My Dad and my Helen were supposed to be coming from Devon. A visit I had ached for in a way I ache for very little now: completely, physically, and with my whole stupid heart. I hadn’t been casual about it. I was the opposite of casual really, opening rooms inside myself I don’t usually open. Plumping things. Airing things. And setting out the good emotional crockery.
And then the message came.
They couldn’t come.
It doesn’t matter why because the details are ordinary and life is life and everyone was doing their very best and all the other reasonable things one is supposed to think when plans collapse. So I thought all those reasonable things, and I thought them quickly and reasonably and then I stood at the window in my socks and felt about nine years old and completely bereft and that was that.
Bereft is the word. Not “a bit disappointed.” Not “mildly put out.” Bereft. The particular grief of having made room for people who then, through no fault of their own, cannot fill it, leaving you standing in all that empty space you made, wondering what to do with it now.
So we went to Didsbury.
Because the Airbnb they had booked was suddenly free, and Helen asked us if we wanted to stay there, rather than waste it and I said yes the way drowning people say yes to life-jackets. So we packed a bag in twenty minutes, and then we were in Didsbury, and Didsbury was doing what Didsbury always does, which is stand there looking leafy and pleasant and ever so slightly fancying the pants off itself.
Burton Road. Linen trousers. Dogs called things like Doris and Figs. Little restaurants with handwritten menus and smug confidence. An area that has decided it is having a lovely time and would you like to join in, yes there is room, there is always room, come in, here is a flat white.
We walked up and down and we had a lovely couple of sunny hours with Ben’s eldest daughter Ella, funny and gentle and easy, the kind of afternoon that doesn’t announce itself as special but quietly is.
And then we walked back to a house called Archie.
A house with a proper name! Why aren’t more of us naming our houses, not with the fake grandiose pomposity of calling a bungalow in Rhyl, Casa Palmera, but christening a house with a name that suits its personality, so that it becomes just another member of the family?
Archie was a house with mod cons. A house with a wet room. A house with a coffee machine. A house with a basement bedroom so cut off from the world it felt like being snuggled safely in velvet and popped away for safekeeping. A house with a kitchen. An actual kitchen! With a hob and pans and space to move and everything where you could find it, all of it just waiting there to be used by a person who wanted to cook something.
I can’t explain, to anyone who has not spent a year without a proper kitchen, what it means to have one suddenly returned to you. It isn’t about food. It’s the ritual of it. The particular meditative quality of standing at a stove with something to do with your hands, the smell of garlic in butter, the satisfaction of a pan at the right temperature. The domesticity of it. The feeling of tending something.
I made pasta.
Spinach wilted down in olive oil, parmesan folded through at the end until it went glossy and slightly guilty. Simple. The whole thing took twenty minutes and I was happy for every single one of them in a way that was completely disproportionate to the task and entirely proportionate to how much I had missed it.
We ate it, and then we took our glasses outside.
The garden was small and still and the evening had gone that particular dark-blue that English summer evenings do when they’re being their best selves. There was a yellow striped canopy. A salmon pink shed, (because Archie it seems, is a man with personality), glowing softly in the last of the light. We sat down under the canopy and it was quiet in the way that gardens are quiet, not silent but layered: something rustling, something distant, the city going about its business on the other side of the fence while we sat in our small borrowed pocket of it and did nothing at all.
Ben and I don’t always get this. The reset. The sitting-in-the-dark-together with nowhere to be and nothing to perform. Life tends to fill all available space with the next thing, the thing after that, the list, the plan, the logistics of two people trying to build something together while also managing everything else that being alive requires.
But that night, under the yellow stripes, beside the salmon shed, we just sat.
It was intimate in the quiet way. We talked a bit. We didn’t talk a bit. We finished our wine. It was enough. It was, I realised afterwards, exactly what we had needed without knowing we needed it, which is the best kind of thing and I was still sad about Dad and Helen, but also so grateful to her for gifting us exactly what we needed.
The next morning I woke early. Ben was still asleep. So I crept barefoot into someone else’s kitchen. Bare feet on someone else’s tiles, the anonymity of it, the way you are temporarily a person without a history, just a woman and a floor and the early morning.
Tomatoes. Olive oil on the counter. Sea salt scattered like hope.
And that was breakfast. I didn’t cook anything or plan anything or perform any version of a nourishing morning. I sliced the tomatoes, poured olive oil over them in the generous way, not the nervous careful drizzle but the real pour and I carried it to the window.
Didsbury going past in its Sunday morning clothes. A man jogging. A woman with a very large tote bag and the giddy stride of someone excited about wandering the stalls of the monthly Maker’s Market A dog, small and white, moving with a sense of purpose entirely disproportionate to its size.
