By Tim ...
​I'm not a writer and I seldom have words, but some days (or rather nights, like this one) they appear. How long they will last I don't know so I'm putting them down now, while I can. It is late and the night is quiet and maybe, in some strange way, having a cold and feeling ill as I do also helps.
If my life here in Cornwall was a book, I'd be starting this blog somewhere around Chapter Three. Or maybe Chapter Ten. It doesn't matter, except to say that I've skipped a bit. My story for the last two and a half years has been one of finding my feet after a massive upheaval. A complete change of life. Not always easy. Sometimes quite painful. An attempt to simplify. To remove unimportant details. To be more at one and at peace with myself. It's working. Gradually. One day at a time.
I'm an artist. A painter. I make all manner of things, creating and recreating objects, building, upcycling, seeking out the inherent beauty in the everyday things I discover all around me. I do all sorts of things. But mostly, I'm a painter.
Painting, creating images, to find expression in the visual, this is what I do and what I love to do. But also, I find it so hard. I learned long ago that you can never go out to create a masterpiece, but even so, the pressure I put on myself to paint well, to always be better, builds and builds. 
So ... I just paint, and sometimes I get lucky. Genius is not something which can be possessed but is something that, if you're lucky, can pay the occasional visit and lend a helping hand. But still, the pressure remains.
For the longest time, I managed to hold in check my need to be better at any one thing by trying to master a new style or medium, always moving from one to the next, always restless. But it is in oils that I may have found my home, so confront the anguish I must!
A gap of two years in creating work is the longest I have ever gone (two weeks would have been my previous record!) I'm not sure why it has taken me so long except perhaps that the life-change demanded that I take a step back and be patient. I truly had no idea what it would feel like to paint again after all this time, or even what it was that I wanted to paint, or how, but the itch had been growing and I couldn't shake it. 
Helped by watching how my friend and fellow artist John Maclean can simply sit himself down anywhere and paint what is in front of him, I followed his lead, not over-thinking, not worrying, merely desiring to break the oily ice and put it on the canvas. So, I stood on the port side of Albacore and painted what I saw there.
And it felt good. Not perhaps the greatest of my work, but a new direction and more importantly for me, renewed hope ... 

It was two weeks later before I found myself sitting in front of the completed picture of three boats, 'The View From the Starboard Side' and the scene I had observed for two years and imagined as a painting for just as long. And I smiled.
I had been drawn to this image for a long time. Visually, the decay, the streaks of rust, the strong, bold shapes, the way the light would catch them at different times of the day. But more than that was the emotional. These once majestic sea vessels had all lived meaningful lives, and now they were all liveaboards. Homes. A Navy boat, a fishing trawler and an old Dutch barge, retired from service and given another chance for life. A new purpose. Maybe I saw myself reflected in them. A renewed meaning and a renewed hope.
Looking at the painting now in its temporary home on the wall in front of me, I'm still smiling. I know I can never stop painting so maybe the occasional smile on a night like this is worth all the anguish after all.

By Tim ...
​Last week, sandwiched somewhere between the mizzle, the wind and the fog, we had a couple of days of perfect Cornish Blue and everyone at the boatyard sauntered forth to celebrate this wonder. At the end of the pontoon where Albacore is moored, a small impromptu party took place around the picnic table ... Well actually, me, Lisa, Bob and Andy had a couple of cheeky beers and, fuelled with the giddyness of said beers and the sunshine, we decided it might be a good idea to do a bit of flag-raising.
Now, I know nothing about nautical flags and their meanings, except that it's probably a good idea to exercise some caution before hoisting up any old thing just because it looks nice. Bob, who lives in the boat next to me, had acquired a set of flags from a boat jumble in Plymouth a while back (along with the world's tiniest anchor, but that's a different story) and happily for us each flag had been neatly folded away into a pocket which conveniently displayed its corresponding letter or number.
There was much debate over what word we were going to hoist up Albacore's flagpole. After 1 beer there were a few suggestion along the lines of 'love', 'hope', 'help' etc. So far not very inspiring. Having only one of each letter was somewhat limiting our choices and the discovery of a missing 'A' caused much disappointment when we realised that 'pasty' was no longer an option. After 2 beers, the suggestions were becoming slightly ruder, mostly thanks to Lisa whose language would have made a pirate proud. In the end, growing bored, we settled on 'dreckly', a suitably Cornish word which suggests something along the lines of 'I'll do it soon. Probably not today though. Or tomorrow ... Or ever.' Which seemed apt.
Now, I'm not too shabby when it comes to climbing things, but that ol' flagpole is pretty high. But it was worth going up there, twice, just to torment Lisa whose cries of 'I can't believe you just did that', 'get down now' and 'I'm not going to save you if you fall in' quickly evaporated into 'hang on a minute, I'll just get my camera'. Never a one to waste a good photo opportunity. Coming down was slightly more tricky, but we won't dwell on that here.
So the flags are up, and mighty pretty they look too. Every boat should have some.
We did check, via google, that we'd displayed the correct letters, and I'm still slightly concerned that I might have hoisted a 'Q' instead of a 'Y' (the 'Q' flag, incidentally, also means 'My vessel is healthy and I request free pratique'. Which is good to know.) For anyone who might be interested, here is a link to a chart of nautical flags and their meanings. For now, though, it's entirely possible that Albacore is flying the word 'drecklq', but after all that sun and beer and climbing, my legs need a rest.

Well, it seems I have a blog. How unexpected. It's been a while since I did any of this online stuff, so be patient with me whilst I find my way around. To be honest, I would much rather be out in the sunshine (or rain, or wind, or hail) getting on with some work on the boat and the truck, but it's been brought to my attention that there might be some folks out there interested in what I do down here in the southeast corner of Cornwall ...
To cut a long story short, I am a painter, an artist, and I live on a 44 year old wooden fishing trawler named 'Albacore' which, inbetween painting, restoring my old truck, taking the dingy out for a potter on the water and drinking tea, I am attempting to convert into a liveaboard.
It's a long process, but I'm not in much of a hurry (life is to be lived in the moment, and at the moment it is sunny outside!) I bought Albacore in Ireland in 2011, with a view to shaking things up in my life a bit, and in that respect, she certainly did fill the criteria! I sailed her back to Cornwall and eventually ended up moored in a little boatyard in the area known as The Rame Peninsula, or The Forgotten Triangle of Cornwall. During the next couple of years I put a lot of work into her, cleaning out 40 odd years of prawn fishing detritus, which was an 'interesting' way to spend my time. I've lost track of all the injuries sustained but there is a colourful back catalogue of photographs which I'll dust off and post online one of these days.
Somewhere along the line, I acquired a girlfriend. I'm still questioning her sanity but she claims to be committed to the cause, and being an artist herself I think she enjoys the eccentric lifestyle. She's been blogging about the life here over at Creating Inspiration for a while now, so take a look for another point of view.
So, now that I'm here it is my intention to talk about life here on the boat, about the ups and downs of living an alternative life, about the day to day triumphs and disasters as work progresses, about what life is actually like living on a boat and being a bit outside of the mainstream, about painting, about the restoration of my 1941 Ford Truck, and about whatever else takes my attention. Mostly, it's about boats. 
And Tea.

Meanwhile, there is work to be done ...