boats

Holy Cow! How Ruminating on Love Ends With the Strange Tale of the Bovine.

#romance, abandonment, boats, England, Life, love, parable, relationships

I have a good friend I met overseas. A trusted sort, loyal, bright, boundless in his generosity, a good companion on these journeys of wine and deep talk long into the night.

One fine day he meets this girl. Let’s call her Mademoiselle V, for literary purposes. There’s no dilly-dallying when mutual obsession is at stake. Within weeks he has fallen head over heels for her ineffable charms. And she his. Truly, the man is snared in the self-tightening loop of love. Like all good snares, the more the hapless ankle tries to pull away, the harder the loop tightens. Like all deadly snares, only once the victim learns to relax their grip and accept the will of the snare, their plight will be eased, until starvation sets in.

Over the course of the following year, my friend’s love affair intensified. There was no limit to the gifts he fettered upon her. And she reciprocated in kind, showering him with the kind of things that money just can’t buy. Before long, they were engaged. The faint peal of wedding bells could be heard all the way from France, which is where I thought they’d be wedded, and I given front row seats.

However, all that glitters is not gold. Or, if they had made it to that French altar, tout ce qui brille n’est pas or. But I digress.

When did the path of love ever run smoothly? On our now infrequent nights over wine, worldliness, and European cine noir, he would recreate vivd little scenes of pre-marital turbulence. After a while, these funny flash points of their relationship would come to replace cinema and philosophy as the centrepiece of our drunken, moonlit nights.

The stories he told of jealous fits of rage, of Montagues and Capulets, daggers at dawn, of stormy meltdowns, mini breakups immediately superseded by major makeups. Lurid. Intriguing. The seed that sprouts legend. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on those two.

The details of their tiffs became ever more non-linear and madcap, the more libations he poured and the more inhibitions he shed. She would turn from Mademoiselle V one moment into suicidal Desdemona the next. Unbidden, she would test his mettle by climbing over balcony railings 200ft above the ground floor of a hotel, threatening to let go if he didn’t do something, the details of which he never quite got. She would storm out of the car into the back of beyond, leaving him to play chase me. They would be drinking in a bar and she would just up and leave in the company of strangers. Their tortured love I came to understand as part of a larger ritual of constantly affirming devotion and loyalty. All ways of showing affection are funny when human insecurity leads to a craving for feeling wanted and needed.

Naturally, all these tantrums had an unnerving effect on him. Mutual suspicions grew. Sniping about one another became quite caustic. He’d drop whatever he was drinking, and hightail it after her when she’d go periodically AWOL. The hunter would become the hunted. In all, it became apparent that passions, like wine, if left to ferment too long, take on a sour taste. Like corked wine, the taste of tainted love, while certainly unpalatable, was still good enough not to throw away.

In the two years they were an item, their exploits elevated them to the status of legends in their own time. Torrid. Tempestuous. Volatile. Spectacular. Christ! The pair of them were an Elizabethan playwright’s dream. And like a great work of art, whenever they sauntered into our watering hole, no one knew what would unfold through the next act; only that some talking point was bound to infect our wider group.

As was the inevitable. They broke up without fanfare, without ceremony. Most of us expected it. Even they both welcomed it, with acid poured over and the candles blown out long after burning out from both ends. He had had enough of her antics; she had had enough of pretty much every aspect of her present surroundings. And enough of him, too. More than likely.

I raise the spectre of this long-interred affair because their tale has echoes in something I witnessed recently that, on the surface, bears little or no relation to them whatsoever. My story, instead of reliving my own tale of blustery sexual relations with a dark-eyed temptress, in fact centres around young bullocks in a field acting strangely in the presence of my own Mademoiselle V: my boat. The parable of these animals and the boat is that sometimes the very things that are born out of acts of love and obsession, that offer us shelter and sustenance, pride and companionship, and most of all the promise of a future, don’t always appear in the form of lovestruck humans. They can be inanimate and still stress test you to breaking point by placing the same unreasonable, suffocating demands as a run of the mill hetero relationship.

N.B. When reading about the cows in the field and the boat moored alongside, it’s wise to keep this couple in mind – in particular, the intense, all-or-nothing basis to their engagement. That’s how parallels become parables.

Let’s mooo-ve along nicely. So, after weeks and months of mooring in giant brown baths (aka canals) that empty and refill with every lock gate opening and closing, leaving boats beached and stricken for half the time, finally i emerged onto a river section of the canal. Yes, a river, no less. Moving downstream like a liquid glacier, a river is nothing like a canal. On a river a boat can attain its neutral buoyancy easily, as it tends to sit perfectly even in deeper water. The river is clearer and supports proper wildlife, such as otters. The current ensures a degree of purification that you don’t find in stagnant canal water. In short, i found a dream mooring for a fortnight. Instead of the usual tunnel vision you find on ruler-straight stretches of canal with hedges and trees lining either bank, on the river the banks abut fields and meadows, offering a more expansive picture. So far, so good.

