It’s been a short run, seven posts in ten days, and yet I expect this post will be my last. We’ve been over the various bits and pieces of my life on Wild Goose: whom I live with, how we live, what the whole moving process entails. It occurs to me though that while I’ve talked at length about where I go when I leave the boat, I haven’t much talked about what I do at ‘home,’ as it were.
The boat has certainly become a home of sorts, if not one in which I am particularly keen to stay. I have a routine here, places for all my things, and stuff to do to pass the idle time. But there’s a lot of idle time, and it’s surprisingly difficult to un-idlefy it.
In complement to Maurice’s slower way of life, a sort of lethargy encompasses all that is the boat. Though he woke me up daily at seven-thirty for the first few weeks, we would sit around doing nothing until at lelast nine on days that we were moving. On days we were staying at port, that nothingness sometimes stretched until ten or eleven. If it got to be lunch time that was when I would flee the boat regardless of weather or a plan. It was also this state of affairs that led me to ask him to stop waking me up. I appreciated the coffee and biscuits each morning, but I would much rather have an extra hour of sleep and make them myself. In fact, I would rather make them myself period, and leave the biscuits. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell him that.
By no means did the boat lack a wealth of things to do. As anyone who knows me is probably aware, I need very little to keep myself occupied. There’s the reading and writing of course, with which to start. I have been devouring Ken Follett’s epic 12th century historical novel The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoying it immensely. These blog posts needed drafting, and I have a million and one ideas for stories running around my head as a result of my months of wandering. I’ve also been learning French on the side from a book I found on board: Learn French in Three Months. I’ve revised it an ambitious three weeks that I probably won’t finish, but I’m still proud of the progress I’ve been making.
The problem is I can’t do any of these things with Maurice around, and he’s almost always around. He does odd jobs throughout the day, reads off and on during breaks, but more often than not he sits, in the only sitting area on the boat, and stares off in to space. That’s all very well and good for him, but it throughly creeps me out and puts a definite damper on my ability to get anything of any sort even remotely done. The staring is almost catching, and then I just feel lazy, lethargic, and useless.
On the upside it gives me that much more impetus to try to get the manual labor done. I’m relieved when he accepts my offer to make him a cup of coffee, I am eager by the time to start making dinner rolls around. After dinner, more often than not, I make excuses to go to bed early so I can at least read in my cabin in peace. Or…. private peace anyway.
On nights I don’t retire early, assuming there’s electricity, we usually watch something on the television. At first it was quiz shows, which we both seem to enjoy, but since leaving Saint Satur Maurice hasn’t wanted to reset the satellite dish. That leaves DVDs, of which I was surprised to find he has a collection.
We started with the travelogues of Michael Palin, an old member of the Monty Python crew, across various parts of the world. While I like travel, I’m not such a travelogue fan, and by the third episode Maurice had started using the series as a way to unsubtlely boast about places he had been. I lost interest altogether.
After that, we moved on to musicals and episodes of a BBC show from the 80's entitled Yes, Minister. Yes, Minister, a program chronicling the British Civil Service, was the favorite show of Margaret Thatcher for its humorous similarity to real government work. After my time interning for the State Department, which isn’t all that different from the British Civil Service when push comes to shove, I could see what she meant, and quickly grew to love it just as much.
The musicals, of course, are also right up my alley. After days of referencing his “boring concert version of Les Mis,” that I took to be the spectacular 25th Anniversary Edition at Royal Albert Hall that I also own, I found out that it was in fact the 10th Anniversary edition and insisted we watch it his opinion be damned. That’s become rather characteristic of our relationship on both sides, as it were.
As you might have guessed, Maurice isn’t always the most compassionate when it comes to choosing his words. I highly doubt he means to be cruel, but much of what he says comes out as unwelcome criticism and judgement regardless. He looks skeptically over my shoulder when I’m cooking as if he doesn’t trust me to do it right, calls me a dormouse if a sleep past eight, martyrs himself over not being able to eat any of the new peaches because I ate the last ones too quickly, despite my carefully rationing them to only one a day. It never occurs to him that such comments make me terribly self-conscious and put me on edge. It’s just his personality, and with so little time aboard it wasn’t worth a confrontation to try to change him.
So instead I bit back with sarcasm and wit, subconsciously defending myself by giving as good as I got, and thus a friendly sort of bickering was born. Except it wasn’t really friendly on my side, it was just psychological survival, and it was exhausting.
But it’s done now, and I’m glad to say that ups and downs, trials and triumphs, I have certainly learned a lot. Perhaps my time aboard Wild Goose wasn’t as relaxing as I had hoped it would be, but I got out of it all the practical benefits one really could. It’s another check in the experience column precipitating confidence in a variety of different situations. French language, rural living, canals, boats. Maybe I’ll never use any of these skills again, but if I need to I’ll be able, and in the end having the ability is what it’s all about.
