TALES FROM THE RIVERBANK: This morning Elwood rediscovered his love of nesting in the dirty washing!

Wednesday is washday in this household (or should I say 'boathold' - although to my mind the 'hold' is the rather smelly bit under the floorboards - but I digress!) Washday means a trip to the laundrette since we have no washing machine on board. So dirty clothes, sheets and towels are packed into capacious Clas Ohlson bags and off we go. This morning, as is my wont, I threw the towels and tea towels from the forward shower room and galley up the steps into the saloon in preparation for packing into said bags, and went to strip the bed in the aft cabin. In the meantime the mad hound found this pile of towels and decided to rake them out into a nest, carefully positioned right at the top of the forward steps. Anyone who thinks cats have cornered the market in finding the most awkward and inconvenient places to sleep should spend some time with a determined dog.



What, no pillow? How's a dog supposed to sleep?

Seeing Bonzo there reminded me of his previous love of dirty clothes nesting, so I went to find an old photo I remembered. Gosh, I had forgotten how cute he was (for about 2 weeks!) he is still lovely, but you definitely can't call him cute now - he'd never forgive you!

Caught red handed...err...red pawed?

LIFE AFLOAT

I am often asked if there is anything I miss now we are living afloat (let me think now; paying a mortgage, cutting the grass, noisy neighbours, mmmm…nope) the only thing I really miss is the dishwasher, I hate washing up by hand.

Master Cabin - island bed!

Galley - no dishwasher!

We are relatively new to the game of living on board our boat, although we have owned it for over seven years. We used to live in a 'real' house - well a large flat, actually - and downsizing to a 41ft long cruiser as been a challenge. There's no doubt about it, we had far too much 'stuff', but what to get rid of? The furniture was the first, and easiest shedding - what didn't go back on eBay, went to local charities or on FreeCycle. However, we had a collection of over 3,000 penguins (yes, 3,000 – I told you it was a big flat!) from a tiny ½ inch high Murano glass ornament to a 2 foot tall papier-mache ‘waiter’. John Lewis’ did us a favour last Christmas with their penguin based advert – we sold a lot of the soft toys at car boot sales while that was running.

Wheelhouse/saloon - it is never this tidy now

 Twin cabin - now larder/office/store/wardrobe

Some would say we are not proper ‘live-aboards’ because we have had to take a storage unit locally for our overspill. We blame this on the fact that we closed a business down when we moved on board, and are selling off the stock from this, but we also have some (quite a lot) of personal stuff we are not yet ready to shed (his Granada spares, my craft stuff). Perhaps eventually we will be ready to let that go too!

A year on and we are car-booting and eBaying like mad, but we still love life afloat.