I ate the tomatoes. I drank the coffee. And I looked out of someone else’s window at a street that had no idea who I was and I was simply there, in the morning, existing in it. Eating tomatoes with my fingers, savouring the complexity of decent extra-virgin.
Twenty minutes.
No phone. Just coffee, tomatoes and a window.
And I’m writing this down because I want to remember that it’s possible.
Later I ran the wet room until the whole room was a steamy haze and then I sat down on the tiled bench, not because I had planned to, but because the steam had reached the point where standing in it would have scorched my skin, but the steam all was enough to bring me to a kind of existential still worth savouring.
So I sat. Pink and damp and still.
And I thought: I cannot actually remember the last time I did something this gentle for myself. Not kind to other, I do that constantly, sometimes to the point of structural damage. But kind to myself. Slow and warm and purposeless kind. The sitting-on-a-tiled-bench-in-the-steam kind.
I noticed my hands. When did I last look at my hands?
I noticed I was tired in the deep way. Not sleepy-tired. The other kind. The kind that lives behind your eyes and in the base of your spine and has been there long enough to have started receiving post.
I noticed that I could not remember the last time I had done something this deliberately, pointlessly restorative. Not productive rest. Or strategic recovery. Just: warm. Still. Nowhere to be.
I stayed until the room was completely opaque and I had reached the particular shade of pink usually associated with things that have been boiled. Then I wrapped myself in a very large white towel and felt, if not exactly repaired, then at least located. Like someone had found me on a map and put a small pin in me. Here. This is where she is. what3words: pretty.darn.relaxed
I spent the afternoon in the basement bedroom.
I need you to understand about the basement bedroom.
A room so dark in the middle of the day that when I turned the light off I could not see my own hand in front of my face, which sounds alarming but was the most profoundly safe I had felt in months. Cut off from the world. Stored. Like something valuable being kept at the right temperature.
I got into bed.
I read a book full of Edith Wharton ghost stories.
I drank tea, forgot the tea, rediscovered it, found it had gone cold, drank it anyway because I was not going to get up, made a mental note to make more tea, forgot again. The standard domestic loop, but slower. Cosier. Entirely without consequence.
Nobody needed me.
Nobody was clattering about expecting me to be a version of myself. Nobody wanted anything. There was no list visible from where I was lying, no half-finished project, no sense of the afternoon watching me reproachfully from a corner. There was only the dark and the stories and me, which is, when you strip everything else away, more or less exactly who I have always been and will continue to be until further notice.
I slept for a while. And I woke up and read more ghost stories. And I was, in the truest and most literal sense, the last woman left in the world. Not in a terrible apocalyptic way. In a blissful, nobody-can-see-me, nobody-is-expecting-me-to-be-anything way. In the best possible way. In the way I should probably engineer more often and somehow never do.
It has been so log since I holidayed, it felt religious and faintly ridiculous.
That evening: the birthday party. Ben’s niece, 21, balloons, homemade pizza, the glowing slightly-chaotic warmth of a family gathering that has decided to be happy and is succeeding. These gatherings have a particular quality: everything slightly too loud, improvised, glowing at the edges, and I find them quietly wonderful in the way I find most things quietly wonderful when I am well-rested and have spent the afternoon reading ghost stories in the dark.
There was a salted caramel cake made by Ella. The kind you are still thinking about a day later, unprompted, while doing something completely unrelated. I thought about it on the boat. And in the circumstances, it was a comfort.
The boat.
Right.
You should know: I have all but imagined my way into life on a narrowboat. Pinterest boards. Late-night searches. The complete fantasy: copper bath, fairy lights, water-filtering systems, plants in improbable places, me at a little desk writing novels while the boat sits beside a misty towpath and ducks drift past and I am impossibly atmospheric and probably wearing something earthy and dramatic.
But this was the first narrowboat we had actually considered in real life.
It was on hard standing.
Hard standing means out of the water. Hard standing means up in the air! Hard standing means there might be a really wobbly step ladder, and you must use it, and when you have used it everyone will know things about you that you would rather they didn’t.
It was raining. I was wearing a snazzy dress. Not a narrowboat dress. Not a ladder dress. A dress that had absolutely no clause in its contract covering the present situation.
And there was Bob.
He was genuinely lovely, was Bob.He greeted us, standing their holding said wobbly ladder in a leather waistcoat, with a pointy beard and a substantial earring I suspect was made of bits of old boat, looking approximately 120 years old in the way that only certain men near water and old engines can look: weathered into something that has passed through regular age and come out the other side into a kind of immortality. He had the air of someone who had: fixed an engine at midnight, smoked a pipe with various Hell’s angel’s types and appeared very briefly in the background of a Peter Jackson film as an unnamed but clearly significant figure. A boat uncle. A canal elder. A hobbit with a motorbike.
Ben went up the ladder first.
