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Lockdown countdown

Goodness!  It seems the last time I updated this blog was April. And now it's nearly July.  And I don't even have a good excuse like 'we were in the middle of the ocean with no internet connection'.  Oops.  The NHS midwife in me says that, as it's not written down, May did not happen.  But that is obviously nonsense, because in May all sorts of things happened.

For example, Kit’s birthday.  We know Kit had a birthday in May, because we were reminded about it.  Every.  Single.  Day.  For weeks.  If anyone's wondering, by the way, what Kit would like for any future presents, the answer is the most garish item of clothing you can find.  I did my middle -class duty and tried to steer him in the direction of the Boden catalogue, pointing out all the applique/sequined wildlife motifs, but no, he wanted a pokemon hoodie.  And not the nice(ish) looking yellow one with a pickachu face on it.  No, he wanted the one that looked like someone had exploded a luminous paint set on it.  If it had come in shellsuit material he would've been even happier (it feels nicer, apparently).  B-day was also pokemon central (thank you Sarah, aka Queen of Party Decorations) - we had pin-the-tail-on-picachu, a pokeball pinjata, and inflatable pokemon balloons (oh, I can hear the pedants saying 'but all balloons are inflatable' - well, yes, technically, I suppose they are, but, be honest, you knew what I meant - I meant the ones with helium in, that float away while children wail when they inevitably let go of them. We actually still have a pikachu (no idea how to spell it, so I'm trying a few versions) stuck on the living room ceiling over a month later - there are threats to try to shoot him down, but that seems overly violent for a kids' toy - besides, I like seeing where he's wandered to from one day to the next...)

Kit's was not the only party in May though - Sarah and I were supposed to be celebrating her hen do on a 3-day, no-kids jolly with some other lovely ladies in a villa in Ibiza with a cocktail man.  I even bought a new bikini.  Instead I decorated a room here with more balloons and a giant inflatable flamingo (I had to blow it up bit by bit with rests in between - good thing I'm not a smoker or he would have been a very flaccid flamingo indeed).  There was also bunting to put up - but all the glittery letters fell out of the packet in a heap jumbled up - undeterred, I sent a photo to the other hens to ask what the letters were supposed to spell - quicker than Carol Vorderman, Hilde replied, but I shan't tell you what the answer was as it was too rude!  (Were rude words allowed on Countdown? Charlie once had a 7 letter word in Scrabble that was too rude to put down against his parents...)  We managed a 2 hour zoom call with 13 people - was lots of fun.  We had a brief discussion about how to play charades on zoom - private messaging, uploading photos, presentation mode - before giving up and deciding to go low tech - everyone closed their eyes while I showed the clue to the person doing the acting.  Then everyone else opened their eyes. Shhhh, don't tell Charlie - he thinks I'm a luddite already...

In other news, Roo made up for lost time and had 4 teeth fall out in the space of 10 days - he is very gappy and quite lispy now.  (Apparently, one of his friends was so worried by social distancing they left their tooth for the tooth fairy on the other side of the room...) And we had a home-made boat competition for Charlie's birthday.  Roo and I decided early on that we weren't going to win on engineering, so we went all out with decoration instead.  Charlie was hoping that this event would banish the memories of having been robbed in the home-made boat competition on board a Holland America cruise ship in 2008.  Alas, no.  He was beaten on coke-can carrying capacity, and on aesthetics.  We're trying not to mention it.

Home school has been going well - we talked about BLM and activism (very depressing to hear a 6 year old say 'but mummy, why would anyone do that, it's just so mean', but more hopeful to get them to figure out ways of changing the world. We tried to make it relevant to them - what would they do if no one under the age of 9 was allowed to use the metal detector - they said they'd ask the grown ups to change their mind and get the other kids on their side (like writing to your MP and starting a petition?)  The metal detector was great btw, we found a rusty nail, a copper button and two boats.  Well, BOATS - bits off a tractor.  We've now finished re-watching all 3 series of Detectorists (and found an extra Christmas special we didn't see first time round - very pleased about that) - haven't found anything to replace the end-of-the-evening void yet...

