Last week in chat, I was talking about some work I was doing on my boat, and somebody asked me when the boat would be done.

It won't be. It is not the nature of boats to ever be done. My boat has been around longer than *I* have, and is even less close to being done. However, assuming there is some nirvana-like mystic potential state of doneness out there somewhere, I can safely say that the boat is now slightly closer to it than it was a few weeks ago.

It now has a working system of plastic pipes and taps and things, which delivers drinkable water. It has a reconditioned engine, or it will on Monday when they put it back in. It has paint where there wasn't paint before. It has electrical wiring which doesn't *show*, and which almost certainly won't melt down all the wires and start a small fire when I try it out next week. (It did last week, but now I'm about 99% sure I know what I did wrong...)

It has two extra places to sleep, because I tore the cupboards out of the quarterberth bunks and extended the bunk surface out, so now a person can actually sleep there *and* be able to turn over in bed without the help of a crowbar. (If you've never been on a boat, the quarterberth bunks are similar in concept to the Japanese capsule hotel. They're great to sleep in, UNLESS some eccentric previous owner has half-filled them with cupboards.)

I painted the interiors of some other cupboards, and varnished absolutely everything that needed it, and put up two little framed pictures, and fixed the little shelf, and painted the other half of the ceiling, and knocked out the annoying wooden boxy thing that was glued into the cockpit floor right where everybody trips over it, and finished making the brass curtain rods to match the ones on the other side I did last year, and polished all the yuck off the curly little brass dragon lamp-holders so they're gold again instead of green, grey and crud coloured.

It's going to have all new ropes by Thursday too, and a new bilge pump hose, and a new mainsheet traveller (if you don't know what that is, just nod and smile), and I might even have time to put a bit of new non-skid paint around the cockpit.

So what's the point of all this? Well, I know Howard will recognise this feeling, and maybe some others will too. I've done all those things, and with *every single one*, it led me to notice about ten *other* things I would need to do before I could do that, or which I would need to do afterwards. I just spent weeks of work and more money than I want to add up, to learn that my boat is EVEN LESS DONE THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS BEFORE I STARTED. And worst of all, I don't even care. Call me back in another 30 years and see how it's getting on.

Brunnen-"constantly approaching perfection"G