We were all running short of diesel, coal, gas and toilet fluid, because first Dusty was stuck in the ice at Duke’s Lock, and then he had to go north to reload his boat.  So everyone was glad to get his text message the other day.

Squirrels are searching out their nuts for a nibble, but you get Dusty’s nuts delivered. Rock on Tues, Thrupp Wed, and Dukes plus Oxford Thurs/Fri. You don’t need to nibble at my nuts – buy them by the bag.

Yesterday evening around half past five a bell jingled, a boat tied up alongside me, and I went out to greet Dusty. 

He loaded eight bags of coal onto my roof (that should do me for a fortnight), and then stepping onto Pangolin, filled the tank with diesel.

One hundred and sixty kilograms of coal, ninety litres of diesel and a litre of “green” toilet fluid was £148.50. 

Pangolin was his last call that day.  Dusty went through the lock and, not wanting to risk the river at night, moored up just by the bridge where the Cherwell flows into the canal and rushes south towards Oxford.

Dusty watches as Pangolin’s fuel tank fills.

My elder daughter tells me I gave up on Twitter too soon.  People get interested in your life, she says, if you just keep going. 

That’s probably good advice for blogging too, and for life in general.  Success is mostly about showing up.  I admire those like Ruth who always have ideas and themes and structure.  When I don’t manage, and then say nothing at all, later it seems to me that I should have at least mentioned what I ate for lunch.

So here’s the latest on my life, in case you got interested:

Last night I tucked my radio under the bedclothes and listened to the late night news.  Recaps of Andy Murray’s defeat in Australia were interrupted outside my window by a swan calling for her lover, a lone, mournful sound.

The fire must have gone out soon after I closed down the dampers, judging by the unburned coal in the morning and the deep chill on the boat.  There was a dusting of snow outside, and my indoor basil plant was stone, cold dead.  I guess I shut the stove down too tight, trying to conserve coal.  I needed the remnants of the last bag to keep me warm one more day.

I’ve got porthole covers on all the windows in the back part of the boat, but I still feel vaguely public when I linger under the covers past 7 or 8 o’clock.  No one can see me, but their footsteps along the tow path, right by my windows, make me feel slovenly.

Eventually I dressed under the covers, and though I thought I was very careful, wore my knickers inside out all day long. 

Once I got the fire going again, I spent the morning finally filling in the insurance form detailing what was stolen when the boat was burgled while I was away.  The only thing I really cared about was the iPod my ex husband bought me the first Christmas we were friendly again.  He had my name engraved on it.

I spent the afternoon dealing with British Waterways who were refusing to license the boat because they insisted it had no safety certificate, though I sent them proof a whole year ago and wrote about it here.

And I am sorry to disappoint you after all that build up, but I didn’t exactly eat lunch, unless a grumpy grande latte counts (grumpy is another story).  So when I got back to Pangolin after sending faxes and making phone calls and all, I was awfully hungry and still cold. I spread chicken fat on bread, poured myself a glass of wine and heaped about ton of coal on the stove.

The chicken fat is because I was Jewish in another life, and the wine is because I am middle class and anxious and all middle class anxious Brits guzzle wine like they have two livers.  The coal is because this is the room of my own. 

I opened up all the draughts on the stove and let it get really, really hot.  Dusty is coming tomorrow so tonight I can be as profligate as I like. 

I also let the engine run for a really, really long time, because the engine charges my batteries and that means my computer will run without alarms screaming.  The engine also heats the water to lovely internal combustion hot, and in a few minutes I can get into my teeny tiny steamy boaty bath and then to bed.

I hope the fire stays in.  I hope the swan finds her mate.

The new year is beginning to feel old, which, I guess, is a way of saying I am beginning to feel at home again along the tow path. 

I have a new neighbour (Mr Badger) and the swan family has changed, but otherwise things are pretty much as usual:  Ratty emerged from his boat for the first time this morning (that is, the first time I have seen him since I got back), off for a toilet run.  He’s still banned from the pub.  Ferret, working on the new boat, has broken up with Dina, but she still shows up at the pub now and then, never ever without her head covered.

Wheels finally got his engine up and running, and Tad is still moored by the pub because it is easier for Chris to get on and off since she broke her hip after the particularly jolly boaters Christmas party (which I missed) when more than one of my neighbours ended up at the hospital.

Kate, who has one good arm and one shrunken by thalidomide, greeted me warmly when we met along the tow path.  But I have also met her on the street when we are each in our respectable, Oxford lives, and she has shown no sign of recognition.

