Maurice (pronounced Morris in American) is a character. That’s all I can say in short. In long, of course, there is much more to say, and I will try to preserve some of that saying here.
In case you have forgotten, Maurice is captain of Wild Goose and my only companion on board. As such, he is a major part of my experience here, and by far the most important component of my enjoyment of the trip.
On the one hand, he is your stereotypical old man. (I am not certain how old, but my educated guess would be late sixties early seventies.) His great passions in life are gardening, bird watching, and snooping on the neighbors. He hasn’t heard a single song or seen a single movie released since before I was born. He is so set in his ways that he is proud of the fact; refuses to deal with anything more technologically advanced than a television, refuses to eat the foods he’s not accustomed to liking, and absolutely refuses to accept that which he does not understand, including many cultures, religions, and languages.
On the other hand, he’s been around the world and understands quite a lot. He has lived in Greece, Italy, and Singapore, traveled extensively in China and Borneo, and driven a camper van across Europe. He is, by and large, amiable and generous, and though he complains a great deal, it is usually in jest. If I had to describe it, I’d say he has a martyr complex without wanting to actually suffer. Whatever happens, he must be getting the short end of the stick, and boy will he tell you about it.
He loves to talk, to tell stories, often beyond the point of one’s willingness to listen, or indeed when no one is listening at all. He talks to things as much as people; the boat, the television, the birds across the canal. When I call his voice mail for him, he responds out loud to the messages on the other end. But after so long traveling alone it was nice for a bit to have company always good for a chat.
He used to be a teacher, which means he loves to teach as well. During the day I am often inundated with random information, though it’s more often than not the same facts over and over again. I’ve learned not to mention it, because the most tender point with Maurice is the fact that he is getting old. To be fair, he has a lot of tender points. (Our only major fight so far happened, of all things, over a game of checkers gone wrong, which I won’t be repeating.) But his misgivings and insecurities appear most often when I help him with technology, or when his health starts to act up, and are plain as day on his face. One of those things to which he talk so often is his own deteriorating body; “Stop it!” out loud when his foot hurts, and when a cough racks his chest an angry enjoinder to “Die quietly!”
I was startled by these exclamations at first. Now they just make me sad. But much of Maurice’s behavior does that, because for all that he tries to make sure I’m provided for, he is at the core a very negative person. Though he loves to laugh and joke, it is almost exclusively at someone else’s expense. He will disparage people on the telly, strangers from the windows, friends from his storied past, without a second thought. At first it mostly surprised me, but now it has worn on me enough that I resent the bitter tune to which he marches. I’m no stranger to complaining. This post proves as much. And yet I’d like to see the good in people while that’s the chief bit he seems set to ignore.
I wonder sometimes if a bit of that negativity has to do with my next point. In many ways, Maurice is also quintessentially English. At least that is how I excuse other behaviors that have also started to wear on my nerves. I should mention here that I differentiate between two types of stereotypically English. Maurice is by no means your stuffy, tweed wearing professor with wire rimmed spectacles and a cup of tea. He doesn’t even drink tea. He is, however, what one cannot help but describe as a dirty old man.
Now, I put off mentioning this to my parents before I could explain it in better detail. They would worry, I know, and while Maurice is certainly strange, awkward, and at times a bit discomfiting, I am equally certain that he is not in the least bit dangerous. Well… maybe to himself, if he were to employ someone prone to filing sexual harassment law suits.
There is a certain opennes among sections of British culture that can at times offend puritanical American sensibilities. This is exacerbated by a generational divide that I often see in American society as well. What mainfests in the states as an elderly man telling a “sweetheart” that she should “smile” because it’s “prettier,” here transmutes into Maurice suggesting I take off my top and pose on the bow of the ship as an ornament.
He’s not serious, and I know he’s not serious, but it’s still uncomfortable. For me anyway. In the United States such behavior would be completely unacceptable, but in the United States the body is also much more taboo than it is in Europe, England included. So while I have no concerns that Maurice will in any way overstep the physical boundaries of decency, it is still very clear that he has women on the brain, uncouthly and often. Then again, this makes his relationship with women all the more interesting to observe.
