A Day Off

It was a late late lunch. My friends had initially planned to be here for half past eleven, but it was a good two hours later when they arrived. I had vacuumed das Boot and was catching up on yesterday’s Guardian. Giles Fraser’s Loose Canon column hit a particular chord. I have been thinking about Mother’s last months and days, the way she has had to accept care. She was a very independent woman and the helplessness she experienced would have been the opposite of everything she would have desired. Yet in a strange way, I believe it healed something in her. As I mentioned before, her own mother died when Mother was just seven. It was a tough, insecure childhood. She and her siblings were a close gang, but their trust in adults was small. Experience taught them young that adults were unreliable. They looked after themselves and each other. So finding herself cared for by people who were kind to her, who looked after her when she could not care for herself, who wanted her comfort and happiness, may have done something to help the damaged child inside. I hope so.
The boat battery was flat. My fault. I should have been running the engine regularly this last week and I haven’t. But I am not going to beat myself up about that and neither did my friends. We left it on charge, went to the pub and toasted our three deceased mothers. We talked about the afterlife and our belief and lack or it. The pub had stopped serving food, so we headed off to another by the river where we ate well in the sunshine and boat spotted. Someone behaving boorishly, revving the engine and leaving a terrible wash, incurred the disapproval of the entire pub. He remained happily impervious of the tutting and moored full of smiles. My friends’ Jack Russell, now a ripe old seven, fell for a spaniel aged just nine months. I fell for a beautiful German Shepherd called Joseph. There will be pictures at some point.
We came back to the marina where the battery had charged sufficiently to start. It wasn’t a long trip, just round to the tap to fill the water tank. It took ages, so we made coffee which my friends drank. In theory this means I should now have hot water on das Boot, but I seem to have an airlock, so I shall be boiling kettles for a while yet.
My friends left as the sun set. MasterB emerged and I took him ashore. We only came back on board half an hour ago. He wants my attention so I shall stop now. He is the best of cats.

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