James and Emma, the young archaeologists, who used to rent Cherry Lea, are gone, leaving their vintage Triumph in the car park, so I guess they will be back.  Pat the Grumpy Mechanic will have a word or two to say then.  He’s let it known to anyone who cares to listen that they owe him at least two Jack Daniels and a Diet Coke for all the work he did on that car. 

John, the new boy in the pub, is now renting Cherry Lea, squatting a mile north by Pigeon’s Lock.

John says he’s going to marry Cherry Lea’s owner, who sometimes lives in the Seychelles and sometimes in Staffordshire, and then it will be their boat together.

I point out that he has just told me he already has a wife in Bicester, Oxfordshire, and several grown children.  He shrugs and says, I’m too old for you, anyway.

When I drift over to talk to Pat the Grumpy Mechanic he nods towards John and says, That guy works on a Bull Farm.

I reply, Oh no!  He makes specialist microscopes! He told me so.

I am an unusually literal person.

Anyway, I was only at the pub because Pat earlier reminded me that on Thursday the fiddly diddlies are there, and so he urged me to come.  I asked the Landlord, Stematos, if he paid them for the gig. 

He looked astonished, and said that he didn’t charge them for practicing in his pub.

Just before I went home alone, to be in bed by eleven (according to my new year’s resolution), I pointed out to Pat, in my literal way, that there wasn’t a single fiddler amongst them: two banjos and more accordions than are probably legal in a single location.

The fiddly diddlies

There’s a guy who cruises up and down the South Oxford Canal filling boats with diesel and delivering coal.  In the way that people call each other after their boats, he is known as Dusty.  I have his real name on a bit of paper somewhere, for when I write the cheques, but I think of him only as Dusty the Coal Man.  When he is on his way he sends text messages to everyone along the route, reminding us to fill up. 

The texts are usually vaguely suggestive: “Dusty – your man for hot nuts, exotic red juice and whiffy gas…Nice! Rock on Tuesday, Kidlington Wed, and on to Oxford Thurs/Friday.”

We are the “Rock”, short for the Rock of Gibraltar, the pub on the other side of the bridge.  I have no idea why it is called that.

For several weeks Dusty was stuck in the frozen canal, and now that the ice and snow have given way to rain, we hear he is headed toward Oxford and won’t be back at the Rock for another ten days or more.  Between him and us is a stretch of the River Cherwell, now in flood. 

So I am getting fit, not just by heaving my toilet cartridge up the tow path, but by heaving bags of coal down it.  I keep the fire going all the time, day and night: the trick is to stoke it up with coal and turn down the vents at bedtime, feeding it in the morning and opening the bottom door to fill it up with fresh air.

I was getting quite smug about how well I was doing until the fire went out yesterday afternoon (I got stingy with the coal when I had to carry it), and it has been troublesome ever since.

Meanwhile my engineer friend who fixes things for me whenever I smile pathetically appeared outside my window with sixty kilograms of coal that he had pushed along the path in a cart stolen from a nearby garden centre and left by the bridge for everyone’s use.  He stood absolutely knackered and barely breathing outside my boat, and then he lit up a cigarette to give him strength to hand the bags on board.

The fire, now glowing warmly again. I lit the candles just for you.

Okay, Jan asked. So here is my little grandson, four months and a day old when the picture was taken last week in Seattle, just before I left for the airport.

Little Julian and Big Julie

Young Julian is doing well, thank you, and giving his parents exactly enough bother to make his grandparents smile and remember that revenge is sweet.

I maintain that he is a particularly pretty baby. One school of thought declares that I am biased, which might just be possible. Or we could simply agree that he is not only unusually attractive, but also shows signs of extraordinary intelligence.

Here, he looks almost as cute, though perhaps a wee bit more gormless. Nevertheless, as I have tidy hair for a change, I thought I would post this picture too.

Nona and Julian.

The gentleman is 4 months old and the lady is 55.  When he is in her arms she thinks she is a young woman again

Heathrow was barely functioning in record breaking cold when I touched down after four months away. The weathermen said the worst was over, but it was still snowing when I got to Oxford.

Meanwhile the government has ordered a go-slow on rock salt use, because we’re running out. Oxford seems to have entered into the ban with great community spirit. There wasn’t a cleared pavement in sight.

Pedestrians made their way gingerly, some using ski poles for help. Others, like the tall woman who grabbed me and nearly brought me down as I later shuffled and slid to the shops, relied on fellow travellers to steady themselves.

I was jetlagged and felt unreasonably foreign as I puzzled over the choice of my evening’s and morning’s provisions, finally settling on bread, wine, tomatoes, avocado, rocket (arugula), the chorizo sausage I have been dreaming about, and, extravagantly, cherries flown in from Chile. I felt bad about the food miles, but I needed something that tasted of summer.

