Chapter Twenty-seven
90% of the Work Takes 90% of the Time
The Last 10% Takes Another 90% of the Time

WE MOVED BACK ON to the boat on January 5 2007 and, I have to admit, I was surprised by the attitudes of the kids – they were both anxious to get back aboard and settle back into ‘normal’ life. There was actually still a fair amount of work to do, but really nothing that couldn’t be done at weekends or in the evenings. So, with this in mind, Geoff started to search for a job. My job had changed and with my boss leaving and my previous experience, the main company had offered me management of the Cambridge office, along with a suitable pay rise.

I enjoyed my job. It was a little bit mad, the engineers were great and the office staff were competent and fun to be with. So I never really minded getting up in the morning and, of course, the money was particularly useful. But Geoff was the one with the major money-making skills, he was qualified up to the noggins and was very good at what he did – project management for IT companies. So we didn’t really expect it would take that long to find him a job, and we started the New Year with high hopes of getting some decent money in. I could stop work and go back to what I liked doing best: writing, messing around with art and taking useless college courses.

What I really wanted to do was spend some quality time with the kids. I was very aware that as my responsibility at work had grown so, exponentially, my time with the family had diminished, which had been niggling away at me for some months.

By the time spring was in the air, Geoff had been to over 20 interviews and hadn’t actually managed to get past the first post. We knew what the issues were but had real problems facing them. One was that, by IT standards, he was just too old. He was competing against graduates and people that really loved what they did – the crème de la crème of geekdom – and that highlighted the other major problem. He just didn’t really want to do it any more and I think that was coming over in his interviews.

At the beginning of April, we sat down late one evening and decided to look the problem straight in the eye. Geoff had been becoming increasingly morose over the last month, and from seeing him so happy when he was building the boat, it was horrible to watch him now, battling with the knowledge that he really ought to go back to work, and really trying to get a job but not really putting himself into it. I decided to let him off the hook.

‘If you could do anything for a job, what would you do?’ I asked.

‘Sparky,’ came the surprising and very prompt reply.

‘Really?’ I casually drained my coffee cup and asked, ‘So why don’t you re-train then and do something you would actually enjoy?’

That was the moment that plan no. 37 was born. Over the next two weeks we looked into training courses and were horrified at the price of changing a career. Geoff already had most of the expertise and experience to become an electrician so he didn’t want to spend two years at college, he just wanted to take the exams and start work as quickly as possible. It was a good idea, especially as he wanted to take his air conditioning qualifications as well, but the bill was still going to come to over £7,000 and that was money that we just didn’t have.

We wallowed about for a couple of weeks, coming up with ridiculous plans to get the money, plans that didn’t include borrowing it from the bank or my father, but there really seemed no way around it. We were bracing ourselves to make that call to Dad when Charlie tried to knock herself out and the plan changed yet again.

To get into Charlie’s room there was a foot-high step that continued inside, which meant that the head room in her bedroom was that much diminished. This step was cleverly hiding the huge water tank that sat at the front of the boat, running under the entire length of Charlie’s bedroom.

That evening, as Geoff and I prevaricated about calling Dad, she had been sitting in her room, playing her new guitar, when there was a sudden scream, a thump and then silence. I went to investigate and found her sitting on the floor holding her head, her guitar lying face down on the bed above her.

The cardinal rule is that if you don’t like spiders don’t live on a boat. How they get in, I will never know. The ones we get aren’t very big, but they are persistent, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many you put out of the windows, there are always others to take their place.

It has amused the kids on no end of occasions to watch a spider come dangling down from the ceiling to hang revolving slowly in front of one or other of them; they then get together and give it a gentle poke on the bottom which makes it scurry back up its web again. Then they sit and wait for it to come back down at which point the whole process starts again. They call it spider yoyo. As it makes them laugh and certainly doesn’t harm the spider, I have never seen a problem with it.

It was one of these spiders that had caused Charlie’s ‘egg’. She had been concentrating so hard on her playing that she had failed to notice one of these ‘boat spiders’ sitting on the ceiling above her. Consequently, when it had let itself drop and had dangled in front of her nose, she had panicked sufficiently to leap up, scream and brain herself on the roof.