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For some time now, I had wanted to find a safe haven for the boat, allowing me to come and go as i pleased. No mooring until this one had provided that leverage i needed – to be able to walk away from my ‘beloved’ for a few days without worrying half to death that it would be either ransacked, or run aground, by the time i got back. That’s relationships for you, I told myself. Together through thick and thin, but mainly thick. The fact that it took me five years and billows of desert dust to save for the materials to build the interior to my high standards, as well as two more years of Gulag-hard labour, and zero foreign travel, to complete its interior fit-out, lent a certain emotional investment vis-à-vis the attachment and strength of feeling i had toward the boat. When you start a project from scratch, for every pound sterling poured in, another two pounds of love follows, leaving the whole owner-possession dynamic to drift into the realms of smothered love. It’s a strange affair, man and machine. And not altogether unlike my friends explosive dalliance with Mademoiselle V.

Pleased as punch with myself on finding this river mooring, I toyed with all manner of escape plans. I’d lock the boat up and go away camping for a few days. I’d take a ferry to the outer limits of the British island archipelago. I’d even take a train up north to see my family. After a lull of two years in an intense relationship with the boat – never leaving its vulnerable side lest it did anything rash like leaping off the 15th floor balcony of a faraway hotel – finally my time had come to gain the distance the relationship needed. That was until the field’s permanent residents, a herd of delinquent bullocks, decided to step in to the fray.

The first time I saw them mass nearby was under the tree nearest the boat. Thinking nothing of it, i returned back inside to the galley only to watch as a few stragglers began circling the mooring ropes, and the canvas chair sat beside. One picked up the chair in his mouth and tossed it away. Another, eyeing the plastic carrier bag tied around the mooring rope, started chomping on the bag. Another got a bit friendly with the bow ropes. But I wasn’t prepared for what ensued. Another broke through the ranks. Annoyed that only a nub of orange plastic remained where the bag used to flutter, he put his mouth around the 2-foot long mooring pin and proceeded to uproot it completely. I could not believe my eyes. I was seeing the systematic eviction of the boat from its lovely mooring spot by a bunch of rambunctious bullocks.

Suddenly, there was a commotion on the bank. Inquisitive as inquisitive can be for a bunch of cows, this lot were peering through the portholes, licking the outer cabin walls, and generally threaten to set the boat adrift. One of the stern ropes was a particular delicacy for another bully bovine, who started fraying the rope as if it was dental floss. Undeterred, I had a stern word with them all, and the herd got the message and dispersed. It then hit me: you really cannot leave this boat for some well-needed time apart. If you do, you may well return to find your home wedged in a weir somewhere downstream.

The herd returned periodically, showing particular interest in the mooring ropes and the pins. I decided to go away all the same. For only a night, but that in itself was a necessary break. And while i sat around that campfire 60 miles away wondering what in hellfire the cows were up to by the river, i thought of my friend and his former relationship. While neither he nor her resorted to yanking up mooring pins, chomping on ropes and tossing away camp chairs, other acts of don’t-leave-me ultimatums were all part and parcel of boozy Friday nights in their world.

The Social Experiment: Going Off-Grid

#alternative lifestyle, #living off-grid, adventure, boats, Canal, climate, conservation, Ecology, England, environment, ethics

Part II: Life Off-Grid

There can be fewer acts of homegrown radicalism quite like going from mains power hook-up to living off grid. But what is it to live off-grid? Everyone is familiar with the term, though few are familiar with the kind of life that entails. Think of it thus: if mains power is similar to taking antibiotics through an I.V. drip, then living off-grid corresponds to foraging for your own medicine from nature’s own root & herb garden. The contrast couldn’t be greater, the results more startling. Sometimes wondrous, oftentimes disturbing. One thing’s for sure, there’s never a dull moment in the pursuit of the dream of living off-mains.

Before I embarked on what i call life unplugged I had seen glimpses of how it’s done. Having trekked the Himalaya a good few times, I had seen how the teahouses that operate as hostelries from the foothills to alpine altitudes managed to run their entire operations without the aid of AC power, or mains gas and cable telephony, for that matter. Naturally, these mountain people had no choice in the matter. Geography dictated Nepal’s infrastructure perhaps more than most places on Earth. Being poor didn’t help things either.