First and foremost is his adamant refusal to host men to move the boat. He doesn’t get along with them the way he does with women, he insists, and yet none of his friends in port were of the fairer sex. He makes markedly more side comments about women out of ear shot than to those that can hear. In fact, it seems his only regular interaction with women was checking out at the supermarket and the corner store, where he spoke to female cashiers in English only and insisted they greet him with “good morning” rather than “bon jour.” He still maintains it was for their benefit, that it made them smile and brightened their day. As far as I could tell, they were smiles of resignation, or at best mockery, and it only gets worse from there.
Before we’d left the first mooring, Maurice’s friend David, who picked me up from the train station, invited us over to his boat for drinks where I also met his wife and sister. The way Maurice treated that wife was horrendous. To be fair, David didn’t treat her much better, but throughout the whole visit my heart ached.
Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that she doesn’t speak great English. She is ethnically Chinese, and how she met David I’ll never know. While David was clearly more annoyed than affectionate, Maurice barely treated her like a human being. He routinely cut her off, called her names, and brushed off her inquiries about the meanings of certain words. When I purported I would eat wild mushrooms if they’d been cleared by a pharmacist, it was upsetting how much her countenance changed. You could tell the men had been verbally abusing her about it for weeks, and I was the first person to come along and take her side. I kind of wanted to give her a hug, but there wasn’t any occasion.
Anyway, that’s what it comes down to in short. Maurice is a nosy, racist, misogynistic flirt who thinks women enjoy his attentions. To be fair, some might, especially when it’s only a few moments in passing, but the off hand comments about how he likes my hair a certain way or I should show my legs more often got on my nerves quickly. As my mother has happily concluded from previous posts, however, I have quite learned how to deal with such attentions. Rather than making a scene, I made sure to express my distaste for the behavior more gradually, either by glaring or contradicting him every time I disapproved. It led to a bit more bickering than usual, though to be fair we bicker quite a lot. He seems to like to argue, and we all know I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. There’s no malice behind it on either side though, and at least it keeps
life interesting.
In the end, it seems he got the hint. The objectionable behaviors at any rate became much fewer and far between. Now the worst thing I have to deal with is him wearing far less clothing than I would really like, and even that hasn't been an issue since the weather's gotten chilly. Besides, even in the heat of summer I could usually go for a walk and he’d be dressed by the time I returned.
If I had to guess, I'd think the perversion goes back to loneliness after a life of womanizing more than anything. Though I understand from Janet that the two of them are in a relationship, it seems from his end a relationship of convenience more than anything. She only visits a couple times a year, and then only shortly. In the meantime, however, it sounds like she handles all of the French speaking and covers most of the bills. Make of that what you will.
Maurice was married once, and has two sons, and though I don’t know what happened as far as that is concerned, I know it ended eventually. The obvious love of his life, Linda, came afterwards I think. Unless it was before in college? They were together for only eight years, but he talks about her constantly. I think I know more about her than I do him sometimes, and get a bit uncomfortable when he makes comparisons between us. It doesn’t help that I cook often, because apparently that was her passion. I imagine he finds it comforting though.
Linda aside, he seems to enjoy what he calls bachelor life. He first mentioned it to me in those terms when I questioned his cleaning of the dishes, which is abysmal. He does it, which I appreciate, but there are always bits of food leftover, and I’m not entirely sure he uses soap. Having seen how he lives, however, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Things aren’t very messy. There’s hardly enough room for things to be messy, unless you count the odds and ends drawers, which are all of them. But he’s clearly not the cleanest chap of the bunch. He doesn’t bathe as regularly as I would like in our close quarters, and he has a conspiratorial aversion to deodorant. The body odor is often unbearable. The countertops are usually sticky. The dishes are rarely more than rinsed. The bathroom smells of sewage, though I’m inclined to think that has more to do with the canal then him. The biggest hygienic issue that gets to me, however, is the bugs.