Right, have to go - I pinky-promised that I would read HP to the boys in front of the fire if they went to check the post.  Which they've done.  But apparently Kit 'might' have let one of the chickens into the kitchen when he came back in.  So I need to check that first.  (How do you 'maybe' let a chicken in?)

Much love to all

Hxx

Oh, I nearly forgot - this post is called 'lockdown countdown' because the countdown is on - flights to Spain on July 7th!  Gulp.

Lockdown blues

Be thankful I didn't write this this morning - I woke up with a large dose of lockdown blues (if this blog had a facility to have sound I'd add harmonica at this point.  In fact, it probably does have that function, I'm just too much of a technotwerp to figure it out.  Where's a teenager when you need one?).  Guess it had to happen at some point, and 4 weeks in isn't too bad (or is it 5 weeks?)  Probably not helped by two large rum and tonics last night and staying up late talking to Charlie about the futility of life without a purpose and whether we'll ever be able to travel again anywhere ever. There was a small high point in our discussion when we found out that friends in Spain have, yesterday, been allowed to take their kids outside for an hour (woo! first time in 6 weeks) - this is a positive sign that things are improving, and might mean we could finally get to our boat.  Charlie is all in favour of heading out to Spain as soon as we possibly can, so he can start being Captain Daddy as planned.  But I am feeling uncharacteristically pessimistic about it all. What's the point in going if all the quirky cafes and quaint old buildings are closed and we can't explore the secluded bays an beaches. What happens if it all totally shuts down again?  So, I was wondering if maybe we should just postpone the whole trip for a year, as our friends have postponed their wedding, on the basis that a decision, even if not the outcome that we wanted, is better than being in limbo as we currently are?  At least then I could go back to work and feel useful.  Charlie was less keen on this idea as a) it would mean being further away from our adventure and b) if I went back to work he'd have to look after the boys on his own.  I'd like to say a) was the greater influence on his thinking but I'm not entirely convinced...

So, after all that, we went to bed feeling grumpy and tired and disillusioned and impotent (hmm, possibly not the best adjective to use in the same sentence talking about going to bed?  I meant in terms of not being masters of our own destiny as we are waiting on other people's decisions, obvs)  But I've been for a run in the sunshine now (current favourite soundtrack is Christine and the Queens, but the French versions, not the English ones, as it makes me feel much more cultured - I'm not really that cultured though as I spent the whole run daydreaming about being a Musketeer - 3 series (I refuse to call them seasons) on iPlayer - you can thank me later).  Feeling much better now - who says I have no purpose in life?  I just built the Spinjitzu Monastery out of a cereal box for a delighted 5 year old.  (He did point out that it ought to be red and black, not red and purple - I told him he should take it up with Kellogs)  I was due a parenting win though - last week Roo and I were learning about codes and ciphers in school - he was being mighty annoying so I wrote him a code that said 'it's no fun doing school with you if you don't concentrate'.  So then he wrote a message back to me in code that said 'I love you'.  I felt really bad :(  Actually, he's been lovely this week - I've been reading them Winnie the Pooh, and was totally unprepared for the last chapter, where the animals are aware that Christopher Robin is going away for some unspecified reason (going to school?  growing up?), so they make him a poem and say goodbye and - well, that's as far as I got before I couldn't read anymore - the tears were streaming down my face and I was sobbing - Kit asked me if I was 'happy sad' or 'sad sad' and Roo said 'it's alright mummy, I'll read the rest' - so I cried some more at that point as Christopher Robin takes Pooh to an enchanted place in the forest and explains that he'll always be with him even if he's not actually there.  Took me all day to recover!  

Happily, Charlie is also feeling refreshed and motivated - you can tell this as we have hardly seen him the last 3 days.  Instead he has been mostly...videoing himself in the garden with a selfie stick - yes, you read that right, he has bought a selfie stick.  But, it's all in a good cause.  He's been thinking about how to reach a wider audience with his pilates teaching for years, and wondering about putting classes online, but he's never had the time - not an excuse anymore.  So, he's recorded, and edited, his first lesson and it's on YouTube now - go there and like it/subscribe and give him feedback (do you like his trousers?  can you hear and follow the instructions? should he do the whole thing in lycra? more/less banter?). The first lesson's not very exciting - lots of small movements and breathing - but it's important to get the basics right so you don't hurt yourselves.  After he posted the video yesterday we had hourly updates about how many likes/views/subscribers he's got - edge of the seat stuff, I'm telling you.