When I finished shopping my ex-husband drove me cautiously to Pangolin, the 62 foot long narrowboat where I now live. Pangolin “lies” (as they say) in rural Oxfordshire, about 9 miles north of the city. My usual route to the boat was impassable; a lorry had been stuck for days, blocking the road, but I was assured that the alternative way, through Kidlington and down Bunker’s Hill, was clear.

A friend had lit the coal fire, and though the boat was burgled while I was away (I knew that, and was expecting much worse than I found), and my car was covered in a snow drift and dead as a door nail, it still felt wonderful to be home again.

The next morning I took some pictures.

Looking north, towards the bridge:

Looking south, towards the lock, the Cherwell River, and Oxford. Part of the canal is still frozen.

My early visitors are lovely, but they are invariably grumpy, and never grateful for the bread I throw.

Outside the window

I gobbled my cherries as I looked out the window and remembered my towpath garden in late September when I had last seen it.

O westron wind when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain,
Christ that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again

Maybe there isn’t that much competition for a great four line poem, but since I first knew it I have loved this medieval fragment, and I think of it when I get very cold, or very lonely. It’s by that prolific writer Anon, and as there is a fair bit of disagreement about the definitive text, and since I don’t have my books with me, I am going for my (possibly dodgy) memory of exactly how the lines go.

The point of the longing for the west wind from Anon to Shelley and beyond, which I finally understood after I had lived in England for a while, is that there the prevailing wind blows from across Atlantic and is tempered by the wide sea and the mild Gulf Stream. The western wind is gentle and warm compared to what comes from across the North Sea or eastwards from Siberia, dry but bitterly cold. No geography lessons here, but if you want literature, think of John Jarndyce from Bleak House: whenever anything unpleasant happens he insists that the wind must be in the east.

As I might have mentioned, I am back on the small island, looking after the bulimic cat and the toy poodles and house sitting for my mother who is flying back from New Zealand as I write. Her warming carbon footprint will be felt any day now. I am looking forward to it.

Never mind what they are saying in Copenhagen about the warmest decade in history, it is unusually cold here, and I am not used to it. The last time I was in temperatures this low for this long was in my final year of college in New England. I lived in an apartment a couple of miles from campus. Each morning as I stood in line for the bus the tears on my eyelashes froze.

In England the cold is different. It’s that bone chilling damp where the only solution is to meet wet with wet and take a hot bath followed by a nice cup of tea.

On my boat I have a coal fire. It’s a matter of boater pride to “keep it in” all night long, closing down the dampers and allowing just enough air so it doesn’t go out. I can’t speak for others, but my technique is that when the BBC World Service signs off at 5 am, and while the Shipping Forecast gives way to News Briefing, I stagger naked the boat’s 62 ft length (the bed is near the back and the stove near the front), throw a few coals on the fire, open the dampers, and scurry back to bed, snuggling in with Farming Today until the warm air drifting along the cabin invites me and Melvin Bragg to get up.

I confess I don’t draw the curtains at night, but I am really shortsighted and my theory is, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me. Besides, anyone eager enough to wait up until just before dawn to see a 55 year old woman in all her glory myopically stoking a stove deserves all he gets.

I don’t mean to be flippant. I am Against climate change (in so far as I have a vote). I am in Favour of polar bears (ditto) and since I have actually demonstratrated a willingness to be cold on their behalf (and they have never been at all nice to me) I am resting my case and moving on.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I am worried about getting my mother’s house warm enough for Old People.

There’s no central heating and the space is many times larger than my boat. The Permit Queen (remember her?) said it was awfully hard to get the chill off a house in just one day and I ought to light the fire tonight, and so I have. For the first time in a couple of weeks the indoor temperature is almost 55.

When I open the stove to throw in more wet, northwest wood the smoke alarms scream, the cat bolts and the dogs whine. Never mind! I’ve raided my mother’s pantry for the last of her best after dinner, festive, warming comfort (something sweet and sticky called O’Mara’s. I wish there were more).

It will be early morning up with the dogs and the cat and the fire and then off to the airport, but right now I feel just fine.

By tomorrow anything might be possible, including the westron wind.

I.

I am on an island 8000 miles from home, looking after my mother’s house, a bulimic cat, and two toy poodles. 

A wind storm has knocked out the power all over the island.  The wind blew so hard that it broke the brand new dock, and the ferry captains are refusing to carry cars after dark.

My one telephone that actually plugs into the wall seems impossibly old fashioned, but it allows me to receive “power updates”.  A message assures me that personnel have been despatched to assess the damage and that if I see power lines on the ground I should assume they are energised and keep clear.  If I think public safety is at risk I should hang up and dial 911. 