With all the furore, we had, once again, completely failed to phone my father. Later, when all was quiet, Geoff looked up from his book.

‘When did she reach the ceiling?’ he leaned back and ran a hand through his hair. He had had it all cut off for interviews and was still finding the lack of length a bit sad. ‘She didn’t reach the ceiling when she moved in.’

I looked at him. ‘Yeah, damn those children for growing, maybe we ought to stop feeding them.’

He smiled. ‘Yes, yes, I know, but if she reaches the ceiling now and she’s only 13, how long can she stay in that room?

I winced. ‘Not long really. I suppose we could always swap her and Sam about?’

Geoff snorted. ‘The way Sam’s growing, he’s going to be the taller of the two, so we won’t have very long before he hits the ceiling as well.’

I nodded; there wasn’t a good answer for this one.

Geoff picked up his mug of tea and stared into the depths. ‘Maybe we ought to be thinking about a bigger boat.’

I groaned, thinking he was just messing about. ‘Oh no, we’ve only just finished this one, if we go for a larger one we’re going to have to buy another complete wreck and start all over again …’

‘Well, we’ve done it once; I suppose we could do it again.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you think?’

Oh poo, he was serious. ‘Well, even if we have to spend some of the profit from Happy on a larger wreck, at least we would have enough left over to get you re-trained.’

Happy Go Lucky went on the market in April 2007. Due to her odd shape, the fact that she had three static bedrooms and that, compared to most holiday boats, she was bloody huge, ungainly and a royal pain in the arse to moor, we knew that the only people interested in buying something like this would be another family that wanted to live aboard. We had resigned ourselves to a fairly long wait; some boats take years to sell.

Exactly three weeks later we had a firm offer – much to our surprise, horror and more than a little panic. A lovely lady called Jane and her daughter were selling their house in Devon and moving up to Bath. Jane’s boyfriend lived on a boat over in that direction and she was used to the vagaries that living aboard entailed. She already had a mooring sorted out and was just waiting for her house sale to complete. We weren’t in any major rush, so agreed to take the boat off the market and just wait it out with her. She expected to move in at the beginning of July.

Having resigned myself to a long sale, this sudden movement took me by surprise. I knew we were selling Happy for all the right reasons, but I was going to be really sad to lose her. We had had some great times on Happy Go Lucky, and she had, over the last two years, gained a beautiful interior and a fair amount of personality. I always pictured her as a huge and slightly dippy dog, eager to please but not too bright. It was going to be really difficult to find another like her.

Once again the search for a new boat became all-encompassing. I spent so many hours at the Internet cafe in Ely that they gave up asking me if I wanted a drink and just produced a coffee as soon as I walked through the door.

With a little experience under our belts, everybody had ideas of what improvements would be needed on a new boat. High on Charlie and Sam’s list was access to the Internet; both felt that only being able to use it at school or at Arwen’s was nowhere near satisfying enough.

One Saturday morning, with Geoff and Steve, who within the last two days had become the proud father of a little girl called Ruby, doing something technical with a load of tubes and a water pump on the flood defences in an effort to get water to the boats, I decided to take an early morning trip to the cafe and continue my boat search. The kids were mooching around doing nothing much, so when I asked them if they wanted to come and play on the Internet for a couple of hours I was almost crushed in the rush to find shoes and get out of the boat.

An hour later, we were all settled, each with our own screen, and I blocked the bickering out as I tried to decipher the boat specs on various Dutch sites. I would come back to reality occasionally, just to check that the kids hadn’t got bored and escaped, but they were both sitting there, dwarfed by headphones, with big grins, each on their own separate sites; Sam catching up with the world of Pokémon and Charlie immersed in strange talking cat videos on YouTube.

About an hour later, howls of laughter dragged me away from one particularly nice barge, moored just outside Rotterdam, and I turned to find out what had caused this tear-jerking hilarity.