I marvelled at how these resourceful Nepalis ran an entire trekking operation with only two bottles of propane gas, a couple of 12V leisure batteries, a diesel generator, and a simple 12V wire loom coming off the batteries and leading to the only plug in the whole teahouse establishment. How they transport them up there is a whole other story. You see it, plain as day, a mess of plug adapters clustered onto a head adapter leading out from the wall sockets. From this higgledy-piggledy mess of cables, every mobile phone belonging to every paying guest is drawing electron juice from the auxiliary power source (in the absence of solar panels, usually the genny). There they are: a brood of mobile phones pulling like octuplets on their suffering mother’s teats, in the corner of the mess room where everyone spends their evening relaxing by the pot-bellied stove at 10,000ft.

That was the limits of my understanding back then. About the most i could discern from off-grid living was that when too many appliances try to draw current from a 12V/24V/48V system – one far lower than an AC voltage of 110v (USA) or 220v (UK) – there what’s called a voltage drop. You know when the bare lightbulb suddenly and inexplicably dims before shining brighter again. This, I later learned, is attributable to a fall in electrical pressure, which is essentially what voltage is. The phenomenon of this can be best imagined in cosmology documentaries where a distant star becomes a supernova, suddenly dimming before emitting a brilliant light in the night sky. Anyway, point is I had no inkling at all into the practicalities of surviving off-grid until I actually decided to try it. And try i did.

Initially, the feeling was euphoric. No more utility bills. Atonement for all those ecological crimes i partook of in the Gulf. Rapid diminution of carbon footprint, from gargantuan to nearly invisible. When the experiment in living commenced, it was the height of summer. Solar panels on the boat’s roof trickle-charged batteries, creating a false sense of power security. So convinced was I of the limitless benefits of going off-line that for that entire summer of 2019 I lived like there was no tomorrow: effectively consuming similar joules of energy than i had in a house. Unfortunately for me, gauging the true depth of discharge of those batteries, to whom i owed so much, did not become apparent until the gloomy autumn set in. By this time, so late in the year, long-term damage had been done to the 880Ah of lead-acid batteries. Plus, the solar panels were about as much use through a sunless English autumn/winter as a propeller in sand.

Sometimes the most enduring lessons to learn are also the hardest. It just so happened that the winter of 2019 was among the wettest on record. Noah would have been able to profit handsomely from starting an ark-building business had he been alive in that year. From the first ominous spatter in late September, that rain did not abate until the middle of March 2020. Living under the miserable deluge infinitely complicated the process of surviving off-grid life with relative comfort. Instead, as the batteries began their slow descent into decrepitude and death, the boat’s voltage meter reported a sorry tale of exhaustion with every reading. Just to get through the long evenings with a modicum of lamp light, heat and hot food in my belly, the trade-off was either to run a droning 2kw suitcase generator for hours on end each and every day under the rain, burning unleaded fuel and ruining my chances of salvation, or else run the boat’s powerful diesel engine. Restrictions applied by both methods. Running the genny meant, lest it end up stolen from a public towpath, i had to be in residence while it was going. The noise was incessant, not altogether dissimilar to the thrum of a billion hornets all descending on me. Try keeping your concentration when that din is going all day, and while people parade past your window gawping in to admire the designer kitchen. While the other method for supplying raw power to increase voltage in order to run every on-board system from plugs to pumps to central heating – the boat’s engine – never really deep-cycled the batteries for the simple reason that every 12v battery responds to an input charge voltage of a certain capacity, which the engine could never reach (it needed 14.7v but only put out 14.4v).

Talk about the best-laid plans o mice and men going awry. 250kg of lead-acid battery dumped after one year of chronic abuse. A replacement set costing a small fortune. A tonne and a half of coal burnt to keep the chronic dampness and cold out. Hundreds and hundreds of litres of diesel burnt to run on-board central heating, as well as to partially recharge the batteries. Hundreds of litres of unleaded fuel used to keep the suitcase genny sweet. A sizeable investment in solar panels, panels which for the half of the year you truly need them are conspicuous by their absence to deliver any volts whatsoever. It’s not even the off-grid burning of so many hydrocarbons that bothered me the most: it was the almost permanent state of hyper-alertness, apprehension and even anxiety, just waiting for the red low voltage warning light to blink on. Moreover, that one’s life is now going to be totally dictated to by the whims of auxiliary power. You cannot stop thinking about it. Constantly monitoring the situation; always on edge, twitching to pay back the battery bank for every little withdrawal of amps you make on a daily basis. I mean, how is anyone supposed to relax when providing domestic power becomes an almost obsessional challenge equal to servicing personal loans and debts.