Although I would very much like to have internet access (among other things, like light and heat) I resist the urge to cruise the island’s streets looking for energised power lines.

Nevertheless, as I did not achieve my daily goal of having a single face to face conversation with a creature without a tail I am a little tempted to dial 911.  In fact, as I did not even achieve my secondary goal of having a single telephone or internet conversation with a creature without prejudice to tails, since on the phone or internet they are hearsay, the 911 option is looking pretty good.

Any readers of this blog from its early days will know that when I am on this particular island 8000 miles from home I hang out with firemen, and if I dial 911 I will probably have familiar faces mustering on my lawn.

Because I am a responsible citizen, instead I stumble around in the dark, find a torch, light candles, round up the animals (wouldn’t you know they are all black?) and retreat with them and a bottle of wine to the warmest space to wait the wind out.

My computer has power, for a while at least, though no internet connection.  I can write in the dark since I am a pretty good touch typist.  I have a story about learning to touch type.  I might as well promise to tell it one day.  Tonight I don’t have anything but promise.

II.

I am on an island, 8000 miles from home.

Yesterday, before the power went out, as I walked the poodles in blustery winds and the pouring rain, my elder daughter (the day before her 26th birthday) called my cell phone to say she felt really, really sick and was in bed in her father’s house in England.   She had a sore throat and a fever.  She didn’t have the energy to get food or medicine.    There was no one to look after her.  She didn’t know where anyone was who could help.  Why did I go away and leave her?

I made reassuring noises.  I said I would call her back.

I telephoned her little sister (my 17 year old Baby) and asked where she was.  She was in her father’s house in England.

So from 8000 miles away I organised one child to walk down a flight of steps to deliver medicine to another child.  Since that seemed a really trivial achievement I also sent the younger one the five minute walk to Starbucks (hurrah for globalisation). 

Acetaminophen and frappacino are still the best swine flu cures I know.

In my last job at Oxford, which ended in August, my informal title and official email address, was Webmaster.  That’s how I feel now; only a few months ago I got paid.

I am beginning to think that conversations with creatures with and without tails are overrated.

III.

Lunch time next day I still have no power.  The computer is nearly out of battery.  I am getting very cold.  The power company phone number tells me that it will give me an update and let me know when normal service might be resumed if I provide my 10 digit meter number.

I am 8000 miles from home.  This is not my house.  I do not know my 10 digit meter number. 

So I think I will just see what happens if I hold the line and do nothing.

A very cross voice shouts at me, first in English, and then in Spanish, THAT IS NOT A VALID RESPONSE.

I’m just guessing that that is what the Spanish says, but I am probably right.  Everyone knows that if you shout loud enough, anyone can understand a foreign language.

IV.

I have, completely informally you understand, and without burden on the public purse, consulted a fireman, and am now privy to a switch that makes my propane stove spring into life, supposedly without benefit of Puget Sound Energy.  My fireman friend said, I’ll just turn it off, and you can try turning it back on, so you are familiar with how it works.

So I flipped the switch, all by myself. 

Though I am still just a wee bit sceptical, because by then the power was back on.

V.

Here on this island, 8000 miles from home, I can get the internet again, and the BBC is all about floods in the Lake District – weather conditions, they say, that come up once in a thousand years. 

It’s raining in my heart and raining all over the world.

I could go on, now that I have computer and internet and Wikipedia and light and heat and all, but after writing nothing for months I fear I am getting a bit long winded, though I always remember that it never rains but it pours.

Poodle getting warm by the newly lit fire.

In the UK they don’t really understand the US version of Halloween, and for a long time politicians, the police and the church all regularly denounced it as a tradition that encouraged a combination of juvenile delinquency and devil worship.  At best it was described as an “unwelcome American import”.

Nevertheless, it is catching on, bit by bit, and in many neighbourhoods these days children go trick or treating.  Sometimes they are met with surprise and occasionally with anger, but usually sweeties are doled out and everyone is happy.  It doesn’t always work the way you expect, though.  At one doorstep my little daughter held out her bag and said sweetly, “Trick or treat!”

The man replied, “Oh, I should much prefer a treat, thank you!”  And then he reached into her bag, took out a sweet and thanked her again.

Even where Halloween is celebrated there is nothing like the American enthusiasm and energy for the holiday.  Pumpkins, once somewhat exotic (and still expensive), are now available in every supermarket (jack-o-lanterns used to be carved out of turnips). But on the whole, people do not erect tombstones in their front gardens or hang strings of skeleton lights or startle trick or treaters with dangling spiders.  Costumes are simple, and very repetitive: children dress as witches or devils or vampires.  No one goes as Michael Jackson, the Cat in the Hat, a pirate or a fairy princess. 

