A Boat With No Engine

Aisha Mirza

My partner Soha and I have a joke that every time she leaves the country, normally to visit family in Canada, I do something impulsive. I know how that sounds - it’s not like that. I’d say it’s more a coincidence of time and desire, because I'm not actually that impulsive. Most of the time I'm extremely careful and methodical in the way I think about things - too much thinking rather than too little - if you catch my drift. But once I’m attached to the idea, it’s gonna happen. It’s the place where manifestation, a ‘flexible’ sense of futurity and impulsivity collide. At some point, you just have to do the damn thing. Most recently, Soha returned home to a puppy, smelling of popcorn, hot off the press from Tennessee <3

In September of last year, it was a houseboat. 

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I had lived on a houseboat before. Ten years ago I was 23 and fresh out of a two-year long, earth-shifting depressive episode. I was living in a 4-story shared house with about 7-10 other people (depending on whose boyfriends were living with us at the time) near the Thames in Shadwell, East London. It was formative and fun, but my period of ill-health, coupled with growing racial self-discovery meant it was time for a change. I was at work, at a women’s rights NGO named after one of the Suffragettes, scrolling Gumtree for options, when I saw a houseboat for rent. Only £300 a month, and to live alone! Two weeks later I was afloat.

At the time I was part of an outpatient programme at an East London Community Mental Health clinic. I had weekly sessions with a Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst and Occupational Therapist who had been assigned to me following my first hospital visit. Lifesavers they were. It hurts to know that now, ten years further into the brutal sell-off of the National Health Service, a young person in pain doesn’t get the same attention, to put it fucking mildly. They held a special meeting with me to discuss their concerns about the move which I attended wearing a home-made t-shirt saying “I <3 NHS” that I unveiled kind-of dramatically half-way through the meeting to a bewildered reception. They weren’t sure I was taking the situation seriously. Would I be safe? How would they find me for home visits? Could I even swim for god’s sake? 

A decade ago, the houseboat community in London wasn’t what it is now. It was larger than it had ever been, but it has since grown into the tens of thousands, boosted by a large surge during the pandemic and accompanying housing crisis which had people barely affording rent let alone property in London, and reevaluating much of the speed and stress and debt of what they had come to consider ‘normal life’. These days it seems most people I talk to, admittedly largely queer, freelance-type people, know someone on the river. I feel like now, the mental health professionals in charge of my well being would have been less freaked out by the idea, even though I had no answers for them. I didn’t know anyone living on the water, in fact I'd never even been on a houseboat. But I remember a feeling of calm about it all, maybe the kind of calm only actually accessible in the middle of a manic episode (iykyk), but a valuable, velvety calm nonetheless, which delivered me straight to the water.

The water was so good to me. The dark, muddy towpaths, the scruffy boatlord who I gave an envelope of cash to each month, the hellish trips to the elsan to empty my toilet, the watersnake hallucinations, the mornings lying on the roof of the boat feeling the sun getting closer, the evenings watching the sunset on the train line horizon. All of it. For the first few weeks my neighbours were an Indian woman and her white boyfriend. They had bought a ‘project boat’ (a cheap boat that needs some fixing up before it’s ready to rumble) and were renovating it through the summer. They had a house in the area but would come a few days out of the week to work on the boat, or at least he would. The white guy would be in and out, on his back, drilling, scraping, all the stuff. She would sit on the roof of the boat and play the sitar in the sun, like some kind of god. Have you ever heard the sound of a sitar bouncing off a river? It’s the sound of heaven. I wonder how she’s doing.

The boat move was make or break for me, in that fuzzy twilight place of having survived death and wondering what’s next. The physical labour, darkness and alone time could have felt bad but they didn’t. For the most part, I felt grounded and capable and so held by the lushious marshes of East London, and would go sleep on friend’s sofas when I didn’t. I ate breakfast food for all meals and joined an all-girl punk band and practiced bass on my tiny battery-powered amp for hours. I also started a wordpress blog and though I had been writing for years at that point, it was the first time I wrote so openly about myself and my health. I soon gained a loyal following of people interested in boats and mental health and whatever’s in between making this newsletter endeavour almost embarrassingly full circle.

The blog was called A Boat With No Engine, because - yeah. Now, I can’t remember exactly how I survived on a boat with no functioning engine, as the engine is kind of the heart of the boat. You use it to move the boat obviously, but also to charge batteries for power and heat water. These days the waterway police are a lot more active, moving boats along when they’ve been in one spot too long, but back then I had the space to figure it out, with London’s biggest marshland as my garden. This is a place where it’s hard to find a parking spot these days, with the continued gentrification of East London, the increase of boats on the river, and its closeness to a marina and cafe, but back then it was spacious and pretty much all mine.

