Housekeeper's Diary

Reader, I am miserable.

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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