You would expect bugs, living on a canal. I understand this. And you don’t want to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I understand this as well. Maurice’s solution, however, is a memorandum on killing spiders. And thus, the boat is full of them. It’s a good thing I’m not arachnophobic, but you’d think they would have warned a person beforehand. Spiders on the ceiling, in the windows, in the doors. The first person outside in the morning always has to knock down a web to get there. Walking around the edges of the boat is sure to entangle you as well.
The worst spot, probably because of the damp, is the water closet. I usually perform my daily ablutions with no fewer than a dozen spiders hovering about in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. I saw a pair attacking each other the other night, or else just playing roughly, and there are a pair of gigantic ones in residence beneath a small outcropping in the shower too; big enough to actually be frightening.
I haven’t quite progressed to naming the spiders yet, but I sometimes think we might as well. Maurice talks to them like pets, a habit probably born of years of ardent gardening and familiarity with insects. We can discuss the more obvious ones based on their size and territory; the large ones in the bathroom that I mentioned, the tiny ones that fill the garden on the bow, the daddy long legs’ in the corner of the shed, the monster that lives by the steering column. It would certainly give a lot of people a fright. It kind of just makes me sigh and feel like everything is always dirty, though I suppose it’s good for my grit. The only time it ever really bothered me was the night we started to move down south. Apparently my spider tolerance has a size threshold, and when the wind blew the curtain in the bathroom back to reveal one the size of my palm,
well… I wasn’t happy. They don’t even catch the flies! Of which there are many.
Coming off of three months straight traveling, however, it’s not quite as bad as some of the hostels I’ve stayed in. And it’s free, which is important. Though prone to criticize my “gerbil and rabbit food” as much as anything else, Maurice is always careful to make sure we have things I want to eat. Though he always asks me what’s for dinner, he cooks for me almost as much as I do for him. Though diabetic, he tries to talk me into selecting tarts and things for myself from the store. There’s always wine for dinner, and he brought me coffee and biscuits every morning in bed before I begged him to start letting me sleep in. I suspected there was a bit of ulterior motive to that, but I was fully covered, and perversion aside I am enjoying myself. I don’t doubt his sincerity in wanting me to be happy and healthy aboard. Nonetheless, regardless of future plans, I don’t think I’ll be taking him up on that offer to come back exploring next summer as well.
In case you have forgotten, Maurice is captain of Wild Goose and my only companion on board. As such, he is a major part of my experience here, and by far the most important component of my enjoyment of the trip.
On the one hand, he is your stereotypical old man. (I am not certain how old, but my educated guess would be late sixties early seventies.) His great passions in life are gardening, bird watching, and snooping on the neighbors. He hasn’t heard a single song or seen a single movie released since before I was born. He is so set in his ways that he is proud of the fact; refuses to deal with anything more technologically advanced than a television, refuses to eat the foods he’s not accustomed to liking, and absolutely refuses to accept that which he does not understand, including many cultures, religions, and languages.
On the other hand, he’s been around the world and understands quite a lot. He has lived in Greece, Italy, and Singapore, traveled extensively in China and Borneo, and driven a camper van across Europe. He is, by and large, amiable and generous, and though he complains a great deal, it is usually in jest. If I had to describe it, I’d say he has a martyr complex without wanting to actually suffer. Whatever happens, he must be getting the short end of the stick, and boy will he tell you about it.
He loves to talk, to tell stories, often beyond the point of one’s willingness to listen, or indeed when no one is listening at all. He talks to things as much as people; the boat, the television, the birds across the canal. When I call his voice mail for him, he responds out loud to the messages on the other end. But after so long traveling alone it was nice for a bit to have company always good for a chat.
He used to be a teacher, which means he loves to teach as well. During the day I am often inundated with random information, though it’s more often than not the same facts over and over again. I’ve learned not to mention it, because the most tender point with Maurice is the fact that he is getting old. To be fair, he has a lot of tender points. (Our only major fight so far happened, of all things, over a game of checkers gone wrong, which I won’t be repeating.) But his misgivings and insecurities appear most often when I help him with technology, or when his health starts to act up, and are plain as day on his face. One of those things to which he talk so often is his own deteriorating body; “Stop it!” out loud when his foot hurts, and when a cough racks his chest an angry enjoinder to “Die quietly!”
