My neighbour, a lovely young woman who used to rescue street dogs in Puerto Rico and who now studies chickens at the Oxford University zoology unit, knocked on my window Friday morning. Wrapped in a fluffy pink dressing gown, trailed by two of her elderly dogs, and grasping a greasy plastic bag, she signalled to me that she had some “unfortunate news”: apparently her cocker spaniel had raided the bow of my boat and carried off a duck, the remnants of my Thanksgiving celebrations.

The day I feel most foreign, most homesick, most alone is the fourth Thursday in November. For a few years, when I first lived in England, I celebrated faithfully with other expatriots. There was a little deli in the Oxford Covered Market where you could get Libby’s One Pie Pumpkin in a can and Aunt Jemima’s Cornbread Mix in a box, but only if you ordered in advance and paid an eye watering price. When the day came to pick up your goodies you stood in line while they carefully scanned their list and ticked your name off. If you got to the front of the queue, and confessed you hadn’t ordered, but really, really wanted pumpkin pie, you were properly scolded (as only the Brits can scold) and added to a waiting list. Sometimes you got the tin, and sometimes you didn’t.

Things got tougher when I moved out of the city and into a small southwest Oxfordshire village. The expatriot community had moved on; the grownups had jobs and the children had homework, and no one wanted a feast day on a Thursday. I shifted our family celebrations to the following Sunday, and murmured with discontent at the radio and television news that would not let me forget: “Wall Street was closed today for the Thanksgiving holiday”.

I skipped a few Thanksgivings. The Oxford deli closed down and my marriage was over. The kids were gone, except my youngest. Thursday was the Ex’s night and we weren’t friendly enough for me to ask for a swap, so I was on my own. I bought sushi-for-one as a special holiday treat and went to the gym.

When I came home, the cat had eaten the sushi.

That was the last time I didn’t celebrate properly. After that, I did what I should have done long before. I wrote a note to my child’s teacher to say she wouldn’t be doing homework that night. I took the same number of days off work as I would have if I had been in the US. I cooked up a storm, laid a table for 12 to 14, and finally raised a child who loves pumpkin pie.

But times and kids moved on again. I left the house in the village and gave the table that seats 14 to the Ex. He uses it to stack papers, a giant desk that only needs to be cleaned every 5 years or so, and I moved onto the boat.

I’ve celebrated three Thanksgivings on Pangolin. The tiny oven (14.5 x 12 inches) means I cook in shifts over several days, and though I did spatchcock a turkey one year on the barbeque, a duck works best indoors. My parties are smaller, too. I can just about manage two couples, plus me. This year the menu was duck, stuffing (with home baked bread), mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, Brussels sprouts with mushrooms and pancetta, and two kinds of cornbread, followed by pumpkin mousse with rum, cream and brown sugared almonds.

Someone asked if we shouldn’t say grace, and one of my guests and I responded with the Oxford blessing: Benedictus, benedicat. If you say it in Latin the religion counts, or doesn’t count, and no one is sure.

I do have a refrigerator on Pangolin, and I use it in the summer, when the solar panel runs it for nothing, but in the winter it seems profligate to run that indoor box when the outdoor world will do almost as much. I sent my guests home with as many leftovers as they would take, and I wrapped my duck carcass in foil and put it in the cratch (the covered bit of a narrowboat bow) along with a jug filled with the giblet gravy.

My neighbour opened her plastic bag and offered me the defiled bones, in case I wanted them for my own dog, but I declined. The jug of giblet gravy was licked almost clean, but the livers at the bottom escaped her dog’s tongue, so mine still had breakfast.

And with that, another Thanksgiving was over.

This time of year boater small talk is invariably about the fire. In September and early October, not long after hello, and how are you? we invariably ask, lit your fire yet?

Boaty Brits are not so different from other sorts, and moderation is still where virtue lies. Eyebrows are raised at news of fires before the second half of September, and the unreasonable abstinence of those who wait until November is likewise quietly despised.

But now, without controversy, the morning and evening mist above the canal is thickened with smoke, and the distinctive smell of burning coal drifts along the whole length of the city towpath moorings. Even the hardiest among us have long since lit their fires, and almost to a one we have the same goal: to keep it going continuously until sometime in March or April, when the boater greeting will change again: Still keeping your fire in? (with, perhaps, another raised eyebrow at any unusual indulgence.)