The boat has certainly become a home of sorts, if not one in which I am particularly keen to stay. I have a routine here, places for all my things, and stuff to do to pass the idle time. But there’s a lot of idle time, and it’s surprisingly difficult to un-idlefy it.
In complement to Maurice’s slower way of life, a sort of lethargy encompasses all that is the boat. Though he woke me up daily at seven-thirty for the first few weeks, we would sit around doing nothing until at lelast nine on days that we were moving. On days we were staying at port, that nothingness sometimes stretched until ten or eleven. If it got to be lunch time that was when I would flee the boat regardless of weather or a plan. It was also this state of affairs that led me to ask him to stop waking me up. I appreciated the coffee and biscuits each morning, but I would much rather have an extra hour of sleep and make them myself. In fact, I would rather make them myself period, and leave the biscuits. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell him that.
By no means did the boat lack a wealth of things to do. As anyone who knows me is probably aware, I need very little to keep myself occupied. There’s the reading and writing of course, with which to start. I have been devouring Ken Follett’s epic 12th century historical novel The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoying it immensely. These blog posts needed drafting, and I have a million and one ideas for stories running around my head as a result of my months of wandering. I’ve also been learning French on the side from a book I found on board: Learn French in Three Months. I’ve revised it an ambitious three weeks that I probably won’t finish, but I’m still proud of the progress I’ve been making.
The problem is I can’t do any of these things with Maurice around, and he’s almost always around. He does odd jobs throughout the day, reads off and on during breaks, but more often than not he sits, in the only sitting area on the boat, and stares off in to space. That’s all very well and good for him, but it throughly creeps me out and puts a definite damper on my ability to get anything of any sort even remotely done. The staring is almost catching, and then I just feel lazy, lethargic, and useless.
On the upside it gives me that much more impetus to try to get the manual labor done. I’m relieved when he accepts my offer to make him a cup of coffee, I am eager by the time to start making dinner rolls around. After dinner, more often than not, I make excuses to go to bed early so I can at least read in my cabin in peace. Or…. private peace anyway.
On nights I don’t retire early, assuming there’s electricity, we usually watch something on the television. At first it was quiz shows, which we both seem to enjoy, but since leaving Saint Satur Maurice hasn’t wanted to reset the satellite dish. That leaves DVDs, of which I was surprised to find he has a collection.
We started with the travelogues of Michael Palin, an old member of the Monty Python crew, across various parts of the world. While I like travel, I’m not such a travelogue fan, and by the third episode Maurice had started using the series as a way to unsubtlely boast about places he had been. I lost interest altogether.
After that, we moved on to musicals and episodes of a BBC show from the 80's entitled Yes, Minister. Yes, Minister, a program chronicling the British Civil Service, was the favorite show of Margaret Thatcher for its humorous similarity to real government work. After my time interning for the State Department, which isn’t all that different from the British Civil Service when push comes to shove, I could see what she meant, and quickly grew to love it just as much.
The musicals, of course, are also right up my alley. After days of referencing his “boring concert version of Les Mis,” that I took to be the spectacular 25th Anniversary Edition at Royal Albert Hall that I also own, I found out that it was in fact the 10th Anniversary edition and insisted we watch it his opinion be damned. That’s become rather characteristic of our relationship on both sides, as it were.
As you might have guessed, Maurice isn’t always the most compassionate when it comes to choosing his words. I highly doubt he means to be cruel, but much of what he says comes out as unwelcome criticism and judgement regardless. He looks skeptically over my shoulder when I’m cooking as if he doesn’t trust me to do it right, calls me a dormouse if a sleep past eight, martyrs himself over not being able to eat any of the new peaches because I ate the last ones too quickly, despite my carefully rationing them to only one a day. It never occurs to him that such comments make me terribly self-conscious and put me on edge. It’s just his personality, and with so little time aboard it wasn’t worth a confrontation to try to change him.
So instead I bit back with sarcasm and wit, subconsciously defending myself by giving as good as I got, and thus a friendly sort of bickering was born. Except it wasn’t really friendly on my side, it was just psychological survival, and it was exhausting.
But it’s done now, and I’m glad to say that ups and downs, trials and triumphs, I have certainly learned a lot. Perhaps my time aboard Wild Goose wasn’t as relaxing as I had hoped it would be, but I got out of it all the practical benefits one really could. It’s another check in the experience column precipitating confidence in a variety of different situations. French language, rural living, canals, boats. Maybe I’ll never use any of these skills again, but if I need to I’ll be able, and in the end having the ability is what it’s all about.
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