The 99% who turn to mains power as a solution for modern power-intensive living: how could they ever know how taxing it is to manage the off-grid life? I didn’t until I unplugged the cable from shore power. Once the brief honeymoon period ended, the reality hit hard. Now, I believe if you are blessed enough to live in a perennially sunny spot below Latitude 45 degrees, living off grid by means of a large solar array is definitely do-able. Equally, tapping geo-thermal hotspots in your Icelandic backyard would work nicely, too. However, the indulgence of trying such a modus vivendi in a kingdom of rains and dirty grey clouds, like this one, by my reckoning is a challenge too great for most mortals. It was for me. I don’t want to face these uphill struggles through the dark of autumn and winter any more. Not here. Not now.

Human effort is not measured, thankfully, in amps. All experience is good experience, save for murder, incest and animal cruelty. At least i tried. And no one can take that away from me.

The Social Experiment in Living Off-Grid: How Goes It?

#alternative lifestyle, #living off-grid, boats, Ecology, England, environment, Lifestyle, social issues, Society

Part I: Life on the Grid

Or should that be the anti-social experiment in off-grid living? There is that aspect, too, though there’s more to life off-grid than a simple wordplay. Or unbearable isolation. There’s the experiment itself, which has to be longitudinal – meaning same conditions over an extended period – and has to transition from living on-grid to living off, with all the upheavals that entails. For all those who aspire to living La Vida Loca – offline, unhitched, and possibly unhinged – the experience goes a bit thus…

Before entering the spartan realm of minimalist, I was a maximalist. Whereas today I can claim to tiptoe on the Earth with a size-4 carbon/ecological footprint, pre-watershed I used to make the Earth shake with a megafauna-sized carbon footprint. You know the type: Crusty the Clown outsized shoes, freak show dimensions, gargantuan metatarsals. Three years ago, but it seems like only yesterday (to quote The Carpenters), I was following a high-octane consumption pattern.

Living twixt the ocean and the deserts of the Arabian Gulf, I drove a car whose off-roading capabilities rendered it a gas-guzzling behemoth. Not that quenching its thirst for fuel mattered much, as costs at the pump were absurdly affordable. I lived in a business hotel in a spacious apartment high up on the 18th floor. For nine months of the year the air outside was so sultry that the air-con inside was on 24/7. A simple walk around the vast mosque near my home, while pleasant, often resulted in a complete body sweat blended in with atmospheric dust and other nasty particulates. The only self-purification was to lose oneself in the apartment’s planet-sized, walk-in shower cubicle. I dread to think what the water consumption was per shower. And yes, in summer one shower could easily morph into three scrub downs per day. That in itself wouldn’t be too egregious an act of environmental vandalism were it not for the fact that in the entire Arabian peninsula – an area about the size of Western Europe – there is not one single watercourse viewable from space. That means that ‘sweet’ water has to be sourced from somewhere other than the traditional go-to place for the native Bedouins, the well.

Arabia’s carrying capacity for humans is naturally small. To elevate it in order to invite millions of migratory workers in, engineers had to build a series of water desalination plants along the coast. Turning seawater into the salt-free solution that comes through the plumbing requires phenomenal amounts of oil to burn the salt off millions of gallons of water in steam condensers that run day and night. This process accounts for a surprising percentage of all oil production. That aside, the point I’m trying to force through here is that just to have a shower required an industrial process that burnt mind-boggling quantities of oil from water sequestrated from the ocean. The Persian Gulf, all 700 miles of it, is turning saltier because of the desalination required to sustain millions of migrant labourers. This brackish chemistry puts stress on the aquatic ecology, too. Most famously, sea grasses are suffering, which brings big problems downstream to grazers such as the manatee.

At work, we used machinery in a profligate way. Printing worksheets and other paraphernalia for the sake of it resulted in towers of waste paper, un-recyclable laser jet cartridges, and overworked Xerox machines. Air-con ran all day through unmanned corridors, empty classrooms, bare staff rooms, and even little panic rooms where you go to escape the madness. The utilities bill alone must have been equal to the GDP of a small principality. Lights were routinely on in empty rooms. Just switching them off was an act of radicalism.

Workdays there are kinder than in the slave-driving West. One of the reasons so many venture there in the first place. Instead of being bolted to one’s desk until long after dark, privileged expat Europeans (Brits included) would finish work with the sun still high in the sky. That exacerbated our carbon footprint, as at 4 o’clock there’s much life left in the day. Invariably, myself and friends would do some form of physical exercise in an air-conditioned gym, on equipment often running on mains power. In fact, the treadmills often needed their own national grid to operate. Once the aerobic fun and games were over it was time to decamp to the bar for a cold one. Except, for the Guinness to reach chill factor 10 required power beyond power. When outside the temperature is touching 40 celsius with a wet bulb humidity level of 80%, and inside the beer tap has a designer layer of ice around it, you know you’ve got an addiction to mains power. Is there any wonder a pint costs the equivalent of $15?