Each year, though this is my fifth winter aboard, it takes me a few weeks to get the hang of keeping the fire in. In October I often let it go out, because the discipline is new each autumn, and because warm Indian summer afternoons lure me to forget how grumpy and cold I will be in the evening, kneeling before the stove and blowing on tiny, reluctant sparks. If embers only understood cussing, they would certainly glow red.

The colder days and long nights of November bring more focus, and though I no longer forget to stoke the fire, a strong desire to stay in bed – it’s too dark and too cold to get up – means I risk the night before’s pile of coal turning to ashes long before I’ve dragged myself from under the covers. More tiny, reluctant sparks, and more bad language.

But all has been well, and the fire continuously lit, for 10 days or so, and I am congratulating myself that I have got the hang of it for another winter on board.

I thought I might try to keep a diary of this winter on Pangolin, and this is my first entry. Perhaps when I am really cold and lonely and tired of the dark, and have nothing interesting to say, I will post about the opposite – the warmth and companionship and light of the summer just gone.

I thought I’d posted the following way back in January, but since I wasn’t expecting any comments, I never checked…  I find some internet inattention means it never appeared….

Never mind!  Life has barely changed.  I was away in February, but the wind was, I am told, unremittently in the east.  I returned this week to a promise of spring, but the weatherpeople assure us that it is back to winter next week.

Below, for what it’s worth, is my January post:

The wettest English summer on record gave way to an autumn with rain still failing. For weeks every lock on the Thames sported red boards — forbidding navigation to all but the foolhardy — and scuppered my plans for river cruising.

Some boats who ventured out despite the warnings sank. Others who stayed obediently at home were ripped from their moorings, swept into open weirs, and also sank. The canal was mostly safe, but the southernmost end of the South Oxford, where I moor, is fed by the River Cherwell, the smaller of the two rivers that flow through the city. The water here can also rise and fall quickly: leave your ropes too tight as the levels change, and your boat may list, fill with water, sink. The internet was full of sad tales and dire warnings.

Returning home from my autumn canal cruises, I tied Pangolin to her moorings in late October and stayed put. I missed the boaters’ Christmas dinner at my old mooring. Last year I brought her singlehanded through the four lift bridges, four locks and seven miles between me and the Rock of Gibraltar, and tied up in the pub garden for the Christmas fun, but the last part of that journey crosses the River Cherwell, and this year I didn’t dare risk the floods. I made a tentative plan to take the journey for New Year instead, but once again I googled the Environment Agency’s account of the swollen river, and cancelled my trip.

In the late afternoon of the 31st of December, in the last hours of 2012, it finally stopped raining. We partied on the towpath around a fire built in an old washing machine drum, and celebrated not being wet.

The legacy of 2012, continuing well into the New Year, is the mud, treacherously slippery along the towpath. Even the shortest walk brings it home, caked to my boots and splattered to my knees. Every visitor tramped in more, however much I policed indoor and outdoor shoes.

Finally, the wind changed direction, the mud froze, the temperature plummeted, and we were twice threatened with what the tabloid press likes to call the “Beast from the East”. An east wind doesn’t sound so bad until you look at a map and work out that if you go far enough east of here, you hit Siberia.

The first Beast from the East brought only a few flurries, but the second dumped snow over much of the country. Then it snowed some more. We aren’t used to it, and it doesn’t take much for all transport to fail.

Snow or not, in winter, as no other season, the weather dominates life on the boat. The strict regimen of the fire demands order the way no other task has since my children were small. Like a baby it must be coddled every few hours, and put to bed at night well stoked, hoping it will last until morning (I won’t push the simile any farther).

Three times a week I heave of a 25kg bag of coal from the roof of my boat to the covered space on the bow. From there I shovel coal into the scuttle and stoke the fire. I save each empty coal bag to take away the cooled ashes. Only once all winter (so far!) have I accidentally let it go out.

There are worse punishments for getting your fire regimen wrong than waking up freezing cold. Whether through careless attention to the rigours of the coal stove, or unprotected candles, or some other cause, fire has destroyed two boats near me and cost one life.

