How To Cope With Moving Off A Boat

Habits form surprisingly quickly.

I plaited and pinned up my contraband blue hair for a few days at the start of term – that habit then persisted uninterrupted for four and a half months. In Australia, in attempt to cheat the sun of my tender scalp, I experimented with side partings – that’s been it now for three weeks.

I have long been a creature of habit. It is a family joke. Cite the Dairylea Caper: 1989 – 1997. But a new thing can become a habit with me after only a couple of repetitions. And I have gotten used to living without space.

Six years ago while strolling through London with my chum Adam, I found myself ignoring his chatter while I gawped in shop windows at Stuff. The twenty first preoccupation with acquiring Stuff (not the charming, harmless preoccupation with ‘portable property’ of the innocent, castle building Dickenzian Wemmick) is a danger I’ve sought to stave off, since basically grunge music and my sixth-form Politics teacher told me to. And I could see their point – particularly that day in London when I found myself prioritizing a fixation with shiny things over my meaningful friendship. All of these things, and a strong pinch of whimsy, geared me towards moving onto a boat.

Narrow boats are the answer to a hipster complex about consumerism. This may seem ludicrous to anyone that’s ever been on/lived on a boat and seem them stuffed to gunwhales with things to look at, but absolutely everything fits into the old Morris adage of ‘useful’ and ‘beautiful’ (or you believe it is.)

Now I must labour the point that any TV shows or interviews you’ve heard that harp on this minimalist shit and only keeping things that ‘bring you joy,’ are very much late to my anti-consumerist party. A narrowboat’s interior could never be described as ‘minimalist.’ There are no white, wide, open spaces, free of mind-cluttering….clutter. There’s coal dust. And if there was a space, I’ve used it to stash the cheese grater. I should have bought a kindle and downloaded the whole National Library, but we insisted on stuffing one hundred books in what space there wasn’t.

But I could sit on my boat with my feet on the raised hearth, and my gentleman’s feet all over the rest of the floor with everything pretty much in reach – well – the sort of arm’s reach that requires that mix of a shriek and a groan when you lunge for it from a sitting position. And everything around me was meaningful. A gift from an old, lost friend. Something with a story. Small, hard things you can hold in your hand, and would fit on a regular shelf altogether.  I was pleased with this.

I don’t want to get into the argument of aesthetics and art for art’s sake – cruising that ever-anxious line between beauty/art and excess. Mainly because I’ve not really resolved that yet. Significantly when I wander round the glorious highly skilled, highly beautiful, utter excess of the Philip-Patek museum. But having moved into a flat with four rooms, I’m staring at all this carpet we’ve now got to hoover and catching myself thinking ‘I need a tall vase to put gladioli in and a fruit bowl for apples we won’t eat just to fill the space.’

I suppose I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the whole Ikea generation precisely because some of the stuff is pretty quirky and looks unique but it isn’t – and you can see what can be paired with it (obviously a mint coloured wool throw and eight cushions at great expense) and basically buy your whole damn personality out the catalogue. And now I’m catching myself doing it because now we don’t live on a boat – I seem to want to be a person that owns a salad spinner and a collection of pottery cups. I’m wandering round department stores (expensive by nice….or poncey), charity shops (individual and cheap), Wilko (cheap and nasty…but looks alright) trying to get that balance between quality, taste and originality. Which sounds like an advert for a goddamn sofa in itself.

How does one navigate by their convictions in a materialist world, post-boat? How can I strike this balance in this big, empty flat? I found myself giddily running through the twenty-five metre squared room in Ikea thinking this shit is perfect – once again backing into a small safe space surrounded with only the necessary and no choice about vases.

So for now: a manifesto for non-consumerism. Don’t buy everything in Ikea. Wait. Enjoy the space. Get used to it. Do a cartwheel in it. And only spend money on what you know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.