TAG | Lady Stardust
OK. So we’ve had Lady Stardust for 3 years and she’s gradually deteriorating despite all my best efforts. After one of the worst summers I can ever remember (2008) in which we hardly visited her because it didn’t stop raining we finally emerged from hibernation in March 2009 and decided that something had to be done and that I wasn’t the man to do it (not by myself, anyway).
Well, perhaps I’m being a bit hard on myself. However, it was becoming clear that I didn’t have either the time or sufficiently specialist knowledge to handle all the things that needed to be sorted out on the boat.
I’d noticed the previous year that the roof was in a bit of a state, so I laid some new sheets of plywood over the roof and sealed them in. Only 6 months later my repair was looking distinctly tatty. For a start, there was a ridge running down the middle of the roof from bow to stern that trapped the water at the rear, as a consequence of which the wooden trim on the roof at the stern was softer than soap. It needed to be cut out, and I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. In addition to this there were spots on the rear deck at either side that we couldn’t stand on because the plywood beneath the mahogany planks had rotted through, meaning that the planks were floating unsupported above free space.
One of the things that attracted us to Lady Stardust was the cosy aspect of the berth below deck, particularly the very comforting-looking stove. It spoke of frosty mornings wrapped up warm against the elements, looking out over a frozen river (illuminated by a clear winter sun, naturally) whilst munching on a bacon sandwich and drinking a fortifying cup of tea. We were, by now, spending quite a few evenings and weekends on the Lady, simply enjoying the feeling of being in the country in the middle of east London.
It took a particularly wet Friday evening in mid-Autumn for us to tentatively try the stove for the first time. It took a little time to get used to the controls (there are only two, but it takes some observation for a non fire-owning townie to get to grips with whatever difference they made) but we soon had a roaring, smokeless coal fire going.
At which point I noticed how much smoke was escaping from the stove. This was precipitated by the fact that the lever that secured the door shut appeared not only to have sheared off but also to have welded itself in an open position with no apparent desire to loosen or act in a generally fastener-like manner. Fortunately there wasn’t much smoke from the smokeless fuel but the smell was quite strong and I was very unhappy about going to sleep for fear of carbon monoxide poisoning!
Clearly the stove needed to be mended. This much I knew. The problem was, how? As is so often the case, I turned to the internet for inspiration. I started to search for companies that sold stoves, to see if I could see any that looked like my own. I singled out about 6 or 7 suppliers and sent them an email explaining that I wanted to buy a new door latch, asking whether they recognised the stove from the attached picture and if so how I would set about my task.
I didn’t expect much but I thought it was worth a try. To my surprise, within a couple of days all of the suppliers I had contacted responded to me. Most of them didn’t recognise the stove, but one of them said it looked like a Poacher from Bernard Davis stoves. I looked at their website and it did, indeed, look much like my own stove. I repeated my request to Bernard Davis and they responded saying that my stove looked very much like a Poacher. There were quite a lot of inferior quality Chinese copies of this stove (that don’t use the same quality cast iron and tend to crack) but I could tell whether mine was geniune or not by the presence of the ‘BD’ logo at the bottom on the front.
I had looked all over my stove for some kind of identifying mark when I set out on the road to sourcing a new door lever, and I had somehow missed this mark (which is quite large and was quite present)! So, I had a poacher. Could I buy a new locking handle, I enquired? ’Yes’ was the response, for the grand total of £9. I couldn’t believe it! I sent them a cheque and a couple of days later I received a new handle. Now the only problem was how to remove the old one. I took some months to do this, in part because I had to find someone who could advise me as to how to do it (I had to drill it out) and partly because I spent some time considering the best way to put this plan into action.