I was startled by these exclamations at first. Now they just make me sad. But much of Maurice’s behavior does that, because for all that he tries to make sure I’m provided for, he is at the core a very negative person. Though he loves to laugh and joke, it is almost exclusively at someone else’s expense. He will disparage people on the telly, strangers from the windows, friends from his storied past, without a second thought. At first it mostly surprised me, but now it has worn on me enough that I resent the bitter tune to which he marches. I’m no stranger to complaining. This post proves as much. And yet I’d like to see the good in people while that’s the chief bit he seems set to ignore.
I wonder sometimes if a bit of that negativity has to do with my next point. In many ways, Maurice is also quintessentially English. At least that is how I excuse other behaviors that have also started to wear on my nerves. I should mention here that I differentiate between two types of stereotypically English. Maurice is by no means your stuffy, tweed wearing professor with wire rimmed spectacles and a cup of tea. He doesn’t even drink tea. He is, however, what one cannot help but describe as a dirty old man.
Now, I put off mentioning this to my parents before I could explain it in better detail. They would worry, I know, and while Maurice is certainly strange, awkward, and at times a bit discomfiting, I am equally certain that he is not in the least bit dangerous. Well… maybe to himself, if he were to employ someone prone to filing sexual harassment law suits.
There is a certain opennes among sections of British culture that can at times offend puritanical American sensibilities. This is exacerbated by a generational divide that I often see in American society as well. What mainfests in the states as an elderly man telling a “sweetheart” that she should “smile” because it’s “prettier,” here transmutes into Maurice suggesting I take off my top and pose on the bow of the ship as an ornament.
He’s not serious, and I know he’s not serious, but it’s still uncomfortable. For me anyway. In the United States such behavior would be completely unacceptable, but in the United States the body is also much more taboo than it is in Europe, England included. So while I have no concerns that Maurice will in any way overstep the physical boundaries of decency, it is still very clear that he has women on the brain, uncouthly and often. Then again, this makes his relationship with women all the more interesting to observe.
First and foremost is his adamant refusal to host men to move the boat. He doesn’t get along with them the way he does with women, he insists, and yet none of his friends in port were of the fairer sex. He makes markedly more side comments about women out of ear shot than to those that can hear. In fact, it seems his only regular interaction with women was checking out at the supermarket and the corner store, where he spoke to female cashiers in English only and insisted they greet him with “good morning” rather than “bon jour.” He still maintains it was for their benefit, that it made them smile and brightened their day. As far as I could tell, they were smiles of resignation, or at best mockery, and it only gets worse from there.
Before we’d left the first mooring, Maurice’s friend David, who picked me up from the train station, invited us over to his boat for drinks where I also met his wife and sister. The way Maurice treated that wife was horrendous. To be fair, David didn’t treat her much better, but throughout the whole visit my heart ached.
Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that she doesn’t speak great English. She is ethnically Chinese, and how she met David I’ll never know. While David was clearly more annoyed than affectionate, Maurice barely treated her like a human being. He routinely cut her off, called her names, and brushed off her inquiries about the meanings of certain words. When I purported I would eat wild mushrooms if they’d been cleared by a pharmacist, it was upsetting how much her countenance changed. You could tell the men had been verbally abusing her about it for weeks, and I was the first person to come along and take her side. I kind of wanted to give her a hug, but there wasn’t any occasion.
Anyway, that’s what it comes down to in short. Maurice is a nosy, racist, misogynistic flirt who thinks women enjoy his attentions. To be fair, some might, especially when it’s only a few moments in passing, but the off hand comments about how he likes my hair a certain way or I should show my legs more often got on my nerves quickly. As my mother has happily concluded from previous posts, however, I have quite learned how to deal with such attentions. Rather than making a scene, I made sure to express my distaste for the behavior more gradually, either by glaring or contradicting him every time I disapproved. It led to a bit more bickering than usual, though to be fair we bicker quite a lot. He seems to like to argue, and we all know I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. There’s no malice behind it on either side though, and at least it keeps
life interesting.
