In my last piece I talked about the strange guests we had on board Art Deco, but I must stress that most guests we had aboard were in fact lovely people and we had some wonderful experiences with them. We enjoyed showing them the local area and relating any bits of information and stories regarding the places we passed and I amassed a great deal of knowledge about the river and its surrounding area. We would plan an itinerary based on where the pick up point was and most of our guests were happy with that, they simply wanted to relax and watch the world go by.

There were a few guests who had a firm idea of where they wanted to go and what they wanted to see and we tried our best to please them if we could.

We had a lovely couple with us for four days. The gentleman was an artist and he just wanted to sketch, so we always made sure we moored each evening in a place where there was some feature or other, be it natural or man made, that would make for a decent subject for him to sketch. When they first arrived on board he surprised us by presenting us with a framed sketch that he’d done. It was from a series of sketches he’d made of Victoria Quays in Sheffield where we’d lived in an apartment before we took to the water and it’s hung in our present apartment now.

The artist and his wife made only one visit but we had a few couples who returned on a regular basis and they became our firm friends. One such couple were on board as we past through Henley on Thames and in the meadow on the Remenham side of the river there was a music festival taking place. After consulting Google we found out it was the Rewind Festival South. There’s a sister festival in Cheshire and another one in Perthshire and they all featured artists who were popular in the eighties and nineties. We decided it would be fun to visit, so we made it a date to get tickets for the following years festival. There were boats moored along both sides of the river and it was my job to get a mooring place for Art Deco.

We booked the festival tickets as soon as they went on sale and I managed to get a mooring for the boat, so we were all set for August next year. We arrived in Henley on the Thursday and found our mooring and we were ready for the first night of music on the Friday. We had a wonderful weekend and saw the likes of: Nick Kershaw, Mark Almond, Paul Carrack, Carol Decker, Chesney Hawks, Jason Donovan, along with a few lesser known artist and a couple of tribute bands. We had a great mooring, right by the festival site and it was reassuring that we could eat and drink whatever we wanted, knowing that our bed was just a short walk away. On all three nights of the festival we stayed to the very end and then carried on partying back on Art Deco into the early hours of the morning. We were pleased that we had the foresight to keep the following week free of guests, we needed the week to recuperate!

Another couple who were regular guests were two ex Fleet Street journalists. They spent the winter months in New Zealand and came back to the UK for the summer months and for three years they joined us as guests on Art Deco. They were great fun and certainly knew how to party. We looked forward to their visits. One particular year we picked them up in Reading with a view to cruising down river, with no particular finishing point. Wherever we landed they would get a taxi back to their car which was parked in Reading. We were passing through Boulters lock in Maidenhead when our guests remarked that they had friends who lived by the river in Bray and thought it a good opportunity to pay them a visit. They called them and when they had finished their call I said “There’s good moorings at Bray but they’re on the opposite side of the river from the grand houses” “That won’t be necessary I was told, you can moor at the bottom of their garden, alongside their boat, “You can’t miss it, it’s a very large white cruiser” Once we had passed through the lock we slowly cruised down river and sure enough on the right hand side, there was the said boat. As we drew along side we were helped to tie up by a gentleman aboard the cruiser and we all stepped aboard and followed him up and on to the roof terrace where his wife was waiting with a large jug of Pimm’s. Introductions were made and we were surprised to learn that our host was a surgeon who’d studied at Sheffield University. What a small world it is. When I remarked what a gorgeous house he had he replied “It’s going to be demolished!” The house was a typical Thames riverside property. A two story, bay windowed, double fronted house in the mock Tudor style. It was, he told us, a lovely house to look at but it was damp and draughty and cost a fortune to heat. It had taken him ten years to get planning permission but the latest application had been approved. We had a pleasant evening aboard the cruiser with our new found friends and spent the night moored alongside their boat. In the morning as we left we were given an open invitation to moor alongside their boat if we were struggling to find a mooring. Over the following months we saw the old house demolished and replaced by a modern glass and steel structure, very architecturally stunning, but we thought it didn't fit in with the other properties on the river.

A lovely couple from Chesterfield, a town just a stone's throw away from our home city joined us for four days in the summer of 2018. The were both part of an amateur drama group in their town and were very flamboyant in both their dress and lifestyle. The lady’s default clothing was brightly coloured dresses in vivid colours and the gentleman came dressed as a typical 19th century bargeman, complete with bowler hat, spotted neckerchief, striped collarless shirt and moleskin trousers. When I asked if he fancied a go at skippering Art Deco he jumped at the chance and he was in his element and I have to admit, he certainly looked the part. He skippered the boat for the full four days of their stay, ok, I negotiated all the locks and bridges but he was at the tiller for the rest of the time. He was in heaven he said and thoroughly enjoyed his time with us and his partner was at his side all the time, acting out their obsession with all things Victorian. When they were leaving they presented us with two silver salad servers, Victorian, of course which they had found in an antique shop in Marlow.

