Guest Post: The Community Boating Community, by Peggy Melmoth

I'm really pleased to bring you this guest post from dear Peggy of Narrowboat Wife, on a new community boating project. Please show your support for this project by visiting her new website and sharing. Thanks Peggy :)

Peggy steering a small narrowboat

First I’d like to thank Zoë for allowing me to guest post here.

I just want to draw your attention to a new blog, which is about a different kind of boating: community boating.

The canals and waterways are the love of my life; I’m passionate about the idea that they should be accessible for all, regardless of ability or personal finances. So I've started working with the National Community Boating Association to publicise news from their members, based right across the UK.

The NCBA is a group of community boating organisations that want to bring boating to their local communities. So I suppose it is a community of communities!

I've started a new blog over at http://national-cba.com/ and I'd really appreciate it if you'd pop over and read my first post, which explains what we do. If you don't really know anything about community boating this blog will keep you updated with the variety of people that can now get access to the waterways.

All of us are part of our local community, and yet sometimes members of our community can feel isolated. Imagine if you lived right beside a canal all of your life but because of some disadvantage (perhaps financial or physical) you had never dreamed that you could actually go on a boat trip one day yourself.

Community boating organisations allow ordinary people to temporarily join the boating community and have an insight into an alternative way of living. To find out more about how we do this please visit the community boating blog.

Thanks.
Peggy

Peggy Melmoth is a mother, freelance writer and blogger. She writes a personal blog at www.narrowboatwife.com

The Big Secret and How it Affects You

"How long will it last, this peace I have found... It is all of life that I contemplate - sun, clouds, time that passes and abides. Occasionally it is also that other world, foreign now, that I left centuries ago. The modern, artificial world where man has been turned into a money-making machine to satisfy false needs, false joys." - Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way.

The Strangles, North Cornwall

In about 2 weeks' time, we will be gone from here. We will have given up our boat (the one that was meant to be our home for the next 20-30 years or more), our business (already being sold off as I type), and Father Earthly will have reduced his working hours by almost half. We are breaking with pretty much everything, in fact, in an attempt to change our lives for the better.

Fancy a boat? Have a look :)

These last 2 years or so have been so tough, and we have forgotten how to laugh properly, how to find joy in the little things. That is what we need to regain at all costs.


When we embarked on our adventures in our lovely green camper 3 1/2 years ago, it was to seek a much simpler life, a more spontaneous way of living, and quite frankly to have more fun. And by god so we did! But then our little sproglets came along and complicated things. Suddenly, even our simple way of looking at things became fraught with stumbling blocks and much weariness. Father Earthly's work and my business got in the way of enjoying our family and creating a home. Stress and anxiety and immense fatigue prevailed: this was not the way it was meant to be at all. And so something had to be done, but what...?

Our new home!

And then very suddenly, just as everything seemed to have gone dark forever, a chink of light appeared. It beckoned and wavered and lured us in. Father Earthly wasn't so sure - why should he trust this light? What if it was a hinkypunk? What was the light offering exactly? Did it have all the answers?


Gently, curiously and not a little warily we started to follow the light, to seek and know the source - Father Earthly dragging his heels a little reluctantly whilst I skipped eagerly ahead, stopping periodically to urge him on. Occasionally our path came to forks and crossroads and diversions, but on investigating these other ways, our light dimmed or was lost altogether. Once or twice, we very nearly lost our way entirely as the dark closed in on us.


Stay with me here, folks.


Today, this very moment, the light is beaming out strongly and bathing us, bright and glowing like a crisp Autumnal day. It feels good and it feels right. There are still many unanswered questions, but the most important have been satisfied. After our long darkness, I feel like a convalescent, letting the warmth and goodness seep back into my very bones.

The way things were...

There are of course some regrets and just a little bitterness. As I type I am sitting on our narrowboat (newly cleaned and tidied), the woodburner chucking out it's cheerful cosiness, and I'm surrounded by all our things, by our space. This was to be our home, and now we have to say goodbye: for financial (and practical) reasons, we can't even keep it on as an occasional outlet for adventures and hideaways. All of the work we have started, all of the special materials or pieces (such as our lovely stove!) that we chose or had planned - all seemingly wasted. That is very disheartening.


But I'm a philosopher and there's no point wallowing in the quagmire of regret. As a friend of ours likes to say "it's better to regret the things you've done than those you haven't".


And that's where you come in, dearest, most wonderful reader! Do you feel as though life has a strangle hold on you and you can't break free? Has all the light gone from your life and your mere existence is dull and grey, or worse...? Are you filled with regrets? Or dreams, passions, caged birds just waiting to be set free?


You know what to do my friends.


And if you need me, you will find me here.


xxx

Narrowboat Living Top Ten

Inspired by Boat Wife's Motherboard Top Ten, I've wanted to write a post about boat living for a while. Recently I've been really struggling on board and have on more than one occasion expostulated "I want to live in a house!" along with a tirade on the myriad problems our water-borne home poses to any kind of sane living. So I thought I should write a "positive" top ten, but then realised that that may not give you much of a real idea about our day to day experiences - so here's a compromise, a well-balanced top ten: five good, five bad!


Cons

1. There's not much privacy on a narrowboat (especially on our mooring which is part of a World Heritage Site!). And people are pretty darned nosy sometimes!!

2. We have no garden or land of our own (other than the bit of towpath we're moored to, unofficially, where we can store wood and bikes, and have a few plants etc. So nowhere to decant the kids to easily on a good day unless really well supervised (which is pretty exhausting with a toddler). And nowhere for me to read a good book in the sun in peace :)

3. More than other boaters, we struggle for services as we have none installed yet. So we fill up several 5 litre water bottles every day from the BW water point and empty our cassette loo and have showers at a BW service block about 20mins drive away. We take our own rubbish and recycling to our nearest recycling centre, also about 20 mins drive.

4. Every space is multi-purpose, particularly at the moment whilst we're building, so our bedroom is also the playroom and "lounge" once the bed has been turned into a sofa; the dining area is also our "office" and everything else just has to fit in where it can! As you can imagine, this can be pretty chaotic...

5.  Life is pretty physical and exhausting sometimes and as yet we have no "haven" like a permanent bedroom to retreat to when we feel ill or knackered or just need to mentally and physically shut the door on things for half an hour.

Pros

1. We own our house (though we are paying off a small loan for it) and so are (a) not tied to a mortgage for the next 30 years and (b) don't have to put up with "inspections" and other hassles from rental agencies.

2. We don't get post, which I see as a bonus as we needn't put up with tonnes of junkmail, bills and nasty letters from your electricity supplier threatening to cut you off. We simply get any important mail delivered to a c/o address.

3. On that point, we have no service bills, just our licence and mooring fees to think about. We buy our own gas and generate our own electricity.

4. Having to create/look after/buy/collect/dispose of our own services and used items really makes us much more aware and frugal as consumers. On average we use about 20-30 litres of water a day, have a shower 2-3 times a week and try to keep our washing to a minimum (which is easier said than done with kids and our lifestyle). We get a vegbox delivered to our boat and try to make trips to the supermarket as rare as possible (particularly as we can get a lot of what we need locally).

5. We can move our house! We have plans to travel much of the South West network and would love to go to the Fens, but we do need to find a few spare weeks or months!