The Narrow View: Water, water everywhere ...

Nov 13 2012 By Natasha Gorbert-Hopkins

Natasha Gorbert-Hopkins

... and not a drop to drink. I’ve lived more or less my entire life on a boat, which has led to two things:

1. The novelty has well and truly worn off. This may become apparent over the course of this blog.

2. I sometimes don’t realise that the things I have to do in my everyday life are not entirely normal.

For example, last night I got home from work and had a shower. Before I went into the bathroom, I had to turn on the gas water heater which sits on the wall in our kitchen, and set the temperature.

This is a precise, high-risk science, because once you get in the shower you can’t really adjust how hot the water is.

Will you burn your toes off? Will you freeze? Who knows!?

The shower has a pump that draws the water out through the plughole and into the canal, but this pump isn’t all that effective, so having recently dyed my hair bright red, I ended up with scarlet water swimming around my ankles.

On the bright side, I now appear to have rather tanned feet.

At one point the water suddenly went cold, and I froze, like a (dead?) deer in the headlights.

This doesn’t happen because we’ve run out of hot water – the water heater ensures it’s constantly hot – but because we have run out of water, full stop.

Our water supply comes from tanks under the floor of the boat; every couple of weeks we have to go and fill up our tank, from a tap on the side of canal.

Sometimes, we don’t fill up soon enough, and the tanks run dry. Thankfully, this has never happened when I have a head full of shampoo!