At my new mooring, just around the corner on the cut that links the canal with the river Thames, a boat burned so fiercely that the bones on board could not be identified for weeks. At my old mooring, my old next door neighbour leapt naked in the early hours one Saturday morning, sans teeth and spectacles, to watch blurry-eyed as his boat blazed.

Compared to that, my troubles are small. The taps froze and I eked out the remains of water onboard most unhygienically. Stoking the fire, I counted the hours until the promised thaw.

It came sooner than predicted; I was sorry when the last promised snow fell instead as rain, but the little warmth it brought came, at first, as a relief. Towards dawn, when the wind swung back to the west, and blew in, one after another, a bank of Atlantic storms, I shed one of the two duvets I had been snuggling under.

Now, the canal is again filled with the brown run off from flooded rivers and the towpaths are thick and slippery with mud. If it weren’t so bloody cold getting out of bed in the morning, I’d fill up my water tank and vote for an east wind all winter long.

It turned frosty last week, just after I got back from my autumn cruises, and just before the country turned back the clocks, that sad Saturday in late October when British Summer Time gives way to Greenwich Mean, and we know winter is really baring down upon us.

This morning was the coldest so far, with a thick frost outside and ice in all the puddles. I huddled under my two duvets until the sun pouring in the back porthole that I always keep uncovered shamed me into finally getting out of bed.

From the back of Pangolin, where my bed is, I can’t tell whether the fire is still lit — all I know is it’s cold. I try to keep the stove going all night, but it is a delicate balance — burning it low enough so it consumes the fewest nuggets of coal, but not so low that it goes out altogether. The plan is, if I keep the ash pan almost full and the air vents barely open, a fire that seems all but dead at dawn will be summoned back to life the moment it’s needed, though I mustn’t push my luck and lay abed too long.

Last night (hurrah!) I husbanded the fire as I ought, and this morning the routine of brisk riddling, pulling out the ash pan and laying it to cool on the hearth, leaving open the bottom door of the stove to give the fire air was all it needed. By the time the kettle was boiled for tea, the coals were glowing bright red.

On the towpath the local excitement — and sadness — is the cutting of the willow trees on the other side of the canal. The sound of chainsaws let me know they were at it again this morning.

I’d chatted with the woodcutters when they first arrived last week. We’ve got to keep the waterways clear, they said, and I reluctantly agreed they did. On my recent cruise I lost my expensive, tall chimney (foolishly left lying on its side on the roof — you can’t cruise under the low bridges with anything but a stub of a chimney, and tall ones have to be taken down, but I should have put mine safely away). A batch of wayward willow branches stretching low across the canal swept it into the water. A pretty pelargonium went overboard with the chimney.

I chatted to our woodcutters again a few days into their pruning fest. They were eyeing the only willow that seemed to me a problem, one that nearly overhangs a neighbouring boat, and they asked if I knew when that boat owner might be back. They wanted to move the boat, in case the tree fell the wrong way.

That boat’s abandoned, I said. The mooring fees and license are paid, but no one comes. The woodcutters and I agreed, looking it over, it must have been a lovely and well-loved boat. On the roof is a row of wooden planters and ceramic pots, now growing only weeds, and a bag of compost, its plastic faded and degrading, still waiting for new season bulbs. The neatly coiled ropes on front and rear decks are covered in algae and green slime. Black mold makes peering into the windows almost unrevealing, but I can see enough to see that the insides were once carefully fitted out for comfortable cruising.

I’d heard from Dusty, the fuel boater who knows everything, why no one ever came to such a fine boat. It belonged to an elderly couple, and the husband died — I think Dusty said he died suddenly, on a cruise on the Thames, only a few miles from here, but I admit I may have embroidered those details, because someone else told me it was cancer, and slow and expected. Anyway, British Waterways sorted the widow out a mooring, here on the edge of Oxford, such moorings being usually rare, and rarely expensive. This seems to me a typically human face of British Waterways, though it is fashionable to grumble about them.

However it happened, once the husband died, his wife never came back, and their boat, moored next to mine, has been empty, and slowly turning from blue to green, since I moved here.

When I’d told the woodcutters this story, and we’d muttered about how sad it was, and I’d said that no one would ever notice if they moved the boat to cut the tree, and gave them permission to move my boat as well, I went out. I mentioned I might go over the canal when they were done and scrounge some wood, if that was okay. We talked a bit about which sorts of wood burned best and longest, and they loyally championed willow.