Of course, this power audit i’m describing is not the half of it. One of the great mass movements of expats in the carbon-rich Gulf is to descend en masse to the airport on the first day of school holidays. It is far from unusual to meet a colleague, neighbour or even drinking buddy in the queue for check-in. Their intended destinations are myriad, but all of them are linked by one carbon-relevant fact: flight time is seldom less than five hours, and sometimes fifteen. That’s a lot of vapour trail.

But this mass gathering of folks sharing similar socio-economic status is by no means confined to the air travel industry. If you want to visualise another airport analogue, but this time for the domestic market outside of school holidays, look no further than the mall. The great emporium of the 21st century – beloved of Arab rulers who see a historicity with the ancient bazaars and souks of the Middle East, as well as a source of great internal revenue – draws the crowds in all weathers, be it hot or hotter. Some, such as the Dubai Mall, are so sprawling as to contain more shops than some cities (Dubai Mall has circa 1,200 individual rental units within its great perimeter walls).

Once inside these 21st Century temples of consumer worship you see the level of food waste. That, in itself, is staggering. If I had a dollar for every plate of leftovers I witnessed, I’d be a wealthy man. Buffets barely-touched. Takeaways partially eaten. Quantities of cooked food that no society without an agricultural base should ever rightfully have within their means. The profligacy of quality food would appall any good Presbyterian. There, in the Arabian Gulf, apportioning little or no value to a precious thing as fresh, quality food is a fact of life in a burnout society gone badly wrong. Now, if these generous helpings of leftovers would go to feeding the pitiful canine waifs and strays that mill around behind malls and hotels, I could almost justify the waste. But they don’t, as a matter of policy. The Muslim rulers would rather legislate for a situation where uneaten food is binned than to nourish an animal considered to be vermin.

Like any superstructure, be it an international airport hub or a world-beating shopping mall, the maintenance costs of the mall are almost as environmentally disastrous as the industrial legacy of building them from their foundations. While I don’t profess to having the data on how many megawatts per hour the Dubai Mall uses in order to keep the lights on, the air-con nippy, and the customers happy, I’ll wager that its not far off the levels consumed by the whole country thirty years ago. A graph showing the mains power consumption over a thirty-year period would likely resemble a hockey stick: from sustainable to a complete loss of perspective in a single generation. The point being here that I was one of millions far exceeding a carbon footprint expected from the average consumer in their home nations. It’s the gift that keeps giving, the party without the hangover.

So much raw power consumed from relatively few sources. We’re not talking PV solar panels blanketing the desert, drawing in abundant current from the Arabian sun. We’re talking good old fashioned oil-burning power stations sending carbon consumption through the roof for many. We’re talking industrial output from raw materials extraction that has had a deleterious – in places catastrophic – effect on the specialist ecology and wildlife of the desert. Arabian leopard, down to two hundred individuals across two million square miles. The Arabian wolf, dwindling away to nothing, unable to halt their own human-led persecution. Hyrax, under threat. Corals, wrecked by coastal degradation. About the only wild things to have prospered are the feral dogs that cling on, unloved, in the derelict quarters of the city. Oh, and the ubiquitous camel, too cherished as a commodity to be in danger of extinction.

It doesn’t take a visionary to see that consumption levels of both power (delivered in cheap abundance by the burning of non-renewable fossil fuels) and commodities (imported on oil-burning container ships in exchange for crude oil and gas) are disturbingly high. After five years, I was reaching a moral dead-end. I couldn’t go on enacting a lifestyle that I myself criticised for its crimes against nature. To be sitting at a bar in the desert drinking Irish beer from a tap that’s chilled not by the air outside but but a long chain of industrial processes demanding huge quantities of power, while having discussions about how to bang the world to rights, that’s wasn’t going to cut it long-term. That’s when the small footprint plan kicked into action.

The transition from energy elephant to mouse has been a steep learning curve. Contrastive, to say the least. It’s not all peaches and cream when you’re trying to atone for your former environmental crimes. The challenges of acquiring power off-grid, of limiting daily usage, and of scrimping on water, are in their own right as equally immense as running power stations for cities such as Dubai. Ethically, living off-grid you’re on firmer ground. However, in a practical sense could we all do it? Or is off-grid living destined to be a strictly niche affair?

In my next blog, I’ll illustrate some of the day-to-day rituals required to keep the lights on, the fire going, and the water running.