The Narrowboat Dream
About 5 years ago I had just bought a house with my ex. When I say buy what I really mean is we scrimped, saved and borrowed enough to put down a deposit on a shared equity house on a new build housing estate in the town I grew up in… living the dream eh. We borrowed from his mum, I asked my Grandparents for help, every penny we had went towards it. I also had about £3000 on credit cards, but still spent my weekly wage on new Laura Ashley curtains or shabby chic candle holders. I didn’t really realise it at the time but was I thoroughly unhappy.
It’s a long and sad story which I wont go into but we’d had a terrible year, numerous deaths and tradgedies in our immediate families had broken us and we were burnt out and ready for a fresh start. How I thought that getting ourselves into a huge amount of debt on a tiny piece of suburbia was the way to solve these problems I do not know, but hey ho, at least we didn’t go down the baby route to fix our problems.
Since leaving school I had worked in an Estate Agents, various call centres, in retail, in café’s, pubs, I had been a baker, a secretary, a guide for the National Trust, and so on – I would make a great careers advisor. At the time of said unhappiness and financial difficulty I was a part time cake maker and was working in a care home (which on a side note happened to be a fantastic job, just at the wrong time in my life). I’d always had a passion and love for history and architecture, I used to go to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire about once a fortnight and just wander the house and grounds on my own, it was my version of therapy. I’d often thought about going to college or university to study Architectural Conservation and dreamed of working on beautiful historic buildings. But that meant moving out of my home town and my boyfriend probably would have imploded if he strayed too far from Manchester. The local Cricket Club, Manchester United and his mum meant that he would have never moved. So I plodded along through life, hating cricket, learning to love United and pretending to like his mum.
We weren’t good for each other, we didn’t really fight or anything, we drank at the cricket club, we went out for meals and we spent money on Fred Perry trainers and polo shirts. But that was the problem, I hated being in this little microclimate of life in one place, but man it was comfortable. It was easy, I became lazy, I leant on him financially. Buying “stuff” gave me a temporary high, a relief from the constant stress and anxiety that was eating away at me from the inside. He took me for granted, going to Old Trafford to watch United was “man time”, us time was me cooking him tea when he got back from football and before he headed back out to the Cricket Club without so much as a kiss goodbye. He didn’t understand why I didn’t like drinking at the CC with all the lads and “cricket wags” and I didn’t get how he was so stagnant and stuck in this monotonous life. And that’s why it wasn’t working. Neither of us were bad people, we just grew up in the 6 years we were together and we grew apart… we just didn’t see it. It wasn’t love it was familiarity.
I’m still not quite sure how it happened and how the 2011 version of me had the balls to do it, but after a few months of trying and failing to explain how we both had to make an effort to compromise and change or I would leave, I did it. I left. I left him, I left my new house and my Laura Ashley curtains. I just woke up one day and I left. And not only that but that very same day I scoured the UCAS clearing website and I found a course in Architectural Stonework and Conservation. I think the secretary at the college thought I was mad. The course started in 2 weeks and here I was on the phone to her, pumped full of adrenaline having just made the biggest decision of my life and making the second biggest decision of my life.
Two weeks later I was sat in my dads car, brim full of everything I owned, driving the five hour drive down to Weymouth. I’ll never forget that first time of seeing the sea from the causeway. I wasn’t sure how to feel. I felt terrible for leaving my boyfriend but I also felt so free and happy. I fought tears of happiness and tears of sadness the whole way down there. We arrived at my new house, a half way house in the rough part of Weymouth. A postage stamp sized room with a shared bathroom and a view of a brick wall. But I didn’t care. I spent the next week alone, wandering around Weymouth; no job, no friends, no money (you’ll recall how every penny I had went on the house that I had just left, I’d exhausted my family’s generosity and I applied to the course so late that my student loan would take about 3 months to kick in). But fuck I was weightless. All my stress and anxiety had lifted and I was doing what I’d always wanted to, without anyone to hold me back.
That was 4 years ago and wow has my life changed since then. I’m a fully qualified Stonemason Conservator, currently living in Canada, I’m engaged to the love of my life and we’re busy planning our wedding, our move back to the UK and our new adventure – living on a narrowboat. With all of the hype about the tiny house movement I all of a sudden feel extremely hipster, but I’m proud and happy to say that I am being smart and carefully planning my future low cost life on a narrowboat. Possessions don’t rule my life anymore, experience and time spent with loved ones does. Tom and I moved to Canada two years ago and we’ve been working really hard, saving money and buying and renovating a house, all to set ourselves up when we move back to England. We believe that by living a low cost life we can enjoy more time together and more time with our families, we can travel and enjoy experiences rather than possessions, we can live a more eco life without compromising comfort and we can do all this whilst living afloat in the English Countryside.