After another six hours, there’s another coat of white above the waterline. Of all of it, painting the stern and rudder was the hardest part, not because it was particularly big but because the ground slopes away under the boat there on its trailer and there is what I think is called a negative sheer. At least, the line of the stern is at a fairly steep angle up and out from the waterline, giving less hull in the water and more overhang above it. In theory you get less drag and more boat. In practice it’s a pain to paint it left handed hanging on a rope with one foot in a tree and the other on the boat trailer.
After
But it’s done and I have to say it looks good. It really does. I gave up on the Mickey Mouse hanging off a rope nonsense and went and got my proper folding ladder, hooked that over the rudder and tied it off so it definitely wasn’t going anywhere. That worked brilliantly. This is what I like best about boats, I think, aside from the now suddenly stunning beauty of this one that’s even getting compliments from the guy who runs the yard.
“Beautiful. Black and white. That’s what I would have done.”
Keep it simple. It doesn’t need flash. It does need a cooker though. That and getting it in the water is the next project.
Well, not quite, but the end of the initial ‘getting the boat ready’ thing is definitely in sight.
I haven’t been able to do anything to the boat for about ten days but today was sunny and windy and ideal for drying paint. I was waiting for a phone call about a job so I thought instead of sitting indoors I’d go and do something useful instead. So I did.
All of the old red topsides are now buried underneath a coat of white paint. It needs another coat, but that’s why I bought the second can and it took one can plus five brush-loads to do both sides, so I’ve got enough paint. Which is good.
Even better is how it looks now. With a simple, austere black and white finish, the way I think boats ought to be, especially wooden boats, especially wooden boats with beautiful lines, especially wooden boats with beautiful lines and a Scandinavian lineage, I like to keep it simple and pure. And it looks great. So great that people are stopping in the yard and asking about it. One today estimated it cost me twice what I paid. I nearly asked him to make an offer, but I want to sail this firstIn fact,
The way it was.
I want to keep it. It feels like my boat. It was nice to get back to it again. I spent about five hours there today, too long, so that by the end, clearing up, I was grunting when I moved from using muscles I never normally use. I do my 10,000 steps a day thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the thing with wooden boats. You have to put the hours in, but the difference is unbelievable. Actually it’s not. The even better thing is being able to say “See that? I did that. Me.”
So I’ll be there tomorrow to finish the paint by putting another coat of white on and using up the last pint of anti-foul. It’s going to be a good summer. Good things are happening. And not just on the boat.
I was told this recipe recently. Apparently (the word you use when you don’t want to keep saying ‘I was told’) it can be smoked or not smoked, as you wish, but you get sort-of bacon and you know what’s in it. Belly pork used to be really cheap. I think it depends if a TV show has used it recently.
So, bish, bash, bosh, me old china muckers, gertcha, or something.
Cheat’s Bacon
1kg pork belly
1kg salt
200g brown sugar
A plastic bucket
Take half the salt and put it in the bottom of the bucket. Rub the sugar into the pork. Put the pork on the salt. Pour the rest of the salt over the pork. Leave it for 24 hours. Then take it out, wash it in water and it is ready for use.
You can smoke it or slice it up and use it as bacon exactly as it is. Apparently.
I’ve just spent four hours or so putting black anti-foul on the Folkboat Fern. I haven’t had time to do anything to her for six days and I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it.
I ached so much last week from sanding that I really couldn’t do much more. I got all of it done apart from some bits I missed on the rails and the stern itself, because I didn’t bring my big ladder and I can’t reach where I need the sander from the ground. I started this the stupid way, the old way, with a heat gun and a scraper and it was hard, hard work. The power sander made things a lot easier, not to mention quicker.
Black – the proper colour for below the waterline.
Do you imagine it was easy?
It’s beginning to look like a manageable project, if the rain that’s started doesn’t wash all the anti-foul off again. But it might not be raining where the boat is, nine miles away from here. And it was drying quickly in the wind there anyway. It’s not raining much.
