The cleaning - Lagarde

Winter can do funny things to a boat, or anything that’s left outside if it comes to that.  Even though we leave everything as clean as we can, we always seem to return to a mess, a vessel covered in a thick grime of pollen mud, green slime and muck.

I have to confess that we have thought about the futility of cleaning things before we go, but there is a trigger somewhere in both our heads that won’t allow us to relax in that state of mind.   Therefore while one of us took herself away to Maggie’s for the day to catch up on a little mending, and probably just to catch up, the other set about scrubbing the decks and running the mooring lines through the washing machine, so they would be fresh and soft for next year and would smell vaguely like lemon.

It’s odd though, as excited as we are about returning to the Antipodes for a time, and that builds as we bustle around, there’s a certain dullness that is exactly the opposite emotion that creeps in to oppose it.   Now matter which side of the world we are on, these conflicting emotions descend.   Perhaps they are something to do with some sort of nesting syndrome that causes this wild rash of cleaning.   Do birds tidy up before they fly south for the winter?

Perhaps we should just lie down for a bit and it will pass!