Headaches and a Little Bit of Hedonism

Wednesday was not my best day. It started early with me going to the early morning stretch class that my neighbour, Dutch Martin offers for free to marina residents. Martin is lovely. You can tell that he is lovely because he gets up early on a Wednesday morning to run a free stretch class for his watery neighbours. I would never do that for my neighbours. I doubt that I would do that for my best beloveds if I’m honest. I hate exercise and I hate early mornings.

I am doing the class because I am a menopausal hag and I need to start taking care of myself instead of talking about taking care of myself. I asked Martin’s advice about yoga classes and he offered me great advice and also invited me to his class. It felt churlish to shout ‘No!’ and push him into the marina, which was my first instinct. The fact that I did not do this and very graciously said yes, shows how much I have grown as a person.

The annoying thing is that while I am doing the class I can absolutely feel it doing me good. Also, even though it starts at 6.30 a.m. I can fall out of bed at 6.15 a.m. crawl to stretch class and be home by ten past seven. Short of a choir of angels lifting me from my slumbers with their angelic powers and fanning me to the class with their wings, there isn’t anything easier I could do.

Despite all this, I was in a filthy mood with myself and the world when I got to class and feeling considerably filthier by the time I left. It was not Martin’s fault. His requests were perfectly reasonable, I had volunteered and it was good for me. I couldn’t square it with the fact that I resented it bitterly and felt like he had asked me to jump up and down on a hot spike for ten years while he shouted mental maths questions in my face.

When I got back to the boat I glowered into a cup of coffee for half an hour before accepting that I was not going to turn into Pollyanna and went back to bed. I got up feeling worse than when I went to bed and spent the majority of the day with a face like a smacked arse for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I had a headache I couldn’t shift and if I wasn’t menopausal I would have sworn my period was about to start. I was as much fun as a fire in an orphanage.

The boys were heading back to Leicester in the afternoon. I decided that my mood was probably their fault (with no evidence to support this) and that I would feel better when they were gone. What actually happened was that I felt the same and they probably felt better because they weren’t trapped on a boat with Satan’s mother.

I wanted to go for a walk, but it was too hot and there was no breeze and I knew that in the mood I was in, I would just get hotter and crosser and there would be no point. Instead I went for a shower and came back to the boat to cook myself dinner. I ate it watching season two of Heartstopper, which along with stir fried broccoli is something only I enjoy. I thought I’d feel better. I did not.

It was only when I found myself craving jam on toast later in the evening that it finally twigged. I was having one of my new style migraines. The ones where I only have a mild headache, but which make me feel like a cross bear coming down with the flu. One of my most persistent migraine symptoms over the years has been weird, pregnancy like cravings. When I started salivating at the idea of jam, which I loathe, the penny finally dropped. I ate the jam, took some Migraleve and twenty minutes later I started feeling better.

It was a little frustrating that it took me all day to figure it out. It was, however, a huge relief that a) I wasn’t sliding back into being as mad as a wasp and b) could resolve it with a delicious pill and a decent nap.

I appreciate that this post is significantly lacking information about boats and also London, which is what lots of people come here to read, so in a weird codicil to me whining about a headache I will attempt to add London value by telling you that I drove past a Virgin Media van called Vangelina Jolie the other day, which pleased me very much. I also went past a blinds’ shop called ‘Peter The Pleater’ which gave me true joy. One can only hope he is a pumpkin eater in his spare time.

In boat life news, I will tell you how very, very much I enjoy going for a shower here. It is thrilling to me, actually thrilling.

Our boat has a bathroom. It’s a good size bathroom. Like a normal, house style bathroom if your house was quite dinky, say a Victorian terrace where there were no original bathrooms and you’d had to fit one in somewhere. We have a full sized bath and shower in our bathroom. We just don’t use them. This is not because we have moved away from civilisation and thrown cleanliness out the window.

It is because our water comes from a tank we have to keep filling up and in order to heat that water we have to run the boiler. The boiler is not sophisticated enough to figure out heating or water. It just heats everything. That means that in the summer months, getting enough hot water to heat a bath could also cause us to expire of heat exhaustion before we could use it. Also, we pay extremely high mooring fees to live on this marina, and one of the benefits of that is a custom built shower block we can access 24/7. The showers are huge. The water pressure is magnificent and someone else other than me cleans them. It is like being on holiday and at home all at the same time. I literally have the best of both worlds. I love these showers so much there are no adequate words for my passion. I revel in them. I have yet to take more than one shower in a day, but that time will come and it will be magnificent.

One of the things I love best about it all though, is the walk to and from the showers at night. I grab all my gear and exit the boat into the dark of a sleeping marina. The water is usually still like glass. All the lights of the surrounding buildings bloom into the darkness, reflecting and starring into the black. Occasionally a fish jumps and the ripples melt out across the water. The night smells of wetness and weed. Even though it’s a smell of decay, there’s a comfort to it, like the water in church flowers. It smells of age and reverence. I’m not mad on God, but there is something properly divine about that smell.

Stepping out on to the pontoon there’s a bounce and the spring of wood cushioned by water. I’m still floating, even though my feet are hitting the ground. I like to barefoot it over to the building and feel the smooth curl of the wooden ridges gripping against my toes as I walk. I cannot get enough of the feeling of being suspended and yet still moving. It does weirdly wonderful things to my neurology.

On nights like these the air is warm, like silk against my skin, but I’m already getting excited for the fierce blaze of winter nights. It’s not just a summer thing. On my return, if I have been lazy drying off, there’s the faint drag of my wetness against the warmth of the darkness and a frisson of goosebumps shimmer across my arms. Tendrils of wet hair tickle my neck like the weed in the water would feel if I were to just slip in for a moment, which I am always tempted to do on nights like these. On nights like these, I belong to the water and the water feels like it belongs to me.