Many guests arrived bearing gifts; we had eggs from their own chickens, cheese from their own goats and all sorts of home grown produce. We also had gifts given as couples left, a book on the folklore of the Thames and a coffee table book full of photographs and paintings of the Thames are two such books that spring to mind. A couple who stayed with us a few times presented us with a framed watercolour of a countryside scene around Henley. They’d visited the artist’s studio and bought the painting directly from her. It’s on our wall in our hallway and every time I look at it I’m reminded of our years afloat.

We had an elderly couple as guests for four days and although they were in their seventies it didn’t show, they were up for anything and they were on and off the boat like spring chickens. What singled them out though was the life they’d lived. She was brought up on a farm in Rhodesia and her ambition had been to train as a nurse and she’d secured a place with an English hospital. She had saved the money for the flight but instead of buying an airline ticket she’d bought an old Land Rover and driven across Africa, just for the fun of it she said! She picked up a boat in Tangier and worked her passage to England. He was born in South Africa and became a pilot and had a job flying workers and supplies to to the remote coal and diamond mines. Some places were so remote that they didn't have a proper airstrip as such and he had to be “creative” as he put it to get the plane down safely. They met and married in England and they both wanted to visit Australia and being of an adventurous nature they secured a passage on a container ship. They had a tiny cabin and ate with the crew which consisted of many nationalities and as they put it, the meals could sometimes be challenging but never boring and they thoroughly enjoyed the journey. They were at sea for over a month because the ship had to drop off and pick up cargo as it slowly made its way to Australia.

Our guests were more generous than we could ever have expected. We were often taken to a local pub and treated to drinks and a meal. It made all the hard work worthwhile, and it was hard work, not only were we providing breakfast, lunch and evening meal but we had the added problem of finding a mooring for the night. It was difficult in the popular places, especially in July and August but we did have help with that problem. There was a small community of live aboard boaters, who like ourselves had no home mooring, who continually cruise all year and we all helped each other and communicated via our own WhatsApp group. If a guest wanted to spend time in Henley, for instance, we would send out a message asking if anyone’s moored there and to check if there’s any space available. If one of our friends were moored there they would message back telling us where they were moored and if there were no moorings available we would double up wth them. It worked very well and got us out of a few sticky situations.

We encouraged guests to arrive by public transport whenever possible and we found that Reading was the ideal place to pick up anyone who arrived by train. There were plenty of moorings available just a short walk from the station and I spent many hours sitting on a bench outside the station waiting for guests to arrive. Reading station was a very modern one, built in 2014 and our instructions to them were that whatever platform they arrived on they were to go up to the concourse that spanned the full width of the station and acted as a footbridge and follow the signs to the Caversham exit. There is an escalator that leads down from the concourse and can be seen through the large glass wall of the station where I could see the passengers as they descended to the exit. I played a game with myself, trying to guess which of the folks on the escalator were our guests and over time I became quite good at it. It helped pass the time if nothing else.

If guests were coming by car then we had the problem of where to leave their car for the duration of their visit. We became friendly with a couple of boatyard owners and they allowed our guests to leave their car with them when they had the space. When that was not possible, we used a website where households who had a driveway to their property that was not used could register with the website and details of its location and cost would be published online . It worked well and was a win win situation; our guests were able to leave their car in a secure place and the property owner was paid for that privilege.

By 2019 we had been living on Art Deco for seven years and taking on guests for three of those years and we started to talk about giving up our nomadic lifestyle and returning to dry land. A number of situations came together and we decided that fate was intervening, all the planets were in alignment, the time was right for a change. The main reason was that we became grandparents for the first time, our daughter giving birth to a little girl in the June of 2019 and we wanted to spend time with our new granddaughter. We had stopped taking on guests after the summer of 2018 because it wasn’t enjoyable anymore, it was hard and stressful work and we were weren’t getting any younger.

The thing that finally decided it for us though, was the lifestyle itself, the atmosphere on the river had changed, and not for the better. More boats were appearing every year and with the government cutting the funding to the Environment Agency there were fewer lock keepers and the facilities were being neglected, when something needed fixing it wasn’t getting done. There were fewer and fewer free moorings and in many places the moorings were policed by companies who’d honed their skills managing city centre car parks. They required you to register and pay via their app, which was fair enough but in some places there was no internet connection which made it impossible to do so. That was no excuse though and there were tales of boaters being persued through the courts for non payment. Taking all this into account we decided that at the start of 2020 we would look to sell Art Deco but little did we know at the time that something the world was totally unprepared for was about to happen and it nearly scuppered our plans.