I bought enough sanding pads. I have the white yacht paint and probably enough for inside as well. I bought the brushes and the white spirit and the Tonkinoise and if somebody somehow ran out of time and couldn’t quite do what she’d said she was going to do and pick it up from the chandlery then it’s the last thing that needs to go on anyway, and she made it up to me somehow. But it’s still been quite hard work.
I had a friend whose family got hugely rich from wool. After they pretty much controlled the entire British woolen industry, sharing it and Halifax as a sort of feudal fiefdom with another family, my friend’s ancestor went to Russia to get cheaper wool. This was one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of sheep’s cheese in England. With no need for the large flocks they sent them to slaughter. Actions have consequences. Not being convinced he couldn’t get wool still cheaper elsewhere the wool baron, or at least High Sheriff as he’d become went on to Australia, where he was sure wool was even more of a bargain.
He got fabulously even richer. I remember my friend’s indignation when I complained about something being hard work.
“Do you imagine it was easy going to Russia? Well? Do you?”
The boat isn’t that hard work. It doesn’t get me seven hundred million pounds if and when I sell it either, unlike some concerns, but that isn’t really the point of this boat. I’ll sell it if someone gives me a good price for it but it feels like the kind of boat I could keep for the rest of my life, or until I can’t sail it, which given the state of my pension might as well be pretty much the same time.
Time seems to stop when I’m with this boat it. It’s not much like going to Russia, really.
I did a bad thing. I started using an electric sander instead of a heat gun, a scraper and a sanding block. Today I did all of the port or left-hand side of the hull above and below the waterline, as well as half the mahogany rails and the coachroof around the hatch which was blistering. It was unbelievably faster. A week’s work in a day.
Right-hand side done. It needs a soft brush to get the dust off it but maybe it’ll be windy tonight.That isn’t to say it wasn’t tiring. I put about five hours in today and I ache. I wore a breathing mask to stop getting paint dust in my lungs, a wooly hat to keep my hair out of my eyes, safety glasses to keep them if something flew out from under the sander and ear defenders to damp down the noise. Despite wearing thick gloves there was nothing I could really do about the vibration and it’s still pretty cold being outside in the wind, mostly keeping fairly still for that length of time.
I’m getting back home, making a hot drink, having a hot shower and still by eight pm every move is accompanied by a grunt, like some parody of old age on an indifferent comedy show. Sometimes it’s better that I live on my own. It isn’t funny. I can hardly move or think or type. About all I can do is surf Facebook, which doesn’t actually progress any of the things on my To Do list, let alone the boat.
But it’s nearly, nearly done. The rest of the coachroof could have a rub over while I’ve still got the sander out and there is some more varnish that could be looked at. The Tonkinoise project was gone back a step because although I bought it the friend who was going to pick it up couldn’t find the place where it was and had to get her mother to the airport and she’s really sorry because she said she’d do it but luckily it wasn’t German Wings that flew into the Alps and sorry. Couldn’t be helped. These things happen. Would I like a swim and some breakfast tomorrow?
And if I can stop grunting when I move, yes. Yes I would. Maybe I can get the anti-foul on tomorrow before I catch the train to London so I can be at Heathrow to meet someone from Big Brother and take people to the theatre on Friday. It’s one of the things I do. I’m going to need some different clothes to the boat-painting kit though, I think.
One of the reasons I bought a wooden boat was that I like traditional ways of doing things. Or I thought I did, anyway. On Friday I spent six hours stripping old varnish with a heat gun and a scraper. Saturday I managed four. Sunday three and a half. I ache all over. By the end of each session when I get home I eat, shower and sit down. Within half an hour all I can do is grunt every time I move and I live on my own. This is how people used to spend their lives, until they died.
I sanded from the bow to the metal post in about two hours.
