Out of Routine

We’re all out of routine, aren’t we? 

It seems that I’m hearing a lot about routine – from family, friends, other blogs and the news. The ‘routine’ everyday life is now something to talk about whereas before it wasn’t deemed worth saying, to most people. People have embraced a new routine while others have struggled, and anything in between. 

It also seems like I’ve had too many ‘new’ routines to keep track.  I’ve lived in six different homes and had five different jobs in the last four years of my life. And not a partridge or a pear tree in sight. In the last year Tom and I have, from time to time, talked about a life not living on a narrowboat. It always ended with me saying I’ve had enough changes and am due some stability, thank you very much (even if I started the conversation!). Somehow always being on the move in the boat still felt like stability. 

And yet here we are, living a different routine in a different place. As mentioned in the last few blogs (and more comprehensively in ‘The Big Coronavirus Picture’), we are staying at my mother in law’s for now. The boat is currently in the boatyard having an extension so we can continue the business of hand making walking sticks and jewellery (see Facebook or Etsy for more info) that we’ve managed to start with the help of this new routine.  With any luck we’ll be continuing a mixture of these two routines in a couple of months time. 

I say old routine, but it is a shadow of the current one. Our old routine was mostly a weekly one; days we got supermarket delivery, or moved the boat. We sometimes joked we needed watches to tell the day, not the time! Nowadays Tom normally gets in a couple of hours work before a pot of tea at midday. Then there’s lunch and normally a walk with the dogs, followed by another few hours work. Sometimes I do nothing in those times because my health won’t let me, but if I’m lucky I’ll send a few tweets, schedule some Facebook posts or any number of other spreadsheet-y type jobs I love to get myself involved with. I have also got myself involved with a few of the crafts but I leave the really arty side of things to my talented partner in crime, business and life. 

Tom’s taken a longer break from work than I have, and I can see him being nurtured by this new routine as well as it helping my migraine-brain to know what to expect next up in a day. We would have started the business anyway but the pandemic has also sped up our finding a new routine, to suit the new way of living that I was so against finding, just for the sake of things staying stable. It turns out a change has given us more stability, not less. I’ll be glad to get back to living on the narrowboat – back home – and back and finding yet another routine to float away to.