I came home to find outside my boat a neatly stacked pile of willow logs, trimmed to just the right size for a boat’s fire, left for me by the woodcutters.

Still, I am sorry for the chopping. It is much more extensive than I had imagined. The tree where kingfishers darted amongst the branches is gone, and the views along the canal are much changed. I know the willows will come back; I hope the kingfishers will.

Speaking of Dusty, he’s due. I’m on his border, one of the last customers he visits before he moors up for the night on the outskirts of Oxford, or one of the first he calls on on his way into town — I never know which it is going to be.

Dusty’s first call is early, and since I haven’t seen him tonight I expect to feel his boat banging up beside mine, and hearing him ring his bell, well before 8 tomorrow morning. He’ll fill my tank with diesel, toss half a dozen bags of coal onto my roof, and leave a bottle of propame gas on the bank, taking away the empty I’ve left for him.

For me, it won’t be the best morning to wake early, as I expect I’ll be cuddled up to the radio all night, like the mid twentieth century wayward child I am, once again listening out for the returns in Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Virginia and the rest.

Four years ago I sat up all night with my two younger, almost grown, children at their father’s house in Oxford and drove home alone at six in the morning listening to the words of a victory speech that filled me with extraordinary hope and joy.

This year, a more sensible woman would just go quietly to bed. Whatever, first I’ll drag another 25kg bag of coal from the roof, fill the coal scuttle, stoke the fire, riddle the grail and twiddle the knobs; that way, there probably won’t be a disaster in the morning — at least not with the fire.

I don’t know how it was for you, but the supporters of Team GB had a jolly good time. On the whole, we like losing, which we do often and well, but it turns out we like winning even better.

And ever since we famously gave up our stiff upper lip the night that wayward princess didn’t buckle up for safety (or, as the Brits say, clunk, click, every trip), we’ve been following dear Rudyard’s advice, and treating triumph and disaster just the same.

Some press wag dubbed these the Crying Games, and he or she got it just right. Andy Murray warmed us up by sobbing through his Wimbledon Final runner-up speech a few weeks before the Games began, and he served up more tears after he walloped the same opponent and took gold.

One after one the winners wept through the raising of their flag as they choked out the words to their national anthem, while the losers have thrown themselves on the ground, inconsolable in their grief.

All this weeping put everyone in a good mood. Londoners stopped complaining about the Soviet-style appropriation of whole lanes of busy roads, open only to the “Olympic Family”, and hardly anyone is still muttering about the elderly men of the IOC, who resemble nothing so much as good, old-fashioned apparatchiks.

Never mind them, we medalled 65 times, and Team GB finished third in the tables. “Inspire a generation” is the new catch phrase.

I don’t think I am quite the generation they have in mind, but I am a very suggestible person. I am incapable of seeing anyone cry without tears streaming down my face, and the other day, filled with Olympic emotion, I joined the hoards of the all-choked-up queueing in the sports shop.

Reader, I bought a yoga mat and downloaded a running app for my phone. I’m assured that this will turn me from a couch potato to a 5k runner in only two months.

I haven’t done any running yet, but I did listen to the app. It says alternately every 90 seconds in a loud and cheerful voice, “Okay, let’s jog!” and “Okay, let’s walk!”. After 20 minutes of this it says, “Great! I knew you could do it!”

What? No blubbing?

As for the verbal use of the noun “medal” I refer sceptics to the OED, which sites such use as early as 1822 by no less a writer than Byron, and after him, Thackery. I admit I draw the line at “podiumed”. Whatever else it is, it’s a syllable too far, and I don’t think it will catch on, though it does add scope for an extra sob.

The jetstream shifted north, the rain stopped, and the red, no navigation signs on the upper Thames gave way to yellow, caution boards.

I drove the car up to the boat yard, admired Pangolin’s splendid, new, black hull and paid the bill without fainting. As I was wondering whether she would start without a jump (a real issue if the engine hasn’t been fired up for more than a week), I spotted a stack of lovely new batteries.

In a few minutes I’d bought a new starter battery and sweet-talked the yard into hooking it up at no extra charge. (They got the scrap value of the old battery, and I didn’t have to do the heavy lifting.)