What else have we been up to?  We felled a couple of trees, had a couple of BBQs and a takeaway (cause of excitement in this house - I'm in charge of rations and hate waste so we're never allowed takeaway unless there's nothing else to eat - yesterday there was only BBQ left overs for dinner and we'd already had that for lunch and dinner the night before, so I relented, much to everyone else's delight).  No more Dead Things to report on this week either.  

I might go and have a cup of tea now.  As ever, do let us know how you're getting on.  No one's been brave enough to use the comments yet - go on, you know you want to...

Hx

PS how could I forget?! I've got lockdown hair - I joined in with the communal hair dyeing project and now I look like the woman from Roxette....still wondering if that's a good thing or not...

Lockdown hightlights

Ahoy there! Update from me (Helen) today instead. We are the picture of a modern loving family just now - all plugged into our individual screens! And to think I thought this adventure would bring us closer together... Ah well.

It's been a while since we last wrote on the blog, as neither of us was really sure what to write - we are acutely aware that for most people, lockdown has been/is really hard, so it didn't seem fair to write about what we've been up to here, where we are actually having a really good time. But, then we agreed that the whole point of the blog is to write about our lives and our adventures, and no one wants to hear about boring stuff, so here, after all, are the highlights of the last few weeks:

 - lots of dead things - we found loads of badger setts on a walk - we know they were badger setts and not fox dens as we also found a dead badger. Sadly, I've still never yet seen a live one. The dead one was fascinating though. The children were a bit more hesitant in their appreciation! Which is why, when I found half a dead frog (with a bit of spine exposed) and a whole, fresh dead shrew (vole?) yesterday I suggested we dissect them in homeschool. I had visions of that being the prompt for the children becoming surgeons or the next David Attenborough. Charlie, however, vetoed the idea and said I'd give the boys nightmares instead. Now my housemates think I have an unnatural obsession with dead things...

- Margaret - and just to prove I'm not obsessed with dead things, we rescued a bee and stopped it from being A Dead Thing - we found it (well, her, as we discovered all male bumblebees die at the end of the season and it's only the females that hibernate, so we called her Margaret), looking a bit woozy in the garden - think the poor thing had just woken up a few days too early, lulled into a false sense of security by a day of warm weather. We gave her some sugar and water (we grew up with Blue Peter so knew exactly what to do) and watched her lap it up with her tongue. Amazing! She had a little rest overnight, then started cleaning her wings and we released her the next day.

- homeschool - OMG - how are any of you doing homeschool while still working? We are managing 1.5-2 hours a day and that's exhausting enough when we don't have anything else to do! We've done experiments with lemon juice/baking powder (produced C02 to blow up a balloon), made a castle (with working portcullis) out of toilet roll, practiced guitar, and tried to work out why we have eggs and rabbits and chocolate at Easter (needless to say reading the bible didn't help with that). Thankfully the 'bigger boys' are arriving tomorrow (age 12 and 14) so that will entertain our smaller boys - Kit will ask from the second he gets up when will they be awake (they are teenagers, so the answer is always, after lunch), and then he'll follow them around like a groupie all day. It is quite endearing. And they are *so* patient with him. Thanks boys!!

- pilates - C has been teaching us all pilates - every 2 or 3 days we've been having lessons and I'm happy to report, we're getting better. Even managed one lesson outside. I've been running, and C tried a bit, but he's had to stop before he injured himself. Not to be deterred from getting his hour of daily exercise though, he found a bicycle in a outbuilding, fixed a pump in a Heath-Robinson style, and went cycling without bibshorts, fancy pedals or shoes or even a bike computer. Who knew such a thing was possible?! He came back a happier man though, so all good (he's been pretty down the last week as the reality of 3 more weeks of lockdown hit and the possibility of getting to LG slipped further away)

- raft - having said that though, we did manage to get afloat last week! There is an ornamental pond/lake here, with pontoon, so C and the others built (again in a Heath Robinson style) a raft, out of pallets and old containers and bits of rope, and we spent a happy few hours rowing the thing up and down (only let the children go on after C had taken his phone out of his pocket and taken his shoes and jumper off, just in case...)

