Tea With Alice Salon 62

I know this was caused by a pest but it looks like beautiful lace.

I’ve been living on a boat in regent’s canal for the past week, and other than a rough start with arriving to find the septic tank full (as horrifying and stressful a process to solve as you could possibly imagine), it’s been very cool and weird and interesting. Laser Fraser can’t go up stairs yet, so it’s very safe and fun for her to caterpillar around in the cabin, which is lovely.

The people who live in Canal Boats in London are a wild mix of delightful. Eccentrics, off-grid-ideologues and middle class people hacking the system to get access to home ownership (Emphasis on the ‘ship’) in the middle of london. I’m in a little sort of gated mooring area - about a hundred people in about half that many boats, semi permanently moored here with little gardens and sheds on the land side bespeaking a greater connection to place than the fact of living on a boat might indicate. The gates close at night and then everyone emerges onto the path for BBQs and children running around. It’s this real village atmosphere.

I had a chat with an American lady, clearly an old rocker - tatts, jeans, the 50’s housewife head-wrap who opens her boat to the mooring’s children on a Sunday morning to give the parents a break. She and her husband are in their mid fifties, used to live in a Red State in the US and a few years ago converted to Islam. I asked if it was hard to make such a profound change in your metaphysical worldview in your fifties. She said, gesturing at her head, “well, I was already into wearing all these hats…”.

I have been laughing about it for days.

Salon this week is Friday instead of Wednesday.

Tea With Alice Salon 62

I’ll send through the link tomorrow just before the salon.