Today I made a start on sanding the paint down on the hull. I did the bad thing. I used an electric sander. After I went to the shop and bought some new sanding pads, enough to do the whole boat and some left over for £9 something, because the old ones had got damp in my friend’s shed and all the scrapey stuff had come loose and then spent the obligatory half hour fiddling about with the other sander, the savage belt sander that strips deep grooves into things because that’s what it’s for, not roughing up a paint surface, I got started.
A friend from a famous yard walked by. I didn’t know he was working here today. Sometimes he plays keyboard behind my spoken word stuff, when we’re Frank Admiration & The Extraordinary Renditions, but today we were wooden boat guys. I felt pretty wooden anyway.
As a break from the paintwork I ran the electric sander over the wooden rail I was going to strip the old way, the one that in three days I hadn’t got near to starting. It took all the varnish off in about a minute instead of ten. The lighter part? About five minutes of sanding. The old ways are the best? Really?
My mobile kept ringing and I made some arrangements for Thursday and Friday night because I have some work to go and do in London and I need to sort that out and not mess it up, but working on the boat is going to be a lot faster now.
I still ache. I will for a couple of days. Now I feel stupid as well. But that will go. And the boat is going to be fine.
The boxy big cars chased each other into the disused place. Something was burning in an oil drum. A man in a vest looked out of the window of a caravan as the bonnet of the Jag flew up and the back end of the Granada slid out sideways on the oily ground. Parts of London like this you couldn’t tell if the Luftwaffe did it or the LCC. Certainly the second one did more damage. In black and white the men with the big tie knots and lapels hit the men with half a pair of tights off her indoors over their faces, flattening flattened noses. Iron jemmies slid from parka sleeves and someone shouted about a shooter but we knew who would win long before Reagan sneered “Shut it” and “Tell him, George” and the man with longer hair glanced sideways before he said “You do not have to say anything. If you do say anything it may be taken down and used in evidence” before he was faded out into something more interesting. Cuff him. Get in the car. They want us back in the office.
One last job, son. Or I can shut the boot lid.
Last time I went to Paddington Basin that’s what it was like. Well, not really, but it looked like that. Derelict, like a lot of London when I first went there and for a long, long time after that. What the bombers had missed (most of it) economics and the paid, trained planners had finished off. The docks were derelict apart from St Katherine’s toy boat harbour and they filmed huge parts of The Sweeney film there. You can see exactly where, just by the bridge.
I went for a job interview. The train was late coming out of Wickham Market. The Tube got stuck in a tunnel. When I got to the interview the girl on Reception told me the company had moved, although this was the address the recruitment agency gave me. I Googled them on my phone and called the company. I tracked them down on Google maps and found that if you type in their address the GIS thinks they’re in East London, seven miles away, but if you give it the postcode it tells you they’re less than five minutes walk. For a company that’s been here in the UK for ten years I don’t understand why their website is all American references and hardly anything at all about London or the UK.
There wasn’t time for the one hour interview when I got there. They asked if I wanted to come back and do it again but I told them things happen, that it’s how you deal with them that makes the difference. That if they were happy to do the interview then I was. In fifteen minutes they asked me back for a second interview and asked me if I was happy with that. I said I’d be happier if they just gave me the job now but that’s what I’d come to get as an outcome.
The agency said they’d asked for confirmation of the meeting and hadn’t been told the office had moved. In the middle of the week I had a phone call to tell me there was a test for the second interview and that would be next week. I got the text emailed to me at 17:26 on the Friday, with a deadline of 11pm Sunday.
I very seriously thought of simply not doing it. At least I’d have one when they said in the interview, “Do you have any questions for us?”
Well yes, I do actually. What did I have to cancel this weekend? What arrangements had I already made? Oh sorry, you can’t answer that, can you? And you don’t care either.
They were using a version of Word my version couldn’t understand, because the whole point of Microsoft is to keep you buying things you don’t need at £300 a go every time Bill Gates fancies another one of his secretaries. It took hours finding free software to convert one version into another before I could even read what the test actually was. That took me to 01:00 Saturday and I had a course booked all day Saturday starting at 08:00 and running through till six that I couldn’t get out of and didn’t want to anyway. I’d booked it weeks previously.