Right, think that's all for now. Actually, no - I nearly forgot! I've been to hospital! With the world's most pathetic injury. I fell and got a thorn in my hand (well, I assume it was a thorn - I didn't actually see it - given the after effects though I'm wondering if it was, in fact, the lesser spotted blue fang tooth hairy spider or similar. It was pretty sore at the time but got worse all afternoon until I ended up calling 111 at about 2000 as I couldn't move my little finger or index finger and my middle finger and wrist were beginning to get in on the act too. Happy to report that one out of hours appt (hospital was empty, very hard to put on face mask/hand gel with a dodgy hand, staff couldn't have been kinder) and a couple of days of flucloxocillin later, it's nearly back to normal :) (C and I were pondering, on the way to the hospital, does anyone ever phone 111 and not get an out of hours appt? Every time we call we get an appt - is that just because we only call when we're actually sick? But if everyone always got an appt there'd be no need for a phone triage system. So what does everyone else call them about?)

Right, that really is all for now. I can hear the dulcet tones of the boys next door arguing about who's turn it is on the game boy (they can't find the charger for the other one). I shall have to intervene, but I'm loathe to do so as they might suggest playing the same game as yesterday when I spent over an hour with them pretending to be knights with helmets and swords, rescuing a princess from a dragon in the dungeons and then building a den in the time honoured fashion out of cushions and tables and blankets. I was Sir whinge-alot (whose accent was most west country, but slid into yorkshire and then irish for some reason), Kit was Sir eat-alot and Roo was Sir sleep-alot). Wish I could hand on heart say it was fun - I've just never been into imaginative play - I simply don't get it :( they thought it was great though and that's the main thing. 

Do send your news - apparently Comments is now turned on apparently

Much love Hxx

Sailing around the world: week 1

Well, this isn't quite how I'd planned out our first week of sailing around the world. Helen and the boys were due to arrive at Lucky Girl in A Coruña on 23rd of March, I was to be there with the boat in the water waiting for them. As it turns out, all the stuff we sent to the marina from our house in boxes (clothes, toiletries, cooking utensils, THE NINTENDO SWITCH, board games, card games, stacks of reference books for school etc...) are waiting for us in the marina office. The marina is closed, so they can't put our boat in the water (there are a few practical reasons why it's really not ok to live on a boat out of the water, esp. with 2 small boys. I'll leave that to your imagination), and it's unclear whether the flights are running. If they are, would we be allowed into the country? I think we could argue the case that the boat is where we live, therefore we're not tourists coming on holiday, but it would be a big risk to take, turning up with the boys uncertain of whether or not we would be allowed in. Even then we'd be living in Spanish lockdown and there's pretty much nowhere we could sail to, I'm in a facebook group for sailing families all over the world and they're all reporting that they're basically stuck wherever they are. 

On Monday night when Boris announced his 'this is not a lockdown' lockdown, we were installed at Grandma's house. This situation was not ideal for a number of reasons, not limited to:

1. She's accustomed to living by herself

2. She has spent a lot of time and effort clearing up her house to make it look nice

3. She has many delicate things she cares a lot about (eg. white leather antique chairs)

4. The boys are very ... 'energetic' (ahem)

5. I am not good at sticking to other people's rules if I don't understand/agree with the logic behind them

6. Grandma is 'vulnerable' because of her years. Us being there meant that with the best will in the world she was exposed to more risk. 

This combination of factors meant that when it became clear (to me, probably after it was already clear to others) that the 'not a lockdown' was going to last weeks rather than days; we took up our friends' extremely kind offer of weathering the storm at their large house in Scotland.

