New Year, New Start, New Dishwasher

I couldn't have wished for a better festive season.We had happy and full days on the boat. Nice meals, nice food, nice company. Wonderful presents and all shared with the most wonderful person. A visit to see "Sunset Boulevard"-a fantastically rewarding reinterpretation with an absolutely off the scale, star performance from Nicole Scherzinger. A fabulous evening in the theatre on Broadway to see the penultimate night of "Some like It Hot”. Followed by a beautiful four-day weekend in New York with lots of walking, plenty of visiting galleries and museums, iceskating in Central Park and shopping. No sooner had we got off the plane on the 2nd of January than I hit the ground running. Staging a conference for a major client which took up all my time and meant that January, and its associated depressive blues, crept up on me unaware. Or rather, they manifested themselves in a series of domestic appliances that decided to give up the ghost and not join in with 2024. We have two sorts of central heating on the boat. One is fired by the wood burning stove, and the water pump on that system decided it had had enough of life. At this time, we’re still waiting, waiting for it to be replaced due to the size of the piping, and inability to get the right man for the job started on the replacement. The dishwasher, which has been a boon to our lives since last August, started to regularly display a repeated error message halfway through the washing process. I think I have forgotten how to put plates in a sink and wash them, and it’s not a process I intend to rediscover. The washing machine had the equivalent of a bad headache last week when it decided it wasn’t going to spin dry any garments. It seems to have taken the appliance's equivalent to a couple of Nurofen and returned to full working order now. So in the coldest weeks, we’ve been using imaginative heating solutions to back up the one set of central heating we have left. And when it works, the boat is a cosy heaven. It just requires the first person up in the morning, which is usually Mr S, to turn on various heaters.He’s a star. Probably cold, but a star. Yesterday’s unexpected sunshine gave us a chance for a fun session with the pressure washer as we washed down the boat roof to clean away the soot from when the chimney was working. This weekend sees both of us working for a day on a corporate video that I’m directing, and next weekend I’m back off down to the West Country to resume filming on the television series. I’m currently doing. And next week brings the end of January. Hurrah At my age, it’s not a good idea to wish away time. The correct attitude, I’m sure, is to arise every morning and relish the next 14 or 16 hours of waking. But in January, I find it particularly difficult. You spend the last two months of the previous year building up with anticipation to the festive season, and you can trip into the first month of the next year without really having a destination in mind. In February, we will brighten up, both in terms of weather and in terms of activity. Valentine’s Day will take us across to Gay Paree for a long weekend and then a trip down to Bordeaux to see some good friends. Filming continues throughout February and March, and March will take us to warmer climes for a weekend with a visit to the city of Porto for my birthday. Meanwhile, it’s making plans for a fun summer holiday and choosing a replacement for that bastard of a dishwasher. We do have somebody who’s agreed to come and start work on the central heating, possibly next week, which would be great. Of course, what it probably means is that we’ll have the mildest February possible and be sweating in here like a sauna. Welcome to 2024.