Spring!

I don't want to be melodramatic about this, but there's a scene in Sean Penn's film of "Into the Wild" where the icicles on the bus where McCandless is living start to melt, and you can see the excitement of spring warming him back up after the long hard winter. Like I said, I don't want to be melodramatic about this, but I thought you might enjoy that little story.

For the first time this year, it's been light enough to take the boat down to the nearest visitor mooring after work for a glorious evening of peace and quiet. 

 And amazing to wake up in the morning to the light pouring into the boat...

and illuminating Gregory, our little purple shamrock. He died entirely in the frost over Christmas, but has been resurrected. 

We've built a little woodshed to start seasoning some firewood in.

I spent some of half term making these little windows for the front cratch.

And we braved the rain and the slightly-too-high river to take a trip into Bath for the night. This is the view through the rain at Pulteney Wier. 

Spring! 

A Room of One's Own...

When you have a boyfriend whom you love very much, but who plays the banjo, and you're working on a PhD, you sometimes need a little quiet space. We have plenty of space, but it's all joined up. The only space that can be closed off from the rest of the boat is the bedroom. Trying to read lengthy latin monographs on ethics in bed is not a good idea. What we needed, therefore, was an office, in the bedroom. We reviewed several options: 

The Study Bed: 

These are absolute genius. They work on a cantilever mechanism which means you can leave all your stuff in place while you pull the bed down. One day, I might find a way of making something like this work on a boat. 

Renting office space:

Bristol is absolutely brimming with painfully cool ways to rent office space. Except, Bristol wouldn't call it 'renting office space,' they'd call it 'concept zoning' or 'eco studio concept mission' or something. These are wonderful, well lit spaces where artistic types have epistemological conversations on hemp sofas, smoking fairtrade mochachocalattechinos and growing moustaches. 

Selling the banjo: 

n/a

Earplugs: 

Spending an hour listening to the wooshing sound the inside of your head makes as your heart beats furiously towards your inevitable demise is only slightly better than listening to the banjo. 

So, having scrutinised the available solutions, and for purely meritocratic reasons, we settled on a homegrown solution:  Here is Simone at her new desk, which works by the patented Fryer 'one end is propped on the end of the bed and the other slots into some old bits of futon screwed to the shelves with the shoes on' mechanism. Blueprints £5.