A new toy!

We've always had a problem on the boat with dust. The solid fuel stove generated quite a lot, and living as we do next to a field, the floor and doormats would often be dirty and require cleaning quite often.

We had a small hand-held vacuum cleaner, bought for roughly £10 in Argos when we first bought the boat, but that gave up the ghost long ago; and only having a 500w inverter we didn't have any other vacuum device.

A dustpan and brush is effective, but very time consuming, and it's hard to get into all the little nooks-and-crannies. The carpet and rugs in the bedroom are also quite coated with cat hairs- the bedroom floor is the coolest place in the boat, so Lyra seems to qpend a fair few of the warm evenings flopped on her side, quietly moulting away!

James and Emma on Kestrel have a constant battle with Jess' hair, which comes out in great volumes when she's moulting, and they have a very snazzy handheld Dyson vacuum cleaner. We've long admired it, and so now we have bought our own- £150 new normally, but we got ours from Amazon, reconditioned, for just under a hundred quid.

Yes, that is rather a lot of money to spend on a vacuum cleaner, but having used James and Emma's, and seen that several other boaters also have them, this type appears to be the bee's knees for cleaning boats.

It has a rechargable battery, which charges in 3 hours, giving 10 minutes of normal vacuuming, or 6 minutes of suck-up-everything-super-high-power. It's very good for all the little gaps and corners on the boat, such as under the kitchen units and along the edges of the floor and the sides of the boat.

But, most importantly, it's quite fun to use! It's loud, technological, and has lots of gizmos, so it's really a big toy. For now, I'm very happy doing the vacuuming...