I got the test mostly finished around half-past one Sunday morning. I didn’t have time to do anything to it that morning because the course started again at 08:00 and ran through till lunchtime. Then I had to be on a train to London to do something on Monday I’d also arranged, another job. One that hadn’t messed me around. I had time to do a little editing on Sunday night before the deadline but I couldn’t get the bullet points to line up whatever I did.
I wasn’t happy with the flow of the piece but given I didn’t know what it was about anyway I didn’t entirely see what I could do about that. We talked about all of this at the interview on Tuesday. They said the email should have been sent earlier in the week. They apologised it had been sent so late. They said that wasn’t part of the test. I think they lied.
I didn’t get the job because they wanted a typist. They said I should do more than this, but not for them. And I agree. As I left the interview I accidentally took the picture at the top of these words on my phone. I’d thought I was in a good mood. See my face? That’s my face, that is. I think I wasn’t happy.
Wild West End
Then I saw the sandwich stall being trundled away by two men. Argentinian pampas-raised beef in a wrap £6.50. And £650 for a no-cooker bedsit one room halfway to Heathrow. It wouldn’t have taken long to get tired of this. As the train took me back to Suffolk I remembered the Sweeney, the grime and the sense of things abandoned that used to be London and the glass and chrome and chip wrappers that it is now, with TK Max standing proudly where there used to be a music gear shop in the Charing Cross Road. It’s not quite the same, somehow.
On your left as you pass down the street you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the site of the place where in the song Wild West End, Mark Knopfler got a pickup for his steel guitar. Now you can buy last season’s Ralph Lauren in a peculiar colour and something a bit wrong with the zip in the very same place.
About a million years ago one August I cycled through the back streets of Kings Cross, through piles of rubble. A kestrel hovered overhead in London’s hot diesel sky. There was nobody around as far as I could see. I don’t even know where that is now. You can’t go back. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And I’m not doing this again.
Today was another day of varnish scraping. I meant to spend a whole day doing it, but I was too tired, too achey after spending the past two days doing the same thing, heating up old varnish with a heat gun and scraping it off with the other hand. There isn’t much room on deck amidships as I suppose I ought to call it, or half-way along the boat in more normal parlance. I didn’t particularly want to do a header over the side and drop eight feet onto the metal boat trailer if I overbalanced doing this, because with both hands full I couldn’t have the traditional one hand for what you’re doing and one for the boat that’s supposed to keep you safe, or at least safer. Obviously it doesn’t work if you get in the way of a super huge container ship coming out of Felixstowe, but nothing will. I did what sailing is all about and improvised, clipping a safety line through my leather trouser belt at one end of the other around the nearest fixed bit of metal attached to the boat. It would probably stop me hitting the ground, or at least at full speed. I didn’t want to find out anyway.
I started work on the boat at about one o’clock today and had to stop just before six. I couldn’t do anymore. It wasn’t as cold as yesterday, or at least it didn’t feel as cold. It said 4.5C on the car thermometer today, but 7.5C yesterday when there was a steady breeze blowing, which there wasn’t today. A huge high tide yesterday too, to go with the eclipse, the water up over the quayside. It looks very wrong when that happens.
This is what I did today. It felt like more.
All I did apart from drink tea and eat a banana was heat and scrape. It was ok. I like jobs where I can see what I’ve actually done, whatever they are. I wanted to get all of the port or left hand side of the deck rail done today but I just couldn’t do it all. I can’t work out what’s been going on with this boat. Parts of the rail had three layers of varnish on them, one of them a deep red. Other parts just a few feet away had a green coating that looked more like moss just beginning to grow and hardly any varnish at all. There is a six inch strip of toe rail – to stop your toes and then the rest of you going over the side – that is rotten and crumbling while the rest of it is completely solid. I don’t understand why that part would have gone rotten. It makes no sense.