At the same time we agreed that I would head home on their Trade Plates, meaning I did not have to spend an extra almost £40 buying a full day’s license for the Thames, just to go through the one lock that separates me from my usual canal home. The deal involved air quotes (an international symbol, though as it still unknown to the QWERTY keyboard, I must simply say that the lock keeper was informed that I had the plates “on board”).

As the new starter battery also needed — without irony — to get on board, I agreed to come back the next day to pick up the boat.

The engine fired first time. Pangolin was tied to another boat out of the yard, on the river and pointing upstream, so my first job was to turn around, not so easy in the still strong current, but finally I was off.

I got around the bends, under toll the bridge, past the moored boats, and into the lock with no real trouble. The lock keeper knew I was on my way, and working the boat solo, and he was very nice and helpful — checking that I was okay holding only the centre line as the water level dropped. (I shared the lock with a big, wide, fibre glass cruiser whose crew eyed my nineteen tons of steel with anxiety. I tossed them a look of consumate confidence, and held the line tight.)

As I pulled out of the lock the keeper advised me to give the engine some revs past the weir stream. After a hundred yards or so, he said I would be fine.

The journey back, downstream, was much faster than going against the strong current two weeks earlier, and I soon saw those pesky DANGER signs at King’s lock weir.

(Here I meant to supply a photo, but decided I had probably better pay attention to driving the boat instead…)

In another few moments I was in Duke’s Cut, leaving the danger behind.

The Thames locks are manned, but on the canal it is do-it-yourself, so I was glad to see a group of kayakers at the lock at the end of Duke’s Cut. The kids were very keen to close the lock gate behind me. I slipped out of the cut, and turned a sharp right towards Oxford.

Three dry days meant the lift bridge had lost some of its water weight, and I just managed to close it behind me, passing my last obstacle. In a few minutes I was manoevering the boat back into her mooring.

I had been gone almost two weeks. The nettles and brambles were out of control and the birds were starving.

I was home.

It’s raining hard. In fact, it has rained for some part of almost every day since a drought was officially declared last week in most of southern England and Wales. (Scotland is, as usual, drenched.)

The Orders are typically British: complicated, detailed and humane. For example, under Drought Orders you are not allowed to use a hosepipe to fill a garden pond or water feature, unless your water feature features fish.

Do not go out and buy goldfish just to beat the ban! pleaded the water company spokesman, interviewed days before the Orders came into force. The BBC journalist asked more probing questions, and we learned that any living creature you introduce into your pond triggers an exemption, while one that wanders in accidentally — a frog, say — does not.

Everyone knows the Brits are obsessed with weather. Never mind however many words Eskimos have for snow, I reckon Brits could give them a run for their money with rain. An early favourite of mine was “merged showers” but I have more recently been won over by “wetting rain”.

They teach this weather obsession in school, and they start early. When he was two and a bit, I enrolled my first born son in a playgroup run by one of the Oxford colleges. For most of the three hours, five mornings the kids raced around on tricycles. There were a few puzzles and the odd doll, but preschool was mostly about wheels; there was no structure, or even a nod at educational content, except at mid-morning juice and biscuits. Then everyone sat in a circle, and, raising her Dixie cup, the teacher solemnly asked, Now children, what is the weather like?

Later in the curriculum, I guess, the kids learn to be judgmental about weather. The “wrong kind of snow” is a well-rehearsed British Rail excuse for late trains, recently revived to explain water shortages: though apparently any kind of snow is the wrong kind of stuff to prevent a drought. What we want is the right kind of rain.

Rain is divided into “useful” rain and “not useful” rain and the weather forecasters always tell us which we are getting: very heavy rain is not useful (because it runs away too quickly); very light rain (though it might be “wetting”) is also not useful.  Basically, to prevent a drought, it needs to rain three times a fortnight, all year round, not too hard and not too soft.

Otherwise it is every frog for himself.

Saturday
Long delayed winter has finally come, and the fire is the one chore I cannot neglect. Every few days I heave a 25 kg bag of coal from the roof, carry it the 62 ft length of the boat and drag it onto the covered section of the bow. From there I shovel up several scuttlefuls of coal a day, and, kneeling in front of the stove, pull the riddling arm, fast in and out, in and out. When the grate is clear I swap new black nuggets for the dusty, grey ash.

