty robes, a laptop, a Kindle and a huge tub of Cerave moisturiser. And then pretending that you don’t miss any of the lars and pennets tucked away in the storage unit, that you once might have insisted you would die without.

But I have come to the conclusion that I am a person who can get used to anything. That somehow my brain goes, well now, I might not have a wardrobe full of clothes or even own a stick of furniture right now, but if I can brush my teeth and tuck myself up with a good book, well then, my friend, all is well with the world and you should consider me perfectly fine and more than happy stirring my tea with a pair of scissors.

For yes indeed, it has come to that. Much of what little cutlery we had seems to have gone missing, I am hand-washing my smalls in lemony shower gel, eating curry out of copper pans we later wash in the bath and spendi…

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