Housekeeper's Diary

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.