So tomorrow is another day. I think it’s going to be two days to finish stripping all the varnish off and probably another two to sand down the deck unless I can find a sander. I thought I had one but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I don’t like using sanders anyway. I don’t like the vibration through my hands, nor the noise.
It’ll be another day to sand down the paint above the waterline on the hull ready to change it from red to white, the proper colour for Nordic Folkboats but the below-waterline part feels quite rough already. I’m wondering if just a wash down with water to get the mud off would be enough, without bothering to sand it. I can’t tell. It would save a lot of time.
It will be worth it. Really. It will. Honest…
Then a day painting, then she can go back in the water and I can paint the inside of the cabin white now that the wet rot cure has done its stuff. There is a crack along the cabin roof side that is letting in water too. I thought I could get away without stripping the varnish off that but I think the only thing to do is lift that off, fill the crack with clear epoxy glue and sand it back flush, then seal the wood up again with Tonkinoise. All day I have cursed the man who invented yacht varnish. He must have had his reasons to invent something rubbish that comes off again in big ugly yellow flakes like old man’s toenails. I just don’t know what they were.
I got back home about half-past six. I wanted something good to eat so I made the broccoli quiche I’d promised myself when I made the pastry and put it in the fridge yesterday. I was cold and aching and if I had had a tin of baked beans in the cupboard I’d have had that, but I didn’t. I hadn’t done quite enough pastry either and I rolled it out with a big Kilner jar, which was lazy and stupid because the fastener made a hole in the pastry and some of the filling dripped through. Not enough flavour. I should have put salt in and maybe just maybe a tiny sprinkle of chilli flakes. But it was ok, So was the cake I made yesterday. It’s now nearly nine. I haven’t seen anyone I know all weekend. I’m tired and aching and I seriously think I’m going to shower and go to bed with a cup of tea and a book right now.
It’s the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the town a friend of mine grew up in. The RAF did it. Nearly half the population was made homeless. There was nothing there apart from a beautiful medieval town and the war almost over. I haven’t known whether to mention it to her or not. She has. But what would I say? Sorry about the unpleasantness earlier?
I thought that as I saw someone pressure washing their plastic boat today, cleaning it up in about an hour while it’s taking me a week to do the same thing. That’s the trouble with wooden boats. Sometimes they make you too tired to think. But there’s nothing, really nothing like them at all.
The thing about wooden boats is they’re wooden boats. They start rotting from the time the first bit of water touches the wood after the sap has stopped flowing. But they’re still a million miles better than floating Tupperware, because you can fix them.
Something odd has happened to this Folkboat of mine some time in the past. There is a hairline crack in the side of the cabin roof that lets water in and where water stays in it starts rotting, so I have to fix that. There’s another patch where someone has drilled a hole through the roof to secure the grab rail that makes going forward from the cockpit not quite so perilous, given there are no rails at the sides and it’s a nice eight foot drop to the ground that I really don’t want to do. The water is getting under the wooden grab rail because there’s nothing to stop it. Taking the rail off, putting a dob of Silkaflex (a kind of putty that never really dries out completely) and put the rail back on should fix that, and there are a couple of other joins that need filling in with the stuff too.
A little imperial relic.
Yesterday and today I spent scraping off old varnish. You can see where it needs to come off because although it’s still glossy it’s a yellowy white colour, which tells you air or water or both has got in under the varnish. This is one of the reasons I hate yacht varnish. It sits on top of the wood as a hard impermeable layer, like concrete and just like concrete, while it keeps water out it’s great and when it doesn’t it’s a nightmare, because it traps the water underneath the varnish where it starts eating your boat. I don’t know why more people don’t use Tonkinoise. It’s French, it’s been around for a hundred years or more and it goes into the wood rather than sitting on top of it. You can see the advantage straight away. The disadvantage is all the old varnish has to come off first. Which means getting the scrapers and the heat gun out.