Because that’s what men do isn’t it? They ascend things and then stand at the top wearing the expression of someone who cannot understand why everyone is making such a fuss. “It’s fine,” they say, from a height that is not fine, in a tone that suggests the problem is your attitude rather than the six-foot wobbly ladder with no grip and all the moral dilemmas of a woman in a ludicrous, foot tangling liability of a dress.
I looked at the ladder. It wasn’t a good ladder.
It was FLIMSY. Damp. Six rungs. The kind of ladder a child might use to reach a high shelf, not the kind of ladder an adult woman uses to board a vessel suspended in mid-air in the rain while wearing something she was rather pleased with when she put it on.
I looked at Bob.
Bob looked at me with the patient expression of a man who has seen this before and has a system.
And then Bob stood behind me and hoisted me up BY THE BUM.
I want to be absolutely clear about what occurred. I was heaved. Upward. By my bum. By a man I had known for about three minutes. There was nothing ambiguous or metaphorical about it. Two hands, two bum cheeks, one determined elderly boatman, one airborne woman making a noise she had never previously made and hopes never to make again.
He did it with tremendous efficiency. Which almost made it worse. The efficiency suggested volume and the strain of a weightlifter attempting brave, while the practical heave ho suggested that he has done this countless times, with countless women, on countless ladders, and has optimised the process. I am somewhere in a tally. I am a number.
This is what all those gorgeous Intsagrammed boats don’t show you.
They show you fairy lights, copper taps and golden evenings on the water. But they don’t show you the hard standing and the flimsy ladder and Bob’s winching system, now do they?
At the top I had to haul myself onto the deck, which I did in the manner of something that had recently washed up and was attempting to rejoin polite society. Then at the door there were no steps down into the boat, just a drop, and I had to jump, and I am simply not built for jumping. Some women land like cats. I land like a wardrobe. And sort of splat.
Inside, the boat was small.
Smaller than small. Narrow in the way that “narrow” as a concept does not prepare you for. The word narrow sounds like a minor inconvenience. The reality of narrow, when you are standing inside it, is a kind of spatial argument that you are losing. I asked Bob what width the boat was and he mumbled “standard” and that varies between 6’1 and 6’10 wide and I looked at Ben, and he is 6’2 and very definitely could not have laid across the width of the boat and was only an inch of the ceiling standing up.
Narrowboats are little and this one was littler still because half of it was engine room, full of complicated important machinery that Bob talked about with love and I nodded at with absolutely no comprehension, and then a boatman’s cabin whose primary function appeared to be historical. Then a half-built bed. Then a shower room in which a washing machine had been installed, presumably by someone who believed in the impossible. Then a tiny black glittery kitchen. Then a space approximately the size of a generous thought where a sofa might, theoretically, live.
I stood in the kitchen, the entire kitchen - a sink attached to two burners, and I thought several things in quick succession:
I had imagined rugs.
I had imagined a corner with bookshelves.
I had imagined a little table with a candle on it.
None of these things would fit. My nervous system alone would not fit.
And yet we schmoozed Bob.
We had to schmooze Bob. It was’t optional because Bob had been fiddling with the boat for five years. And because Bob loves the boat and has devoted significant portions of his 120 years to the boat, and he is standing there in his leather waistcoat with the earnest expression of someone who believes, genuinely believes, that you might be the right person for his boat.
So we nodded. And make suitable sounds. The “oh yes” sounds and the “interesting” sounds and the “ah, so that’s the bilge pump” sounds. And I wandered about peering at things with an expression of assessment, admiring the engine room as if all was well, and deploying the three boat words I know, once each. Feeling guilty, because the boat isn’t bad. It’s fine. The boat is someone’s pride and someone’s life and it is just, specifically, completely, entirely wrong for us in ways we cannot say out loud while Bob is standing there with his earring and his hope.
A brief history of the boats we have not bought:
The First Boat: wonderfully wacky name, charming photographs, a marina that kept reducing the price while smiling blankly and refusing to explain why. Something was wrong with that boat. We all knew something was wrong with that boat. The price kept dropping like a stone into polite water and still nobody would say the words. “Any issues we should know about?” “Oh, the usual.” THE USUAL. WHAT IS THE USUAL?? We could not buy that boat and we are still sad about it.
Then, the Scotland Boat: a full bath. Actual wallpaper. The rough romantic glamour of something that had lived a life. My heart rose up and started ordering fabric samples. But Scotland to Macclesfield is, and I say this as someone who looked it up, impossible without a lorry, then an unconscionable number of canal miles, canal hours, canal locks, canal everything after, and at the end of it the budget would be gone, evaporated into the canal along with all practical sense, and then we would be floating beautifully with no money left for Starlink or water filtration systems or any of the forty-seven other boring essential things that nobody mentions until you are committed and surrounded by lovely wallpaper and it is too late.