Grownups don’t answer the door in costume, and grownups don’t get invited to Halloween parties.

This was my first Halloween in the US for 30 years.  The Lawyer Sis and the Lawyer Brother-in-Law invited me to join their annual celebrations, always elaborate and coordinated.  Last year they went as Sarah Palin and a moose. 

My joining them meant, my sister insisted, that we had to come up with a costume idea for a threesome. 

And unfortunately, she added, she was useless with a sewing machine, so I would have to make the costumes for whatever threesome I decided on.  She would be in charge of props.

Here’s how we looked:

(The Duchess is the mouse on the right.  No one else was willing to wear the mouse undergarment constructed out of mattress pads, hung from the shoulders by blanket ribbon, to bulk out the suits…  Nevertheless I thought we looked pretty good – and I sewed the suits without a pattern, or rather I made my own pattern from pencil scrawls on taped together sections of the NY Times.  I thought the Lawyer Sis handled her prop brief well too.  The white canes adapted from sawn off Bo Peep crooks were inspired.)

We gathered at my brother-in-law’s brother’s house.  Since we lacked a Farmer’s Wife, his friend the Freudian Slip – who is in real life a bassoonist with the Seattle Opera – wielded the carving knife.

After mayhem we all went to Highway 99, a blues club in downtown Seattle where the brother-in-law’s brother had a gig (he’s a professional trumpet player).  I thought his girlfriend must be dressed as a groupie of some sort, or maybe a cocktail waitress, but she informed me that she was Marie Antoinette.

Osama Bin Laden – former principal trumpeter with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – brought his own cocktail.

And the mice enjoyed a martini or two.

It was a lot of fun.  I’ve missed Halloween!

*******

Poor neglected blog!  For any readers I might still have I will try to do a series of catch up posts soon…

Huricane Bill has made his way over the Atlantic, and what is left of him is blowing the trees about in an ineffectual sort of way.  Bill’s rain is what the Brits like to call “wetting” rain.  I know what they mean: the effort feels half hearted, but it doesn’t half soak you.

I knew Bill was coming, so this morning I lugged up the tow path my two toilet cartridges – what the boaters call, “shit suitcases”.  I thought I’d do it early because I prefer to stay dry when I sluice my effluent.

The cartridges were surprisingly heavy, and their contents were all mine.  It amazes me how much waste a body makes in a week.  I have had no other home except Pangolin since last Tuesday. 

I am still having anxiety dreams about moving out of my house and waking at 3 am in a panic.  If I can wait just a little while, at 4 am I know the BBC World Service will give me lovely, familiar, soporific news to doze by, but I have learned that the radio is not my friend in every sleepless hour.

In my last nights at Hedges (my former home) I sometimes turned the radio on too early.  One night the program was interrupted mid sentence, and there followed, for twenty minutes or more, a series of clunks, dings and fog horn type noises.  Was no one else listening?  And no one at the station to intervene, apologise, and offer me “a little music” while they sorted it out?

There was no such intervention, and when I next heard a voice it was speaking a language I did not recognize, except intermittently when it shouted “Afghanistan!”  “Pakistan!”  “Taliban!”  The voice, whose unfamiliar syllables sounded to me angry and aggressive, continued for another fifteen minutes.

With insomniac logic I calculated that the whole point of the BBC World Service was that it was English, the Language of the Empire, the Common Language of the World, and more importantly, the Language I Understood, and which ought to be lulling me back to sleep. 

If the radio wasn’t speaking English, something must be badly wrong.  I began to be certain that terrorists had taken over – if I imagined World Service studios at all I imagined them remote and vulnerable.  The terrorists were now broadcasting to their brethren (and me).  How many more times were they going to say “Afghanistan”?

While I was wondering what to do next - surely I should call someone - I heard the words “BBC Swahili” and then English, and normal service, resumed.  Okay, fine.  But next time before the Swahili program comes on don’t break the tape first.  And maybe try throwing in a few comforting, international words, the sort that terrorists always eschew, like Disneyland, weekend, and Big Mac.

Meanwhile, no one on the towpath can get phone, tele or internet reception.  Leaves on the trees, apparently.  I can sometimes get connected if I wander around outside and point my screen hopefully at the sky.  So I need to brave Bill, and the wetting rain, to post this.

When I get back inside, I think I’ll read Mansfield Park.  I packed it near the top of one of my boxes, because I thought I might need it.  It’s a comfort text, with nice dry pages, reliably in English.