Boris finished his 'not a lockdown' speech at about 2040. Helen came rushing downstairs and said 'we need to go; now'. She had said out loud what I think I was denying inside my head - that there was a good chance that by the next day the authorities wouldn't allow us to make the journey from Kent to Scotland. By 2110 we had packed up the car, lifted the children out of bed elbow-bumped our goodbyes and were on the road. En route, we only stopped to charge the car and have a pee. I drove all night and arrived at 0530 the following morning. I was incredibly grateful for Tesla's autopilot which kept us safer than my sleep-deprived brain could do on its own. 

So now we're holed up with incredibly kind, easy-going and generous friends in a very large house, in very large grounds. We are sticking to the rules - none of us are going off-site except to get supplies. It's mostly possible to exercise without leaving the grounds, although it turns out I did run over the boundary, briefly yesterday. I know that the lockdown is extremely stressful, and hard for most people, it makes me feel a bit guilty that were here having a nice time together, with enough space that we don't tread on each others' toes too much; and with good friends to stop us going too crazy.

We're now a few days in. The boys have been enjoying the company of 3 other kids. I am much less stressed, and have mostly stopped shouting at the people I love! Homeschool is up and down. Today, we did some mindfulness at the beginning of the lesson where, even with my eyes closed, I could tell when Roo's concentration started to wander! Because it was just the two of us, I was able to gently remind him to bring his thoughts back to what we were focussing on in the exercise. At the end I congratulated him on managing to bring his focus back. It was then a skill I could keep reminding him about when his mind started to wander during the subsequent lesson.  I spent some time with him looking at the pilot book for our Atlantic trip. He wanted to look at the Straits of Gibraltar, so we looked at the tidal-streams atlas and worked out what would be the best time to enter the med from Cadiz. Then we looked at the marina in Tenerife, checked the harbour rules and made sure there were no places we might run aground. Everyone has been asking me for the last few months how we're going to homeschool the boys, and I have become comfortable with our plans for this. Ironically now everyone else is thrust into it, without the months of anticipation we've had. The internet is awash with people sending each other links to various online seminars, museums, classes, zoos etc... so far I'm happy when I can get Roo to recognise when his focus is wandering and bring it back to the subject in hand!

We've done a couple of video-calls to friends and family with more planned, there's an enormous jigsaw on the go, and I have ordered the next one: a picture of people at the table in the living room doing the current one. I've had a Spanish lesson, with another one booked early next week, my tutor has almost no slots available - I guess everyone else is taking the enforced-downtime opportunity to learn Spanish! 

The boat feels further out of reach than she did a week ago, to me at least. I must be coming to terms with the fact that we're not doing what I thought we'd be doing (who is!?). For a while I felt like I had a right to be more disappointed than everyone else about the situation - they were all just expecting to go to work; I was expecting to start a new life. Now, I'm aware that if we were on the boat right now, we couldn't go anywhere or do anything anyway, so better to be where we are.

Covid stopped play

Today is the day the boat was booked to lift-in. I was supposed to wake up in a hotel room in A Coruña, and then Dave and I were to walk down to the marina, finish installing the diesel stove, inspect the hull, maybe install the new house batteries, make sure the engine turns over, then drive away from the lift-in to begin life afloat. Gosh that sounds nice. What I did instead was wake up at my mother-in-law’s house (thank you Susan), do 2 hours of home-schooling with the boys in Grandma’s dining-room, have some lunch, trawl a couple of supermarkets to scrape together the ingredients to see the house through the next few days and go to a garden-centre. Years of preparation came to a head last Friday morning when we finally got the last of our possessions either into storage, sold/given away or boxed up and handed-over to UPS to await our arrival in Spain. We emptied and then departed our house of the last 10 years and handed the keys over to the letting agent with a Tesla packed to the gunnels with all the things we hadn’t finished sifting through, plus clothes and toys to see us through a week of goodbyes before our flights. A couple of days on and it was clear that we shouldn’t visit my parents as planned, as my dad would be classed as ‘vulnerable’; so we headed to Helen’s old family home to stay with her mum instead, obviously this isn’t ideal as Susan is also in the vulnerable age-bracket, but she doesn’t have underlying health conditions to add into the mix, and we do need to stay somewhere, as we are now homeless. I’ve been learning Spanish for the last few months, so I’ve exchanged a few emails with the marina, sail-maker and battery shop. I’ve also (virtually) met another parent whose boat is in A Coruña - she is now stranded in the UK while her partner is on the boat in Spain! The reports are that no-one is allowed out, the only open shops are supermarkets and they’re only allowing 5 people in at a time. The marina says that customers aren’t allowed into the yard and they wouldn’t lift our boat in. Now our flights are cancelled and the next available booking with the same airline is May 1st (should I book that?). The situation with Spain’s border is not clear to me at the moment - if we could get there, would they let us in, on the basis that we’re homeless in the UK and our home is now locked up in a yard in A Coruña? I’ve written to the Spanish embassy in London to see if they can provide us with something we could show at the border to let us in, but they haven’t replied - I guess they’ve got other stuff to worry about right now! Here we are then, self-isolating with Grandma for an indefinite period. She has been very kind and generous, and the house is plenty big enough, with a big garden for the boys to play in. It’s still not where we should be though, and we are all (including Grandma) on our best behaviour. I’ve found today particularly hard to deal with, and I’m afraid my family has borne the brunt of this in the form of shouty-daddy. Hopefully I’ll manage to be more patient tomorrow...