It is my third winter on the boat and the bags feel heavier than they used to. I’m older than most of the people I know living on board, and much older than any solo woman. I hug the coal bags close to my chest, puff out, and count the steps until I drop my load. One day I will remember to ask Dusty to deliver the bags nearer to the front.

Last thing before bed I bank the fire and turn the vents until they are almost closed. The trick is to keep the fire only just alive through the night, so as neither to waste fuel nor to start again from a stony cold stove and a frigid shell. Pangolin, like most narrowboats, is made of steel. The winter is a fight against the frost, and the summer would be intolerable if it ever really arrived.

Sunday
I was very cold in the night and slept badly. Last winter I piled the bed with two duvets; it’s time to get the second one out.

In the morning the temperature inside, near the fire, is 5 degrees celsius (41 fahrenheit). At the back, where I sleep and dress, it is much, much colder. Outside there is a thin layer of ice on the canal, and the grass and hedges that line the towpath are white with a frost as thick as snow.

While the kettle boils I am back to riddling, now with the stove air vents wide open. By the time my tea brews the indoor temperature has risen to 8.

The forecast is for a few more days of very cold nights, and while it lasts I am rationing water even more closely than coal. At my old mooring I had to move my boat to fill the tanks, but here in Wolvercote we each have our own water tap, and all I need to do is run a hose from the tap to the bow. Lured into carelessness by such ease and the long, warm autumn, I let the tank run low. Now the tap is frozen and I must wait for a thaw. Usually I am an ant sort of person, but this time I was a grasshopper.

Monday
A worse grasshopper than I, paddling a canoe from a narrowboat above the lock crunched through the ice. It looked, and sounded, like hard work. From the half dozen empty plastic water butts he carried I knew where he was headed.

The canoe returned not long after with the water bottles full, so I know that the communal tap below the lift bridge is still running. Meanwhile I am not yet desperate, and I excuse the dishes piling up in my sink.

Far away, the English cricket team falters, and a letter is leaked to a newspaper: the Secretary of State for Education thinks the nation should buy Her Majesty a new yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee.

The sun shines. It’s our north Atlantic tradeoff — we can have it wet and mild or dry and cold.

I run the engine most nights, but because the domestic battery monitor shows good charge, forgetting that the dodgy starter battery will hate the deep freeze, I decide to save on diesel.

Tuesday
I should have known that in the morning the engine wouldn’t turn over.

I am impressed by how calm I am, since if the engine won’t start I will soon have no electricity at all. I decide to rest the battery for a few hours and then try again, making sure to give it plenty of glow plug (I guess it warms the diesel, but I think of it like the choke we used to give cars).

The barometer is falling and the wind is changing direction.

The outside water tap was still frozen in the morning, but by afternoon I get a dribble from it. I unroll the hose and chunks of ice fall off the coils. An hour later the drip becomes full flow.

As the tank fills, I fetch my jumper cables from the car; I watched the young archaeologist connect the domestic batteries to the starter and jump the engine after new year, and I am ready to manage it myself, without help, but when I try the starter battery one last time it reluctantly springs to life.

I leave the jumper cable stored in the engine room. The battery won’t hold out much longer.

Meanwhile, I notice that the elsan — the toilet emptying point just past the lift bridge to the south — is looking sluggish again (I think it cannot be the frost, because it is already noticeably warmer), so I race to empty my shit suitcase before the elsan is totally blocked.

Now, besides rationing diesel, electricity, water, and coal, I consider my bodily motions. Toilet paper, I decide, is strictly two squares per visit, until the elsan flows freely.

The Prime Minister announces that in these days of austerity it would be inappropriate for the nation to buy the queen a yacht.

Wednesday
In the night I threw off the second duvet, and by morning I hear the soft tap of rain on the roof. The west wind is back, and we have exchanged our sunny, continental frost for the more usual Atlantic, temperate gloom.

I eke the coal out one more day and night. In the morning it will be time to drag another bag from the roof.

I arrived back on Pangolin on New Year’s Eve. I had only intended to be away for two or three days, but in the end I was gone a full week. Whenever I started to say it was time for me to go home, someone asked what was for dinner, and all eyes turned to me.

It was alarmingly easy to slide back into jobs I thought I had long ago shed, and once again I found myself in charge of the total nutrition for three overgrown children and an ex husband, along with his mother and uncle, who at the last minute made the almost unheard of announcement that they were joining us for the holidays.

