Hi peeps, long time no write. Not sure what’s wrong with my reading and writing mojo currently but I think I’ve given up caring. Things are as they are. Never mind 🙂

And what about you my lovely readers? How is life rolling for you? I promise I answer if you share 😉 as I have just cleaned up my notifications so I actually see your comments coming up. Oh, I can just go to the comment tab, can’t I???? Writing this I just realise how much I am missing you. So, I definitely need to get a grip on my blog reading and writing habits. So much for not caring anymore LOL

There have been post-sentences flowing around in my head since Friday but now that I sit at the laptop all seems to have vanished. Oh, I just checked out Linda’s #SoCS post from Friday. I know I am a little late but it’s a prompt I might be able to do something with:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “near/far.” Use “near,” use “far,” use them both if you’d like. In fact, if you start your post with one and end with the other, you get bonus points! Enjoy!

No bonus points for me today but that doesn’t matter either… do you think I’ll be able to get to the point of my post title?

I am no Minimalist but…

we, at last, decided to sell up and move on a narrowboat. I wrote about our ponderings earlier this year but until a couple of weeks ago, we hadn’t properly decided. It is not an easy decision. First of all, we bought the house we live in because we wanted a plot of land to be able to raise chickens and grow stuff for when food might get hard to come by because of Brexit. And the climate crisis too. So now that there are shortages because of Brexit we want to give it all up? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?

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The thing is though we are exhausted from all the trouble we had since we bought the house. My mental health, my husband hurting his neck and op and then my cancer. We cannot keep up with everything that’s needed to be done here. On top of that our employer might not always be there. I can’t go into details on that one. Let’s just say we have a gut feeling that things might go wrong and then we have to sell up anyway. Even though there would be enough other jobs nearby now. But we are tired. Exhausted.

It seems like we just sleep, work, eat and sleep. What life is that? Well, you could, of course, say, it’s our own fault. We still act mostly like we are in lock-down and being cooped up in the house even with our garden isn’t particularly exciting. However, the husband can’t drive very far anymore and we both have become rather anti-social. I do not want to be in crowds neither does the best husband. Unfortunately, all the nice places nearby are taken by tourists from near and far. Again, moving on a boat seems counterintuitive because Narrowboat living is a lot about the community and like the nice spots around here the canals are frequented more too. We can’t win, can we?

Well, I think what helped us decided was my husbands dream from his teenage years to live on a narrowboat. One day I said to him: “I had my dream fulfilled with living here in the UK. Now it’s time you fulfil yours!” We might sell up after a couple of years and go abroad because we are not happy with the state of the country under Tory rule. To be honest, I’ve made a huge turn to the far left in recent years. But is it different anywhere else? I doubt it very much.

But the husband just had his 60th birthday and he simply doesn’t want to work until 75 to pay everything off. The hope is that we can live on his fire service pension with jobs here and there and maybe selling our fossil collection and my socks. Yes, I am in sock knitting fever 😉

We do not want to keep much and hope to be able to get a little with our cars too. This way we could be debt-free and just have the boat and our living expenses and we believe we can make it work. We would of course reduce our co2 footprint enormously. Yes, the diesel motors aren’t great but they must be better than driving to work every day. Using less is important to us. And supporting capitalist consumerism less too. And how can you resist this lifestyle?

So far, we have let our families know. The children seem to be excited but they are grown up now and go their own way. Our mothers either said nothing or “You are not going further away, are you?”. Well, we wouldn’t. In fact, we would be closer to the best husbands mother on a boat. But most people seem to be in awe of our courage.

It doesn’t feel too courageous for us though. Our kitchen & bathroom is absolutely tiny (both about 3×3 metres) so we should be able to deal with less space. We mainly live in the living room anyway and it looks like we already save a lot of water. Our last water bill showed that people around here on average use between 100 and 200 cubic metres of water in a billing period. We use around 40 and that with watering the plants and washing clothes daily.

What is a problem though is letting go of stuff! As I said in the title I am not a minimalist even though I would love to be. It has always been a mystery to me how people can live in a monastic looking living room. Seems cold to me. Now, we’re choosing THE minimalist living space. Well, I think I might be ready at last. And there are storage units too LOL.

So far, I have managed to give away some books to our employer’s library. We’ve chucked a couple of things but mainly try to make the house look sellable so we can put it on the market next month. Not perfect, I know, so short before Christmas but we hope it’s easier to get a boat in wintertime. So many more people want one now with no chance of going on holiday abroad and pandemic change of life priorities. And our house is in a perfect space: 10 minutes with the car to the beach on one side and to town for shopping don’t the other. As well as a bus stop directly in front of the house. It’ll be fine. Everything I ever set my mind to worked out in the end. We will get a decent price, be able to pay off our debts and get a gorgeous boat. I can’t wait 🙂

Maybe that is all I need to get back into my reading and writing mojo 😉

Thanks, my dears, for staying with me until the end.

I appreciate your presence.

Please stay safe, stay kind and remember that you rock!