Harry Potter Puppet Pals are an odd little YouTube puppet show that has the ability to reduce children to giggling lumps of yuck.

‘Mum, Mum!’ Sam grabbed me and pointed at the screen. ‘Look at this, it’s called “Wizard Swears”. It’s really funny.’

Charlie nodded, but couldn’t speak, as she was still trying to get her breath back from laughing so hard.

I frowned. ‘Wizard Swears?’

Sam sighed. ‘They’re not rude, just really funny.’ He rolled his eyes, showing that I was obviously not on his wavelength and being very boring.

Luckily for my obviously over-delicate sensibilities, our booked time was up and we headed toward Starbucks for a naughty coffee.

I watched Sam and Charlie walking ahead of me up the hill, and thought how nice it was that they seemed to get on most of the time.

Sam reached over and thumped Charlie on the arm. I was just about to tell him off when I heard him say, ‘Unicorn turd!’ He winced and ducked slightly as if he expected Charlie to give him a kick up the rear as she so often did, then relaxed as she turned toward him and yelled, ‘Blast-ended skank!’

They grinned at each other.

‘Dragon bogies!’

‘Floppy-wanded Dementor botherer!’

‘Cauldron bum!’

‘Swish and flicker!’

‘Voldemort’s nipple!’

‘Jiggery pokery!’

‘Broom head!’

‘Leprechaun taint!’

‘Dobby’s sock!’

I watched them, giggling and pushing each other, getting louder with each ridiculous insult. I had to smile at their antics but decided that no matter what new technology came along, we had managed perfectly well without the Internet for the last two years and we could do without it for the foreseeable future – cauldron bum, indeed!

That evening I was attempting to moan about it to Jude. The family had recently sold their narrow boat and had purchased a wide beam. I was completely envious; there seemed to be so much room – still less than a small, two-bedroom flat but, compared to a narrow boat, it was a veritable mansion. However, with all the new baby stuff cluttered around, I could see why they needed it because babies don’t care where you live. When they turn up they seem to bring half of Mothercare with them.

Ruby was absolutely gorgeous. Even after the morning sickness had subsided, the rest of the pregnancy hadn’t been particularly easy for Jude and I think the whole family were relieved to see the outcome so healthy and ... loud.

This had been my third attempt to see her but every time she had been asleep. On this occasion, I could see so much more of her, which appeared to be mainly the inside of her mouth as she screamed and screamed, defying all Steve and Jude’s attempts to calm her and we felt that visitors, however well-intentioned, were not what the family needed at that moment. So we left the presents and made a swift exit.

Little Charlie gave us a mournful wave as we left; I got the feeling that his little sister wasn’t entirely living up to his expectations. I grinned and waved back at him, thinking that he needn’t worry. It would only take about a year and then he’d be wishing for the immobile, noisy baby back.

Summer crept toward us and we waited, mainly mooching about enjoying Happy being fully finished. We kept in touch with Jane and things seemed to be moving along fine.

Our exit date was July 3 and we spent the two weeks prior to that packing everything up and squeezing it into storage. By June 29, we were just waiting for the money to transfer and, as we still hadn’t found a new boat – although I had become slightly addicted to YouTube and knew all the Potter Puppet Pals sketches off by heart – we had planned to spend the summer with Geoff’s mum again and would search for a new boat from there.

Jane had moved out of her house and had called us, laughing, to say that she had just sold her bed and her television; she was now truly homeless and was moving up to a friend’s house to await completion.

July 5 and we knew we had a problem. Jane called in a panic and advised that her house sale had fallen through, right at the last moment, on the very day of completion. Evidently the person buying her house had lied to the mortgage lenders and the whole deal was off. I wasn’t sure who to feel sorrier for, her or us. At least we still had beds and all the home comforts, she was left with nothing but an empty shell, and she was so upset.

