Housekeeper's Diary

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.