Yesterday has got to be one of the most pain-in-the ass days there has been on my new boat to date. Difficult, not in the sense of a “Boo-Hoo what have I got myself into?” day, more a sense of “well things could be a little bit better”. After all who wouldn’t want heating when the weather outside is something like 5 degrees centigrade? Especially when you think all I have between me and that distinctly chilly river outside is 6mm of steel and 3 quilts.

Well I’m out a diesel, and being out of diesel means as well as not being able to go anywhere to get any diesel, the central heating won’t work, because as you may have guessed it, the heating is powered by diesel. Of course I could plug some sort of electrical heater in to take that edge off. And I do have a fan heater here. But as any of you who have experienced such a thing should know, those mothers eat your electricity. Allied to the knowledge that my electricity runs on tokens which cost £2 a pop and have to be slotted into the meter, witnessing what little cash I have whizzing around at ever quicker rates than I would care to see, means its not really that much of a valid option.

So as I wait for the diesel boat to come trundling down the river to fill me up my options are distinctly limited. In addition, my toilet is full of some sort of brown crap. The nature of which I’m not entirely certain, but to think about it logically, well what do you reckon? This boat has a holding tank, so on every occasion the toilet is used, everything that came out of you, plus the water in the toilet bowl gets stored in some tank way down underneath my bed. In order to empty the tank, you use a pumping station located at different spots along the river, where you plug a hose in and it sucks the whole thing out, so I’m told, I’ve yet to have that pleasure. But of course I can’t move. So the flushing of the toilet is on hold, whilst I sit in the cold waiting for the diesel, which would allow me to get warm as I go up the river to empty the bloody thing.

Just the other day Chef, one of the other merry band of boaters who lives on our marina, told me a story, I hope not prophetically, about someone who had problems with their pump out. Apparently they had some air trapped in their system, and when they went to pump it out the tank blew throwing you know what everywhere, and making their boat inhabitable for six months. I so do hope that's not the fate awaiting me considering I’ve only had the thing for a month.