During the time we had been waiting for the house sale, we had had many phone calls about Happy and being prudent (or cynical), I had kept a list of all those interested and we now went about calling them all and telling them that Happy was back on the market. We didn’t really feel that there was much point, as by this time we were at the beginning of the summer holidays and, with only six weeks before the kids had to be at school again, it was unlikely we could sell Happy in so short a time. I have to admit I was relieved and when I sheepishly admitted to Geoff that I was happy that the sale had fallen through, he just laughed and refused to admit that he felt the same.

We had one gentleman who called us back and arranged to come and see her, and, as usual, we hoofed the kids out to ‘play in the sunshine and take the stinky dog with you’. Kids and stinky dog gave us the usual hard stares and took themselves off to fly kites on the flood defences while we cleaned poor Happy yet again from top to bottom.

Gerald McKenzie turned up alone and, after a cursory glance at Happy, said she was exactly what he was looking for and would be in touch. The clean-up had taken three hours and the viewing took less than ten minutes; we didn’t expect to hear from him again.

Watching him wander back along the flood defences, I snarled, ‘What a waste of time.’ Oh well, at least the boat was sparkling and beautiful – in fact it looked so fantastic with the morning sunshine coming through the freshly cleaned windows that I was loathe to let kids and stinky dog back in.

Two days later and we were due in dry dock to re-black Happy’s hull. June had been a strange month. There were huge floods all over the country and with Happy in dry dock, there we were, living in a boat on dry land, while the rest of England seemed to be growing gills. The whole experience was rather surreal. Each night we would watch the reports of the floods, while coping with the unnerving sensation of our beloved boat not moving at all. The lack of sensation made all of us a little nauseous.

We had hired an industrial pressure washer and the first morning we all assembled with brushes, sponges and other implements of destruction and prepared to do battle with the weed, mud and freshwater shelled things that had attached themselves to Happy’s bum.

Within an hour, Sam had decided that he had ‘helped’ enough; he was soaking wet, muddy to the point of being unrecognisable and was completely fed up with the whole process. I wasn’t too disappointed at him expressing a deep desire to go back into the boat, as he was, like most small boys given sudden access to an industrial pressure washer (an implement of mayhem way and above anything he had had access to before), far more inclined to try and wash off his sister than the boat. We never managed to decide whether it was by accident, or whether he lied to us about not being able to hold it and was doing it on purpose. I suspect that once he had hit her by accident, he had found the screams to be very gratifying and was intent on replicating the experience.

Charlie was not so happy about it, but did manage to exact a very gratifying revenge by waiting until he was spraying the boat, creeping up behind him and turning the washer on full: the water pressure far exceeded Sam’s body weight and he shot backwards, landing in a murk-filled puddle, screaming and soaked.

Charlie, on the whole, was much more professional in her handling of the pressure washer – after she had amused herself once more by turning the washer off, waiting until Sam looked at it in confusion, and then turning it back on again, causing more screams from him and howls of delighted laughter from her.

‘Ah, Mum,’ she gasped, holding on to the boat with one hand and her stomach with the other, ‘I’ve seen that done on films but I didn’t think he would be so daft as to actually fall for it.’

She staggered off toward Sam, still giggling, her wellies squelching through the growing mud pool under the boat, obviously intent on finding out what else he was ‘daft’ enough to fall for. Sam, finally working out that he had been had, threw the nozzle down in disgust and stamped off toward the steps (well, he tried to stamp, but it’s really difficult to stamp in three inches of slop), stating that he hated Charlie and was going inside.

So with Charlie now firmly in control of the pressure washer, something I suspect she had been aiming for all along, she settled down to work on the boat and was actually very good at it. It was just unfortunate that while washing off the windows she hadn’t spotted that one of them was actually open, managing to fill her bedroom with muddy, stinking water.

With Happy down a hole, it was quite difficult getting on and off her, as our main gangplank wasn’t designed to rest in an upwards position. So poor Herbert was back to walking a thin plank, a skill he had never mastered. We got around this by one of us holding him in the boat and the other waiting on what would be the bank when there was water in the dock. The one in the boat would put their hands either side of him to keep him on the plank until the other could grab him and hoist him up on to the grass.

