Beginnings

How we got here and how it's going

2024 was a year of such great change in my life that it’s only now, with it behind us, that I can finally turn around and take a good look at it. Almost a year ago exactly, on a grey January day, Matt and I took a walk up the canal. We could live on a boat, he said, something he’d been talking about for a couple of years by that point, something I’d regularly dismissed out of hand. Now though, as we walked, I looked at the narrowboats hunkered down against the towpath, their windows warm and yellow, their chimneys smoking into the cold air. Maybe we should live on a boat, I said. Maybe it’d solve all of our problems.

As winter turned to spring, we spent Saturdays driving up the country to marinas in the midlands ​​armed with sandwiches and print-outs from marine brokerages. Stepping foot on a narrowboat for the first time as we were looking to buy one, I thought, is this ridiculously naive? We gained a new vocabulary, our mouths suddenly full of words like blacking, elsan, bilge, gongoozler. We viewed more boats that I can remember, none of them quite right: too small, too old, too dark, too expensive. And then, at a small marina in Derbyshire, we found her: green, slender, a good hull, a naff name. We’ll take her, we said.

On a hot day in May, we handed all of our savings over to an old couple from Hull in exchange for a set of keys. I hope you love it as much as we did, they said before leaving. As the evenings lengthened, a new government was voted in, and the men’s football team inched further towards the Euros final, and it felt like the country was vibrating with hope. Each weekend we packed the car with sleeping bags and dried food and drove two hours up the M1 to the marina, the clouds huge over the motorway as the country began to flatten out. We got to know our new neighbours, most of them ex-navy men with rough hands and rounded Derbyshire accents that were unfamiliar to the two of us, Lancashire-born and London-based. They brought us tools, offered advice, told us tales of their own boating life. We ripped up carpets with our bare hands, sanded down walls, took an angle grinder to patches of rust, tried to tile the kitchen wall, failed, tried again. Some nights, we were so tired that we went to bed before the sun set, its orangey glow reflected onto the ceiling as the boat rocked us to sleep.

Finally, at the beginning of August, we left the marina in Shardlow and set off on the 180-mile journey south. We had never driven a boat before. We had, in hindsight, absolutely no idea what we were doing. Where are you headed? asked other people we met, retired couples who took their impeccably-painted boats out for six weeks at a time over the summer. London, we replied, watching their eyebrows twitch.

At first, we battled with the boat. It turned us black and blue. We pushed it and pulled it, threw our body weight against it, shredded our hands on the ropes. Each night I admired the purpling bruises appearing beneath my skin and the rope burns callusing my palms before falling into an exhausted sleep. We cried openly and often. Parts of the boat were breaking and we didn’t know how to fix them. We watched videos in the middle of the night on our phones and made frantic attempts at DIY. I googled ‘how hard is it to sink a narrowboat’ more times than I care to admit.

As the summer reached its height, we cruised down the River Soar, where dragonflies danced around the boat at sunset and evening swimmers braved a dip in the shallows. Then the river became the canal, the Leicester Line of the Grand Union, and the city appeared on the horizon, sprawling and daunting and grey. As the miles ticked down, the boat began to yield to us. We learned when to push and when to pull, how to use the small of our backs to ease open the lock gates, when to keep the ropes taut and when to loosen them. We learned when to let each other cry and when to say come on, belt up, let’s keep going. From a charity shop in Market Harborough we bought a wildlife book and learned the names of the birds we were seeing every day: sand martins, cormorants, canada geese, moorhens. Then the nights began to draw in; the kids went back to school. The Leicester Line became the Grand Union mainline, and we inched further and further towards London, a place we thought of as home. When we finally arrived in Paddington in mid-September, six weeks after we left the marina, we were wrung-out and elated. We spent two weeks like tourists, walking around Hyde Park and Primrose Hill, the city made new to us once more.

Over these past few winter months, as the year has gathered itself up, we have been learning to live on the water. Once a project and a vehicle, our boat is now our home. We spent the autumn in the parts of London that were familiar to us, watching the trees that fringe Victoria Park turn orange and gold, before heading north up the River Lea where herons hover in the reeds and the boats glitter with frost in the early morning. We've weathered a few storms, flagged down the fuel boat, piled our roof high with bags of coal; we've already spent hours dragging our toilets along the towpath, feeding the ducks out of the window, sitting on lock gates waiting for them to fill. We are by no means experts: I am aware that we are beginning this newsletter in the middle of our first year on the cut, when each week presents an unexpected challenge. But it's the start of a new year, which seems as good a time as any to start documenting a new way of life.

We promise that Boat Notes will try to avoid, as much as possible, the cliches of canal-dwelling. Here you will find no references to ‘slow life’ or ‘foraging.’ I will write about the sheer drudgery of the toilet leaking onto the floor on a Friday night as often as I will the magic of seeing a kingfisher fly past the window on Christmas morning. Sometimes I might write about other things that interest me - reading, writing, knitting, cooking - which are not specific to, but mostly happen on, the boat. And I won’t make any promises about how often we’ll post, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living on a boat, it’s that things don’t usually go to plan.