buckets on the canal boat

The buckets you can see in the picture are not all the buckets.  There are buckets within buckets.  We also have a lot of sponges.  One of the things I have found with Quirk, and apparently he did it with wife 1, is the constant moving things from one part of the boat to another.  So you might leave it tidy on a Sunday and the next week everything is out again while he decides new homes or even the same home , after thought.  I keep telling myself it is harmless.

No good things in life come without a price.  I love the boat and I am working hard to make it work.  Quirk complains that I am rude to him.  I am pretty certain I put my school teacher voice on with him a lot – some of that is because I am tense, but I don’t send him abusive texts and messages and emails.  I get a lot of these and I am trying to make it a condition of continuing that they stop.  He never says really spiteful things to my face.

My children and my friends think I should jack it in and count my losses, but I can’t.  I could not have this experience without him, anymore, I suspect, than he could without me – at least in the short term.  He is a good-looking, clever, interesting man facing a lot of end of life indignities.

He also adores Noah who is a badly behaved teenager dog who likes chewing sponges.

This weekend we went from Linslade to Ivinghoe in glorious autumnal sunshine via a number of locks.

There are a lot of single old people on boats as much as there are young, hippy types.  Today I saw two guys who were probably 60s 70s each with their own boat and their own dog, but who were travelling together to do the locks together.  How sweet is that?