In the end, it seems he got the hint. The objectionable behaviors at any rate became much fewer and far between. Now the worst thing I have to deal with is him wearing far less clothing than I would really like, and even that hasn't been an issue since the weather's gotten chilly. Besides, even in the heat of summer I could usually go for a walk and he’d be dressed by the time I returned.
If I had to guess, I'd think the perversion goes back to loneliness after a life of womanizing more than anything. Though I understand from Janet that the two of them are in a relationship, it seems from his end a relationship of convenience more than anything. She only visits a couple times a year, and then only shortly. In the meantime, however, it sounds like she handles all of the French speaking and covers most of the bills. Make of that what you will.
Maurice was married once, and has two sons, and though I don’t know what happened as far as that is concerned, I know it ended eventually. The obvious love of his life, Linda, came afterwards I think. Unless it was before in college? They were together for only eight years, but he talks about her constantly. I think I know more about her than I do him sometimes, and get a bit uncomfortable when he makes comparisons between us. It doesn’t help that I cook often, because apparently that was her passion. I imagine he finds it comforting though.
Linda aside, he seems to enjoy what he calls bachelor life. He first mentioned it to me in those terms when I questioned his cleaning of the dishes, which is abysmal. He does it, which I appreciate, but there are always bits of food leftover, and I’m not entirely sure he uses soap. Having seen how he lives, however, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Things aren’t very messy. There’s hardly enough room for things to be messy, unless you count the odds and ends drawers, which are all of them. But he’s clearly not the cleanest chap of the bunch. He doesn’t bathe as regularly as I would like in our close quarters, and he has a conspiratorial aversion to deodorant. The body odor is often unbearable. The countertops are usually sticky. The dishes are rarely more than rinsed. The bathroom smells of sewage, though I’m inclined to think that has more to do with the canal then him. The biggest hygienic issue that gets to me, however, is the bugs.
You would expect bugs, living on a canal. I understand this. And you don’t want to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I understand this as well. Maurice’s solution, however, is a memorandum on killing spiders. And thus, the boat is full of them. It’s a good thing I’m not arachnophobic, but you’d think they would have warned a person beforehand. Spiders on the ceiling, in the windows, in the doors. The first person outside in the morning always has to knock down a web to get there. Walking around the edges of the boat is sure to entangle you as well.
The worst spot, probably because of the damp, is the water closet. I usually perform my daily ablutions with no fewer than a dozen spiders hovering about in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. I saw a pair attacking each other the other night, or else just playing roughly, and there are a pair of gigantic ones in residence beneath a small outcropping in the shower too; big enough to actually be frightening.
I haven’t quite progressed to naming the spiders yet, but I sometimes think we might as well. Maurice talks to them like pets, a habit probably born of years of ardent gardening and familiarity with insects. We can discuss the more obvious ones based on their size and territory; the large ones in the bathroom that I mentioned, the tiny ones that fill the garden on the bow, the daddy long legs’ in the corner of the shed, the monster that lives by the steering column. It would certainly give a lot of people a fright. It kind of just makes me sigh and feel like everything is always dirty, though I suppose it’s good for my grit. The only time it ever really bothered me was the night we started to move down south. Apparently my spider tolerance has a size threshold, and when the wind blew the curtain in the bathroom back to reveal one the size of my palm,
well… I wasn’t happy. They don’t even catch the flies! Of which there are many.
Coming off of three months straight traveling, however, it’s not quite as bad as some of the hostels I’ve stayed in. And it’s free, which is important. Though prone to criticize my “gerbil and rabbit food” as much as anything else, Maurice is always careful to make sure we have things I want to eat. Though he always asks me what’s for dinner, he cooks for me almost as much as I do for him. Though diabetic, he tries to talk me into selecting tarts and things for myself from the store. There’s always wine for dinner, and he brought me coffee and biscuits every morning in bed before I begged him to start letting me sleep in. I suspected there was a bit of ulterior motive to that, but I was fully covered, and perversion aside I am enjoying myself. I don’t doubt his sincerity in wanting me to be happy and healthy aboard. Nonetheless, regardless of future plans, I don’t think I’ll be taking him up on that offer to come back exploring next summer as well.
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