The rules of engagement were particularly complex with the latter two, because they have officially not spoken to me for more than ten years (since I divorced son and nephew) and we exchanged neither gifts nor cards.

Nevertheless, when Uncle Bob stumbled and tore his nonogenarian skin I was elected (by acclaim) to clean and dress the wound.

The cooking, cleaning and nursing fest were over just before the old year was out. My Ex drove his mother and uncle back north. My younger son drove himself south. Five thousand miles away his brother (my eldest) was holding a new baby daughter, born two weeks early, trailing extra festive, tax deductible cheer. My own Baby, still a teenager (just), had already gone back to work in London, which left only my elder daughter.

My car complained of neglect, and barely started, but it cheered up, even if I did not, on the run to Cowley, on the dodgy side of Oxford, where I dropped her for a New Year’s Eve party. Then, all alone for the first time in days, I drove back to Wolvercote, the northest of north Oxford, where my boat is now moored.

It was a remarkably warm night for the dead of winter, and I slid on mud, not ice, along the dark bridleway, over the lift bridge, and past the line of deserted boats to Pangolin. I ducked inside the engine room (too low to stand up with the hatch closed) and stooped to try the ignition key. The engine coughed weakly but refused to turn over. After two or three more tries, I resigned myself to darkness.

Without an engine to recharge the domestic battery bank I couldn’t afford to waste any power. I had already turned off the fridge some weeks before (I keep the milk on the gunnels outside the kitchen window and other chilled provisions in a cool box on the front deck), but no power also meant no indoor water:  drawing water from the tanks requires electricity.

With enough charge left in the domestics I might be able to jump start the engine in the morning. Otherwise, only a borrowed generator or the charge from a passing boat could do the job.

Attentive readers might remember the Young Archaeologists from my old mooring. I had always thought of archaeology as a rather exotic, academic, and mostly foreign profession. Years ago I knew a pushy mother who demanded that her daughter become an archaeologist. At the time I thought the mother was simply insane, but I now know that in the UK planning regulations require that archaeologists give the all-clear to every major building project and many minor ones. It turns out archaeology is a pretty secure job prospect.

Nevertheless, the Young Lady Archaeologist of my boaty acquaintance decided she had quite enough of not finding Roman remains under potential multi-storey carparks and is re-training as a publican. To that end she has a barmaid job about a fifteen minute walk from my new moorings, and she and the Young Gentleman Archaeologist brought the boat south to Oxford, convenient for her holiday hours. I happened to see them as they cruised by. They’re nice kids, young enough to be my children, and he is very handy with electrics.

After I lit the fire and found my head torch, I scrambled in the dark for some more festive clothing, shut up the dog, and strode off down the towpath toward the centre of Wolvercote to a pub I had never visited.

The Young Lady Archaeologist Barmaid was very busy serving drinks and only just had time to promise, while she poured me a glass of wine, to let her boyfriend know my engine wouldn’t start.

It was nearly midnight, and the bar was getting louder. I took my glass and found myself next to the only other person I recognised, a woman who twice each day walked her large German Shepherd dogs along the towpath. At first she had seemed unfriendly: she scowled, and I scowled back, daring her to let her dogs take a shit in front of my boat.

After a month or two, when they didn’t shit and I didn’t shout, we moved on to nodding. Because once or twice recently we had even managed a smile with the nod, I pulled up a chair next to her and her fellow in the pub on New Year’s Eve.

We shook hands and introduced ourselves.

“How are you enjoying Wolvercote?” Jan asked. “Wolvercote is certainly enjoying you,” she added generously. “We love your towpath garden!”

A few minutes later midnight sounded, and I was kissing these people I had only just met.

On New Year’s Day the Young Archaeologist came and and jump-started my boat, and the Scary Dog People waved and grinned extravagantly as they went by.  All is well.

Since it is only just past the first half of January, I hope it is not too late to wish you a happy new year. Apparently we need good wishes, this day of all days. According to the BBC, the middle Monday in January is officially the most depressing day of the year. Apparently we are sorry that Christmas is over (hands up anyone?) while all but winter seems a distant prospect.

Like Shelley, I choose to be more sanguine:

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?