A couple years later, when I was in New York, I deleted the blog without backing it up (that was impulsive). Recently, I told Soha about it, heavy with loss. And once again I was charmed with the ingenuity of generation Z when she used Wayback Machine to recover large sections of it in about 3 minutes. So I’m gonna leave you with an excerpt from the first one I wrote. And I might share more in the next few months coz it feels like an important archive or an accidental longitudinal study of some kind, a fleshy wayback machine for real.

A Boat With No Engine, 26th July 2013

CHOO CHOO! ALL ABOARD HMS BATSHIT!

Today is the two-week anniversary of my life as a mermaid, and I am happier than I can remember being for a long time. For the record, I don’t think I was manic when I made the decision to move here, I think I had a good idea, and quite helpfully wasn’t clinically depressed, so was able to act on it, quickly and successfully IF I SAY SO MY SELF. But that’s what happens when out of nowhere, little old happy-go-lucky You, is diagnosed with a mental illness that is characterised by wild mood swings. You can’t trust anything anymore. But I’m not manic. I was manic when I had to be restrained from leaving the house to buy a cat at 4am (more on #catgate another time). 

I wanted to move onto a boat because I was bored, and sinking, and wanted something fresh in my life. I was also curious, after having lived in a madhouse for the previous 2 years, how it would feel to live alone, something that I’ve always romanticised. Part of me probably also wanted to remove the burden of myself, due to my mental health… quirks, from the living environment of other people. It’s astonishing, the impact this move, and this boat seem to be having on me. And seeing as boating, and mental health difficulties are both new to me, and both, will probably be sticking around for a bit, I thought I’d write about them here.

So much has already happened in two weeks: 

I have made friends with a man with incredibly long dreadlocks, and a woman with a kitten, I might have got myself a gig on a floating stage, I have bought a bike, I have had a bike stolen, I have suffered a broken heart, I have rekindled an old friendship, I have spent £32 on new clothes (not allowed), I have learnt how to clean and fill my water tank and empty my poo, I have been fabulous kettle shopping, I have woken up to find a massive spider on my chest, complained about this on an internet forum for boaters, and now got a reputation for myself as a massive pussy, I have purchased a wind chime with a solar powered multi coloured glowing orb, I have gone skinny dipping under a full moon, I have watered some plants, I have not cooked anything but I have eaten A LOT of crisps and made some tea, and I have accidentally dropped a large polystyrene box into the river. 

My boat doesn’t have an engine. I won’t go into details but it doesn’t. So this blog probably won’t be about anything useful like how to do moving or parking. But it might be about how it feels to live like this. How it feels to go from living in East London for basically your whole life, from never even knowing there were canals in London till a couple years ago (for real) from kind of hating nature and middle-class endeavours like “boating” and “walking” to basically voluntarily living at a floating Climate Camp.

There’s lots I can say, but I want to say one thing – the one thing that has struck me, so far, as the most important thing about living like this. 

When an old friend found out I’d had a nervous breakdown, had been diagnosed with bipolar, and was struggling to get on my feet again - was still terrified of making decisions some 6 months after it first really struck, he took me to dinner and said: I’ve known you since you were 11. You’re not scared of anything. I don’t want to see you scared. You can’t let this stop you. Just be grateful for things. Try to be grateful for things.

And I remember thinking, as I often have, I appreciate you trying to help me, I really do. But you don’t understand. It’s not a switch you can flick, I cried on the way here, and I will probably cry on the way home. There’s no space for gratitude. But since moving onto a boat, gratitude has crept back into my life, moment by moment, and ultimately, basically, made me thankful to be alive again. 

I am grateful for showers in the middle of this hot, hot summer. Especially cold ones. I laugh hysterically during cold ones. So grateful for water, grateful for smiles, flushes, internet access, and sometimes even human company!

This boat with no engine has given me the gift of gratitude, and I think that’s pretty good going for 14 days. To be clear, that’s not to say we should collect all the depressed people and make them push a trolley for ten minutes to the nearest public tap for water, because if someone had told me to do that 4 months ago… well… I probably wouldn’t have heard them because I’d have been asleep. The just get a grip mentality makes me want to kill people. I am just lucky that this move has coincided with a fairly stable point in my life. The spiders are a lot though…