I finally got up the courage to drill out the old handle when I had the loan of a particularly powerful drill for installing new deck furniture. It took courage because cast iron is notoriously brittle and I had visions of ending up with a pile of iron dust where my stove door used to be. Nonetheless, when I actually got around to the task it was surprisingly easy. The door was secured in place with pins which I removed with a centre-punch and hammer, and the handle took about 10 minutes to remove. I now have a fully functioninig Poacher stove with locking door (although I have now noticed that the asbestos rope that seals the door needs replacing too, but that seems much easier to solve than finding a new handle).
…would smell as sweet? Maybe, but if it were called ‘Stinkwort’ I for one would be less likely to get close enough to tell.
The more observant and curious amongst you may have been wondering why, when our boat is called ‘Ordu’, this blog is called ‘Lady Stardust’. Well might you ask, and I shall now answer. When we bought Ordu one of the last things I asked about her was her name. This is just as well because I really, really don’t like the word ‘Ordu’ and if I had known this was her name from the start I probably wouldn’t have looked at her.
The cliche is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I’ve noticed that there are some people and some words that don’t mix. For example, I don’t like the word ‘scrumptious’. It positively makes my flesh crawl (I was probably traumatised by watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when I was a child). I don’t know why this should be, but although ‘Ordu’ isn’t quite in the ‘scrumptious’ category it still doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t even like saying it because I find it to be ugly and graceless, which can be a problem when it is the name of your boat.
Ordu is, in fact, a port on the Black Sea cost of Turkey with an illustrious history. According to its Wikipedia entry it was at one time the headquarters of the Ottoman Empire army (although nowadays it is better known as being the centre of the Turkish hazelnut production business). The word actually means ‘army’ in Turkish. This, in its own way, makes it even less appealing to me as the name of boat – I want our boat to be a place of relaxation, not the means of launching an invasion.
As a digression, when we bought Ordu we were told (amongst other things) that she had been used as a harbour partol boat by the Dutch Navy, had originally had a ‘gun emplacement’ on her foredeck and took part in the the evacuation of Dunkirk in the Second World War. I didn’t really believe this but she was old enough to have taken part so I checked with the Dutch Navy to see if they had any record of her. They hadn’t, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true (although it probably isn’t).
Anyway, even allowing for this it became clear to us that ‘Ordu’ was not a satisfactory name. There are folk out there who will tell you that changing the name of a boat is unlucky – they had a friend who changed the name of his/her boat and his/her leg fell off the very next day. There are undoubtedly some superstitions which are worth observing (not walking under a ladder, for example, in case the twit on top of it drops a hammer on your head) but renaming a boat is not something I personally believe will upset the balance of Ordu’s personality. Besides which, as you will see if you read (and I write) on that she’s been almost completely remade anyway, so I’m going to rename the new boat regardless.
My Yemayah picture
The first replacement name we found was ‘Yemayah’. Yemayah is the yoruban goddess of the ocean and patron deity of survivors in shipwrecks. Now I know that I’ve already said that I don’t believe in superstitious nonsense, but all the same I like name and it kind of fits. I even went as far as to design a picture to make into a flag for her. I copied the design nearly wholesale from an image I saw on the internet, but since I re-drew it myself and it was for my ‘personal use’ I didn’t see the problem. Besides, it was highly unlikely that anyone would recognise it anyway.
And this, it turned out, was the problem with the name Yemayah. The following is typical of conversations we had many times:
- Friend: “So what are you calling her then?”
- Me: “Yemayah”
- Friend: “Yer what-er?”
- Me: “Yemayah”
- Friend: “What’s that?”
- Me: “Well, She’s a yoruban sea goddess”
- Friend: “Yo what-un?”
- Me: “Yoruban”
- Friend: “What’s that?”
- Me: “Well, it’s a religion from West Africa, particularly Nigeria, which….. oh, never mind”
Yemayah, it seemed, was not an ideal choice. OK, so we need an alternative. Selena and I thought about it for some days and then David, the supreme deity that He is, came to our rescue. We’d call her ‘Lady Stardust‘ in his honour, and with a wink at Marc too – “Awful nice, really quite paradise” indeed.
