Life Afloat

It’s great to be back in Islington. I drove here on Sunday with Emina and her husband Darko along for the ride. We started in Paddington basin, left the Grand Union for the Regent’s Canal and Emina took the wheel to drive through the park, past some rather posh homes.

Emina quickly got the hang of driving and without a single bump took us past the zoo and on to Camden market for lunch.

We opened a couple of bottles of mulled wine and carried on. Driving through the kilometre long Islington Tunnel was spooky enough but illuminated by the headlight was what appeared to be a tiny toy skeleton hung from the roof. Quite surreal.

Islington’s got one of the safest moorings in London. At night a section of the canal from the lock to the tunnel is locked behind secure gates and only accessible to boaters. With that and the shops and train station conveniently nearby, I might as well get comfortable here for a couple of weeks.

Last time I bought a pumpout card it was six pounds. This week I went into the floating cafe at Little Venice and bought a card, for which they charged me twelve pounds. That’s right, British Waterways have doubled the cost. How can anyone justify doubling the cost of anything? Nothing suddenly becomes twice as expensive.

It’s not as if I could choose not to buy one, I have to empty the sewage tank regularly. As the saying goes: if you gotta go you gotta go. And to add insult to injury, when I actually used the pumpout at Little Venice, it gave me nothing like the full eight minutes. If BW have to double the cost, could they also double the time the machines give you to get the job done.

I won’t be eating at the floating cafe again for a while. Nothing personal, I love the place, it’s not your fault BW upped the price of the cards, it’s just that I can’t afford to produce too many waste products for a while.

It was very rainy and windy last night. The boat kept lurching unexpectedly, making it difficult to walk up and down (although the mulled wine couldn’t have helped). This morning I was woken up by the sound of drawers sliding open in the kitchen, then by a picture falling off the wall onto my feet. Tied the boat up extra securely, slightly too tightly in fact, because when I came back from work she was on a slight tilt and the ropes were taut. That can happen if the water level rises.

Had some fun yesterday. I phoned TV Licensing and asked to buy a licence.

What’s your address?

I don’t have one because I live on a boat.

OK, then what’s your correspondence address?

I don’t have one.

Then where does your mail go?

I don’t receive any.

Then you can’t get a licence.

In that case are you telling me it’s legal for me to watch tv without a licence if I don’t have an address? Because if you’re unable to sell me one it’s your fault I’m unlicensed.

Er, I’ll just talk to the manager. Five minutes later…

Sorry this has never come up before. We need an address.

I don’t have one.

etc etc etc…

I started a discussion on the groups.yahoo.com/group/canals-list email group about continuously cruising and not having a postal address.

Moose asked me whether I’m registered to vote. Under the Peoples Act, apparently I could be fined 1,000 pounds for not being registered. Moose told me the rules were relaxed a couple of years ago by Labour so that more vagrants could then register as unfixed abode.

I’m not on the voters register so should I be worried?

Steve told me he’d spoken to his local returning officer (local as in where he works, which is his correspondence address) who after assorted enquiries established that he cannot register to vote unless he lies on the application by saying his boat is based in that constituency. Because he’s a continuous cruiser he isn’t in any one constituency for long enough to register (it takes 6 weeks).

Anyone out there know otherwise?

For months I’ve had battery problems. They would charge up really fast but couldn’t retain the charge for long. I had to run the engine for ages each day to make enough electricity to power my laptop and tv for just a few hours. And running the engine uses up diesel.

I bought a new set from Uxbridge Boat Centre but when I got them back to the boat the positive and negative terminals were on the wrong side of the batteries and the leads wouldn’t stretch over. It’s obvious in retrospect but hadn’t occurred to me at the time. I couldn’t be bothered to do any rewiring so I took them back and bought two new 110 amp hour leisure batteries for 80 quid each from Halfords. I had assumed I should buy a specialist marine battery but then I read this faq about batteries on the Sterling website.

What a difference it’s made. I hardly run the engine at all now, the lights stay bright all night and I don’t miss the end of movies because the tv suddenly cut out.

My Sterling 500 watt inverter broke down a few weeks back. An inverter converts 12 volt to 240 volt electricity and I need it to run a household tv, laptop and other “essential” equipment. It would have cost over 100 pounds to replace but I calculated my energy usage and realised that I have never used that much power, so I bought a 150 watt inverter for 30 quid from Maplin instead. It simply plugs into the boat’s cigarette lighter socket and then I plug my 240 volt appliances into the inverter.

Trying to reduce my energy consumption further, I recently bought a Polaroid tv/dvd which has a 12 volt adaptor. The screen is quite small but then where would I put a 40 inch plasma tv anyway?