Here we go again

I'm sitting in a cold living-room in Edinburgh, with three and a half weeks to go until we set off again. It's 13 years since we last set off to live on boats. This time we'll have the boys with us - Roo and Kit have already spent several weeks living on various boats during holidays. They've sailed from Edinburgh to Orkney and back, Edinburgh to Sweden and last summer from Edinburgh to the Scilly Isles. We've worked them up towards being able to live on a boat over the years. I think we've succeeded, and at the same time prevented them from realising how unusual this is and how lucky they are. A couple of years ago, Roo's friend Harris came to see Lucky Girl. As they were climbing up the stern ladder past the name, Roo said to Harris: "Our boat's called 'Lucky Girl', what's yours called?"

Things still on my to-do list:

- sell the tumble dryer (yawn)

- sell both cars

- organise insurance for the stuff we're leaving in storage

- alter our bank accounts & credit cards to our forwarding address

- arrange for proxy voting

- ship all our stuff to the marina in Spain

- take our 2 original paintings to Gareth and Sarah's house

- book flights back for Gareth and Sarah's wedding

- switch mobile phone plans to get more data (yawn)

- organise the boat lift-in for the day I arrive in Spain

We've booked onto the ARC (sorry James), so we now know we'll be leaving Gran Canaria on the 22nd of November bound for St Lucia. We would like to be in the Canaries for a month beforehand as a few people have said they'll visit us there, so we need to leave Gibraltar in the last week of September. As the boat is in A Coruña in NW Spain at the moment we have to do roughly 100 miles a month to get there. That doesn't seem too arduous. I didn't want to do the ARC because it is expensive and I feel we, (and our crew) have the experience and skills to be just as safe without it - if we depart on the same day as it does, then we still have the safety of other boats crossing at the same time. However, Helen is nervous about ocean crossing in a way that she can't rationalise right now (I'm sure she'll feel better after we've lived aboard for a while) and the ARC has a kids' club which will give the boys a definite opportunity to spend some time with other children in Gran Canaria and St Lucia, and also give them some people to talk to on the VHF during the crossing. I think that we and the boys will meet plenty of sailing families between A Coruña and the Canaries, but this is a guarantee. 

We get asked a lot about schooling for the boys. We've spoken to their teachers and got their advice, I've just picked up £150's worth of Usborne books to accompany the ones we've already got. Helen thinks I'm being too organised. My plan for starting out is to sit down with the boys and work out together what skills they need to acquire and practice (eg. reading, writing, maths), then we can list some topics they'd like to cover (eg. volcanoes, fish, the Spanish Armada), and we can make sure that as we go through them, they cover each of the skills - it's all subject to change, so we'll see how it goes. I think it'll be good to agree a plan with them so that when I say to Roo: 'hey you haven't done some maths for a while', he has a record of it, and he can see for himself that he needs to spend some more time on it, rather than it being what Daddy reckons. 

I am looking forward to having the house all packed up and arriving in Spain ready to start a new chapter of our lives.