Saturday, April 21, 2007
Apart from enjoying the beautiful Shropshire countryside I've spent much time working on my new book, Living the Dream, which has now been published and tells the story of our days aboard Lady Elgar.
The book is available direct from me via my website www.trevorpavitt.co.uk or from High Line Yachting at Iver, The Uxbridge Boat Center or Limekiln Chandlery at Compton.
Here is my introduction to the book just to whet your appetite:
I sit staring at a pile of six rather battered logbooks.
Four of them are red and of uniform size – about nine inches by seven in old money. The other two are black and somewhat larger.
I open the first, the most battered, and find that on the opening page I have copied out some lines from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, writer and mystic so beloved of the hippie generation:
Despite its apparent illogicality (were we supposed to travel at night?), this passage reflects the essence of the dream we had back in the early 1990s when we conceived the idea of living on a canal boat and wandering the length and breadth of
Of course it didn’t quite work out like that. The log books track the practical progress of our dream and remind me that circumstances often forced us to remain in one place for long periods. The slow-moving, golden days of our imagination were few and far between whilst much time was spent in patient effort as we battled against winds and rain or struggled with recalcitrant locks. Nevertheless, despite long periods on our home mooring the logbooks reveal that we were able, in the course of some ten years, to cover more than 5,000 miles of waterway and negotiate over 4,000 locks. More importantly, though often not recorded, we met fascinating and eccentric people and made many good friends. We were able to observe our homeland from a unique viewpoint, whether it was those parts of it, almost unchanged since medieval times, where we slept with the knowledge that there was probably not another human being within a mile of our mooring, or the teeming cities where the canal threads its way through a fading industrial landscape and city workers rush about, late for appointments, babbling into mobile ‘phones, obsessed with details of a life that seemed to us of supreme superficiality.
As I attempt to extract a coherent account of our days aboard Lady Elgar from the carefully ruled pages of distances, timings and miscellaneous notes I am aware of the fact that never, even at the nadir of our fortunes, did I ever regret embarking upon our great adventure.
My only regret, as I stare at the pile of battered books that represent those ten, wonderful years is that we were eventually obliged to abandon a lifestyle that suited us so supremely well.
This is the story of our dream.
