February and early
March were spent entertaining visitors and visiting our friends Bernie and
Sarah in Montpelier and since then we’ve been in the boat park scraping and
sanding and painting. Looking back over
past newsletters I’ve noticed an insidious “Year in Provence” tendency creeping
into them. You know, “aren’t the locals
quaint and aren’t we so lucky to have the wisdom and perspicacity to be doing
this, blah, blah, blah”. As an antidote,
I have to say that living in a boat out of the water is not particularly
romantic. Using a sea toilet in a boat
park is as unforgivable as pulling the lever while the train is still in the
station, so If you want a pee in the middle of the night you either have to
climb down the ladder and walk two hundred yards or use a receptacle, in our
case a bucket (hers) and a jerrycan (his).
In order to avoid the boat smelling like the stairwell in a block of
South London Council flats these containers then need to be emptied every two
or three days. There are two basic
approaches to this task. The upfront
approach is to take them to the loos during the day, hailing anyone in sight
with a hearty greeting – “good morning, I’m just going to the toilets to empty
this large bucket of vile smelling piss down them, turned out nice again hasn’t
it!” So far we have preferred stealth,
creeping down the boat ladder at dead of night in dark tracksuits and
balaclavas – “OK, the coast is clear as far as the bushes, go, go, go!”
Mostly our days are
spent applying noxious chemicals to one bit of the boat or the other and
wandering round the local DIY stores and chandlers looking for things to spend
money on. In the true British spirit we
tend to think that the more poisonous or carcinogenic a substance is the more
effective it is likely to be, especially if applied with no protective clothing
whatsoever. By contrast the Italians are
much more safety conscious, so while I slave over a hot angle grinder in
nothing more than a pair of shorts and sandals, they get togged up like pest
control officers inspecting the kitchens of a Dalston Chinese restaurant, even
if they’re only doing a spot of painting.
Paolo, our friendly local diesel fitter is a good example. He arrived at the boat to do a couple of
minor jobs in an immaculately pressed monogrammed boiler suit and before even
touching a spanner carefully rolled on a clean pair of white latex gloves like
a surgeon preparing for a major heart operation. I was wearing a very greasy pair of old
trousers and a sweaty T-shirt at the time and felt distinctly under-dressed.
Even apart from the
piss problem, working on a boat and living on it at the same time can get
pretty squalid, rather like servicing a car in ones living room whilst using
the kitchen as a toolshed. To add to our wartime sense of privation our country
has, of course, obligingly decided to go to war. Not having a TV we are spared most of the
real time coverage, but we do have the good old World Service on short-wave
radio. Reception being a bit hit and
miss, this gives us that genuine Baghdad air raid shelter feeling. The radio announcers morph from Daleks to
normal human beings to helium snorting medical students followed by pure white
noise and then the Daleks again -
“American forces are now within (crackle, crackle) of Baghdad (warble,
warble, crackle) we join our
correspondent Johnny (wheeze, wheeze, crackle) at Old Trafford for the half
time report”.
Our sense of
wartime paranoia is exacerbated by living in a foreign country and our still
very far from perfect grasp of Italian.
In between the easy listening europop, which seems to make up ninety
percent of Italian radio, the news bulletins are full of the war and it’s very
easy to get the wrong end of the stick, leading us back to the short wave radio
“in my hotel room I can feel the shudder of violent (crackle, warble) Andre
Aggasis ... exterminate ... exterminate.”
There are times
when I feel like trying to explain to people here that although I voted for
Tony Blair, well once, when I could be bothered, I didn’t think he’d get us
involved in anything like this. However, there’s no obvious anti-British
feeling here as the Italians are just as pre-occupied with their own
government’s attitude to the war. Sue
has taken our Red Ensign down, but I managed to dissuade her from burning it
ceremonially.
Bloody hell, there I was trying to avoid sounding like a smug Year in
Provencer and now I’ve I turned into a whinging ex-pat. I guess I can’t win.
Actually, despite
all of the above, we’re having a really good time here and as our spell in
Ameglia draws to a close we are sad at the thought of leaving. I’m also a little intimidated by the journey
to come. Our journey last year was one
of canals and rivers and coast hopping, mostly under power. This year we plan to do more real sailing and
some longer passages and to spend more time at anchor and more time going where
the wind and the weather dictate. This
is exciting, but also a bit scary.
Let me finish with
a little parable that we saw unfold every day for about a week here in the boat
park...
Paolo the crane
driver parks his big crane just opposite the boat most days and as he has two
cranes sometimes it stays there all day.
From early in the morning a pied wagtail would jump onto the bonnet of
the crane and peer into one of its big wing mirrors. For a while it would glare at the pied
wagtail that glared back at it through the mirror. It would then attack the other pied wagtail
by giving a sharp whack on the mirror.
Sometimes after making an attack it would fly past the mirror ready to
give chase to its fleeing opponent. The
attacks would continue for up to an hour or so, by which time the bird was so
tired it would often tumble to the ground after making its attack. Then it would fly off only to return an hour
or two later to check whether the other wagtail was still invading its
territory. The sequence of attacks would
then begin all over again. Sometimes we
debated whether to cover the mirror with a plastic bag to stop the bird from
exhausting itself, but we never got around to doing it and in any case we found
the bird’s behaviour fascinating and wondered how long he would keep doing it.
I can’t think what
this means, if anything.
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