Different lives

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on April 12^th 2025.

Next week we leave Le Shack and our life on the land, swapping it for a life on the water with Olivia Rose for the summer. As our departure date gets ever closer I find myself in limbo, not quite fully present in our everyday tasks as we prepare the cabin for four to six months without us here to look after it, and not quite able to re-connect yet to what feels like my other self, living such a different life. Once I’m on the boat I know I will shift almost instantly into a different mode and it will seem completely natural, but for the next few days I am neither in one place nor the other.

We all live one life, but that is no more than an overview, rather like the title of a television series, and what gives that life colour and interest is the individual episodes within it. Growing up, maturing, growing older and changing as we move through each phase.

I have a favourite walk from Le Shack, about an hour long, which loops round in a big circle, partly through woods and partly through open farmland. This walk takes me past an old farmhouse, which has been abandoned since we first moved here. It is one of those places that is instantly appealing and looks as if it is just waiting for a new owner to come along and lavish a bit of love and attention on it. The last time we came back after our summer away I could see immediately that things had changed. The yard had been tidied, chickens were scratching away happily in a large enclosure safe from foxes, small polytunnels had been erected and someone had been putting in some hard graft on the newly dug vegetable beds. A young French couple had moved in and were living a smallholder life, living the good life.

It bought back memories of when we lived that smallholder life in Wales, over fifteen years ago now, although it feels more distant. That particular episode of my personal television series was a very different time, and when I think of how busy we were, how much boundless energy we had, I find it hard now to believe that was really me. That’s the mixed blessing of a long-running TV series – if the main character doesn’t get killed off they just get older!!! At the ripe old age of 64, I am having to accept that I can’t do what I did when I was 45, or even 50, and there are times when I’m tempted to sack the script writers and get someone to write a different story, turning back the clock and introducing a younger me. However life doesn’t work that way, and we all have to adapt. None of us can escape it.

I felt a bit nostalgic as I walked past that young couple working hard with so much ahead of them, but not in a bad way. I believe that doors open and doors close all the time and with each decade that passes we need to keep opening doors, sometimes different ones to what we might have got used to or would ideally like, but the promise of finding out what lies on the other side never fades.

Which leads me neatly ( if I say so myself) to what lies ahead for us this summer. We are leaving the Netherlands, where everything works, and heading back to French waterways, where things often don’t. The last time we were cruising through France everything was in chaos: many canals closed due to drought problems or maintenance issues, as well as the never-ending challenge of the weed infestations that were blocking so much of the network. We don’t know what to expect, having been away for two years. Will it be worse or better? I have a gut feeling that this summer might not work out as we have planned but all we can do is slip the lines, point Olivia in the right direction and see what we find. And if there is one thing that eight years of having a boat has taught me, it is that it’s ok if things don’t go exactly to plan. Mostly……

I’ll leave you with a few memories of Le Shack, looking at its best. The daffodils are all finished but the blue bells are a delight. The trees are sporting their finest spring greens, the birds are singing their hearts out and the pond is full of newts, as well as at least four different salamanders and a decent sized snake. The cicadas are singing during the day, the frogs and toads taking up the baton at night and it feels like Eden.

See you next week with news of how Olivia has fared over the winter. Given that boats never appreciate being left I am sure there will be plenty of work to do.

MJ