I sat there for six hours yesterday and three and a half today, in a wooly hat, four layers of clothing, safety boots, gloves and a PVC smock, heating up old varnish in one hand and scraping it off with the other. I froze. I’m writing this sitting on my sofa at home ninety minutes later and I’m still cold, with the heating on, a cup of tea and a disgusting shop-bought so second-hand biscuit, not really able to think straight yet because I’m so cold. But it’s getting done.
I’m getting the feel of the boat, finding out what needs to be done. There’s an electrical thing in the battery compartment which got rained on for six months and that’s going to need bypassing or replacing. At the moment bypassing looks the best option because I don’t know what it is, but I might revise my opinion on that. Really, all it needs apart from the electrical thing, whatever it is (and it’s metal with fins on and one wire goes into it and about four wires come out of it if that makes any difference), all it needs is doing it. Just scraping and sanding and painting. Wooden boat stuff.
Making a start. The deck looks like teak but the varnish on the edges hasn’t worn well. I think someone just varnished over varnish, without taking the old stuff off first. Task One.
Practical meditation. It sends me into almost a trance state. It’s a great way to calm down and think. Except when it’s cold, when it stops you thinking long after you should have thought that it’s too cold to keep on doing this.
I spent six hours scraping old varnish off yesterday and another three and a half today. I’m getting better at it and it’s one of those things that improves with practice. I’d done just about a third of the deck now, and treated the wet rot around the windows inside. I have all the paint I need, the white paint for the hull and the black anti-foul and the Tonkinoise arrives on Tuesday. I have the brushes and the thinners and about enough sandpaper and all of this week to get this boat ready, if it doesn’t rain.
Years ago when I was learning to sail (me and Mr Dana, out of San Diego, obviously) I read one of those stupid folksy maybe-traditional sayings carved and burned into a plaque above a yacht club bar. It was empty, as they always are in the afternoon. A fly was buzzing at a window. The air was full of the scent of damp cotton drying in the sun with that special smell faded sailing it always has.
It was just a stupid motto:
A day spent sailing is not counted as part of your allotted span.
It was just a little sailing club on a lake by a dual carriageway. The woman at the next table finished organising her children. She looked at the sign, then at me, then she looked away across the lake as she said ‘A day on the water – sometimes it all feels like starting again.’
She didn’t mean learning. I knew exactly what she meant. Just that timeless thing about wooden boats and the water. Maybe it’s not part of your allotted span. Or maybe just days when you have the space to be on your own, doing something that needs doing that you can do, something you can work at and see the difference and think at the end of the day that maybe it isn’t completely fixed but you can finish it tomorrow, that you’re on top of this by just working at it, that you can work this out, maybe that’s what feels out of time.
Summer’s coming soon. And summer on the water is a special thing.
Yesterday I went to a friend’s before she was awake. I let myself in and quieted her dogs but not soon enough to stop them waking her.
“I knew it was you.”
The little dog had barked.
“She only barks for you.”
I took them out for a half hour while my friend got up, then we talked while she had a bath, the door left half open so we could hear each other, like people in a daring 1950s film.
We were going for breakfast, but we talked so much that we ended up going for lunch, then somehow it was half past four and time for my friend to do some work. I took the dogs out on the river path that leads to the sea. Deep in the woods on the promontory we found a plank laid over a ditch that we crossed over, into a place where no-one had walked since the floods.
We had big floods here last winter, the water even coming into the place my friend works, half a kilometre from the river. The ground was smooth in this place, with no footprints of deer or people. There were rabbits though, that the dogs hunted as a pair, one diving into the bushes while the other ran around the other side of the little copse to catch the rabbits as they ran out.
Technically I suppose it’s called hunting with dogs and illegal, but I didn’t make them do it and they didn’t stop when I called them. They didn’t catch any either. If there were really any rabbits there rather than just their smell I didn’t see any.
We walked for about an hour and a half until my friend texted me to see where we were. We were here. Ten minutes away. Five if we hurry. And no need. She was fine. Just seeing how we were. We were here.