This worked for the first day, as he had taken one look at all the pressurised water and screaming going on below him and decided that staying in his bed until the last possible moment would definitely be a preferable state of affairs.

The second day, we made a start on the actual blacking. Again Charlie enjoyed this, and proved to be very good with a bitumen-covered roller, although there were whole sets of clothes that had to be ceremonially burnt when she had finished, as we couldn’t find a set of proper overalls small enough to fit her. We had decided that we didn’t want to open big buckets of the special blacking paint that Geoff had purchased, so we had taken to pouring it into roller trays; this was working quite well and Happy looked beautiful, all black and shining.

We had finished the first coat and were all standing back to admire the effect when Sam, being ‘helpful’, hoisted Herbert on to the gangplank and then, that job done, turned back to his colouring and left him to it. With us standing on the ground, a good six foot beneath the plank, there was absolutely nothing we could do, other than watch anxiously, all lined up under the plank ready to snatch him from mid air.

Herbert took three steps forward and, feeling the fresh air on his coat, gave himself a luxurious shake and once again, promptly shook himself straight off the plank. We all rushed forward to try to catch him but somehow, in all the running and screaming, we got in each other’s way and Herbert dropped straight through the middle of us and into one of the trays that was half filled with tar-based paint. It was a long drop for a small dog and we all held our breath waiting for him to start crying or show that he was hurt in some way.

No, in glorious Herbert style he had landed on his back in the bitumen. He rolled himself over, getting blacker and stickier with all the struggling, then climbed out of the tar bucket and promptly fell into a mud-filled corner.

We all watched, wincing with every new glob of yuck that Herbert covered himself in – the more muddy and tarry he got, the less any of us wanted to grab him. He staggered up the stone steps out of the bottom of the dock, relieved himself on the grass, then stood waiting for someone to pick him up and put him back on the boat. The silence stretched on. Herbert looked at us and we looked at him. Charlie summed the whole situation up quite well: ‘I’m not touching him,’ she muttered and wandered off down the dock to check out any missed areas around the rudder.

Finally Geoff brought out a large bowl filled with warm, soapy water and I gingerly caught our muddy, hairy, little mucky puppy. Oh God, he stank and was obviously pleased about it as all he wanted to do was snuggle up to me which he usually avoided at all costs. I swear that rotten animal has a really warped sense of humour. So with Herbert wriggling, by the time Geoff came back it was difficult to tell who was the muckier, me or the wretched dog. We spent a good half an hour with the Fairy Liquid, but it was all to no avail; the tar was stuck in lumps all over him. There was only one thing to do: out came the clippers.

Oh poor Herbert. He was pretty funny to look at before, but now he just looked diseased. The bitumen had worked its way down to skin level in some places and, mindful that he was an old dog, who, like all ancient granddad types, really liked being able to shuffle around in his shaggy old coat, (he was always very indignant when I inexpertly clipped him in the summer and with every passing year his indignation was turning to downright outrage), I only took off the bits that were really solid. By the time I had finished he had numerous two-inch circles of skin showing through hair that, because it had been washed numerous times, stood away from his back like six inches of dirty brown fluff; he resembled a moth-eaten ball of candyfloss with skinny legs and an evil expression – he was not a happy boy.

When he was dry, we got him back on the boat where he stuck his nose under his blanket, then ran round in circles until he was completely mummified with only a nose sticking out. Other than for meals and relieving himself, he didn’t leave that blanket until we had Happy back afloat.

The rest of that week went pretty much without a hitch and, eventually, the dry dock was once more filled with water and Happy was afloat again. It seemed a shame that all our hard work couldn’t be seen as it was under the water, but it was nice to know it wouldn’t have to be done again for another three years.

Happy had been back in the water for all of 48 hours when we had a call from Gerald McKenzie making an offer, subject to a satisfactory survey. Once again we were thrown into disarray. Thinking that we wouldn’t bother selling her for at least another year, we had moved all our possessions back on to the boat while she had been in dry dock, and had assured the kids that there would probably be no change until next year. Now here we were again, moving everything off.