The Poo Pipeline

Let’s start Monday’s newsletter with the perennial problem of poo. Had I known how much of a feature poo would become in my new life I feel I may have approached a lot of things differently with regard to my writing. Having said that, I am not a fan of the highly Instagrammable and heavily curated life. I prefer real, and you really can’t get more real than the dilemma of what to do with the enormous amount of shit one family generates. I can’t see any filters that are going to help me with that knotty issue.

Our poo tank was full - again - so we had to get Gareth the ex-trawler fisherman and Kevin, the marina manager to help move the boat to the pump out station. I can’t remember how much of this I wrote about before, so if you’re having deja-poo (see what I did there?) you can skip this bit. When we were in the process of buying the boat we did ask about how often the tank would need emptying. The guy we bought it from told us it was usually a 4-6 week job. I’m pretty impressed that three of us managed to fill ours in three weeks, and two of those ‘us’ were mostly in Leicester. Basically, I am full of shit, which is what many people have suspected for a long time and which I have now inadvertently proved with science.

Boats have many different approaches to sanitation. Some boats have cassette toilets like in motorhomes. This has the benefit of not requiring you to navigate an unwieldy metal vehicle with a top speed of four miles an hour and a penchant for drifting wildly into walls/boats and wildlife every month. On the other hand, the cassettes are small and our poos are mighty and we would be emptying, emptying like someone frantically bailing out the boat to stop it sinking like the poo Titanic. Really, if we had a cassette, we would be even more obsessed with bodily functions than we currently are and life would be intolerable.

Also, I’ve seen people taking their cassettes to the disposal room and it’s not an unmessy job. First you have to get the thing out of your boat without dropping it or it leaking. As a dyspraxic person who ran into her own dining table three times last week, it’s not likely that our cream carpet would stay that way for long. Once it’s out the boat you have to transport it to the requisite room. Lots of people use luggage style trolleys for this. You would surely have to have a dedicated poo trolley? When they wheel them past on the pontoon, you can hear them sloshing. You don’t want to be able to pick your luggage out at baggage reclaim in Heathrow based solely on the smell.

Once you’re in the room, you have to empty and disinfect it. Again, messy, messy, messy. All of these steps require levels of waste handling that I do not feel I am in any way qualified for. So, even though the pump out is complicated, it requires minimum handling of shit and this, I feel, is a good thing.

It would help, of course, if we were competent mariners, but we are most definitely not. We still haven’t booked in for our free day of navigating the high seas of barge life, so we pay Gareth to compensate for the lily livered landlubbers we are. Because our boat is large and unwieldy and the boat builders, it transpires, went for style over content (which is totally why I bought the boat. I am that shallow), our bow thrusters are weak and puny, which means that we don’t have adequate poke for the size. This means our boat needs finessing. With the best will in the world, we are not and are highly unlikely to ever be, finessers, even if we become vaguely competent boaters. Consequently it costs us £70 every time we need to pump our poo.

This seems like a lot. It is a lot, but when compared with the damage we could wreak with an out of control, seventy foot long hunk of metal, it is also cheap at twice the price.

Kevin, who is a very nice man and who has the measure of us, has come up with permission for us to buy our own, poo hose pipe. This will mean that we can lay the pipe from our boat to the pump out station, without having to move the boat and damage Kevin’s marina. We also have to store the pipe when it is not in use. This is quite unappealing, but it turns out that there is a hatch at one end of the boat which has a dedicated, small storage space where we can drop our shitty pipe (sounds like a euphemism) and hide it between uses without worrying about it dripping crap everywhere.

This is what we are going to do, which should save us considerable amounts of worry and stress and mean that we can stop hyper focusing on everyone’s bowel movements, which will be a blessed relief for us all.