I’m still thinking about that fever dream of a wallpaper. All naked people and weird animals.
We are now looking at something at the other end of England. Ancient old. Characterful. The right shape. England to England, which is psychologically a much more manageable migration than Scotland to England.
Onwards. That is the only direction available with boats, as with houses, as with most things. You look, you hope, you fall a teeny bit in love, discover the problem, gather up spreadsheets and your dignity and move along. You fall in love again. You discover another problem. You move along again. This is the process, and apparently exactly what we have signed up for.
But hopefully the next one will not involve a ladder situation, because no woman needs to be bum-winched into her future more than once.
Now I am home. Three days away. I forgot my laptop, and write it, that feels like disaster, because I am constitutionally incapable of stopping. Even my stopping is a kind of working. Even my lying on the sofa is a kind of planning. There is always a paragraph being rearranged in my head, always a product being tweaked mentally, always this little internal mechanism going: yes but are you being productive though, are you sure, couldn’t you just —
Without my laptop, that mechanism ran out of road.
And I was discombobulated. And then, about four hours in, I was something else. Something closer to peaceful. The frightening kind of peaceful. The kind that makes you realise you have been running on adrenaline and anxiety and forward momentum for so long that the absence of all three feels not like rest but like falling.
But then you land.
And the landing is lovely - a yellow striped canopy and a salmon pink shed and pasta in a real kitchen and strong coffee at someone else’s window and a tiled bench in the steam and ghost stories in a dark room and not one single thing that needed doing, not one, not even slightly.
And you discover that nothing terrible happens when you stop. That you are still there. That the work will still be there. That you are not only a worker or a worrier or a woman endlessly attempting to nail down the roof while the storm is still actively in it.
You are also a person.
Which I keep forgetting.
Which is, exactly the kind of thing that takes a borrowed house and three days away from your own life to remember.
Our kids keep saying: don’t deep it.
(Don’t tell them how much we cringe)
They say this whenever anything real surfaces. Keep it light. Stay up here where it’s manageable.
But some things we gotta dig through.
Not permanently. I’m not suggesting we all move into the abyss. Nobody wants to set up permanent camp in the dark with vintage bunting and a welcome mat. But briefly. Long enough to look it in the face and say: ah, there you are. That’s what that was. That’s what that did to me. That’s why I built myself this particular shape.
You don’t get free of things by pretending they’re floating do you? They don’t float away. They come back in the night. They arrive when you’re making tea. And they are infuriatingly patient because they have nowhere else to be…
So yes.
I deeped it.
A mixed bag of a weekend, in full:
Bereft. Burton Road. A house called Archie. A lovely afternoon with Ben’s daughter. Pasta with spinach and parmesan in a kitchen I could have wept with gratitude for. Two glasses of wine under a yellow striped canopy next to a salmon pink shed in the quiet dark. Bare feet on someone else’s tiles. Coffee. Tomatoes eaten with my fingers at a window. A tiled bench in a steam room where I sat and looked at my own hands and realised I had been mislaying myself for months. Ghost stories in a basement bedroom that hugged me tight. Ella’s salted caramel cake. A narrowboat on hard standing in the rain. A snazzy dress wildly unprepared for the situation. Bob. The waistcoat. The earring. The system. The bum.
The last few weeks of this particular chapter. This house. This strange, deep, tremendous, occasionally devastating year. This year of sitting inside the drama of all the years that came before it, with someone safe enough to let it all surface.
A sense of ending. Purple flowers on the table. The cats murdering each other and then lying down like the best of friends - as if theirs was a marriage.
And me here, talking to you as always, cross-legged on the sofa, laptop balanced on my gothic velvet cushion like the domestic goblin queen I have apparently become.
Different now. Properly different.
They could’t come come.
So we went instead. (Thank-you, Sister)
And I came back a slightly more located version of myself, which is perhaps exactly what the weekend was always going to be for.
Let’s deep it all silly, shall we?
Have a Very Brocante Day
Cottagecore, Ritual, Folklore and Joy
From the reviews: “If you love cottagecore and springtime, you will adore this book!! It is delightful, delicious, and decadent! I have a hard time putting it down! Alison knocks it out of the park on this one!”
This was the most wonderful article. I have been with you from almost the beginning and have cheered for you, wept for you, and had my fingers crossed for you for so long they are almost deformed. If I could I would have bought your house so you can move on - but that is beyond me sadly. Your writing has always made me think, soothed me, and sometimes made me re-evaluated myself. Thank you.
I hate to break it to you, but I think you're incapable of *not* being profound after honing your craft after all these years. The silly injected into this, though? Delightful. Violet and I both laughed the laugh of two people who had been in terribly awkward situations in the wrong clothes more than once.