Getting Ready for the Season

Yes, we’re still in Ameglia.  I haven’t written for a while as we’ve actually been really busy.  We have been out of the water for over three weeks now, catching up on winter maintenance and doing our bit for the local black economy.  Hopefully we will go back in the water next week, then spend a week or two saying our goodbyes before heading South to Elba, Corsica and Sardinia.

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.