Current affair

NICKI the Amazon Green parrot squawks as we walk through the door. "Hello. Hello. Hello!" He's perched on top of his cage in the Waterlily's forepeak area. John Hunt ruffles his neck feathers affectionately.

Next to Nicki, Marilyn the cockatiel - "she's called Marilyn because she's blonde" - and Beauty the budgerigar set up a welcoming chorus of their own. John and I sit at the little chart table, peering through the boat's forward windows at the grey River Ouse, while Hardy the cat settles on John's knee.

The Waterlily is a lovely place to live, John says - and it's easy to see the attraction. The cream and green houseboat is rocking at its moorings beside the St George's Car Park, just downstream from Skeldergate Bridge. Every now and then there's a creak as the timbers adjust to the movement of the water. It's wonderfully soothing.

"It's almost an organic thing," John says, puffing on his pipe. "There's a hostile environment outside, but it's like a womb in here. It gives you a real sense of security."

I can see what he means when he describes it as 'organic'. The Waterlily is never going to sail anywhere - she's a houseboat, not a barge. But she's in tune with her surroundings in a way no house is ever going to be. "You're always aware of the weather," John says. "She really moves and responds, and when it rains, you can hear the rain drumming on the roof. It's like being in a tent."

The 58-year-old York postman has lived on the Waterlily for eight years, since he swapped his terraced home in South Bank for her in 1993. It was a straight swap, house for boat.

John had always dreamed of living on a boat. "When I was a lad growing up, about 12 or 13, there was a houseboat moored down opposite Butcher Terrace, near where the Millennium Bridge is now, and I just thought it was a great place to live. That stuck with me."

He has, he insists, got everything your average terrace-dweller has - and more besides. He takes me on a little guided tour. There's the forepeak, up in the boat's bow, with the chart table set by the forward windows: the 'saloon' a little further back, a deep, square 'room' littered with comfortable cushions. Amidships, there is his 'studio' - another spacious room, with a large window looking out over the Ouse. It has got to be the best view in York. That from the Aga Khan's penthouse atop the block of posh flats across the river may be more expensive: but John is right from river level, where it's all happening. He likes to recline in the studio of an evening, listening to music and watching the boats go by.

Between the saloon and the studio is the galley. From there you go down a deck to reach the boat's two double bedrooms - one, in the stern, with a view out over Skeldergate Bridge.

For good weather, he's got the deck space, too. "It's lovely to sit out there on a summer evening when there are people on the bank, with some Mozart or Vivaldi playing," he says.

The Waterlily even has all mod cons; mains water; solid fuel central heating; on-board generators to provide all the electric power John needs. He has a mobile phone to keep in touch, and even his own postal address, complete with postcode. "Though I had to apply to the Post Office to get that," he says.

It all seems impossibly idyllic. But summer evenings listening to Vivaldi on deck as the boat rocks gently at her moorings are one thing: long, cold winter nights with the rain and wind lashing the water into a fury are quite another, surely?

"A lot of people ask, isn't it cold and damp in winter?" John says. "I say, you must be joking! I have to open the windows in winter to let some of the heat out. I had more damp in my home in South Bank than I do here."

Living on the Waterlily is much better than being stuck in suburbia, he says. Although it would not be true to say he's never had regrets. A year ago today, at the height of the great floods, he wished for a while he were safely back on dry land in his South Bank terrace.

He opted to sit out the floods on the Waterlily, not wanting to abandon her to the rising waters - and he faced 19 terrifying days entirely cut off from the rest of the world, marooned on the face of the vast, swollen torrent the once-placid Ouse had become.

It was a lonely, frightening time - and he wouldn't want to go through it again. "It was terrifying. The current was terrible, and there was all sorts of debris coming down the river. There were tree-trunks; there was half the breakwater from Skeldergate Bridge which must have weighed ten tonnes and got wedged behind the boat."

He couldn't sleep at night in his bedroom, down at water level, for the noise of the water surging past outside. Instead, he slept fully-clothed on his recliner in the studio a deck above, ready for anything.

His biggest fear was that the boat would be dragged from its moorings and that he'd be swept helplessly downriver. One night, he thought that had happened. It was the worst moment of all. "It was 3am, I was in bed, and I heard this crashing noise, and the sound of broken glass," he says. "I thought the boat had broken away from its moorings and I would be on the way down to Naburn."

He rushed out on deck - to find it was only his gangplank that had washed away. It was still tethered to the boat by a rope, and had smashed one of the galley windows as it swung against the side.

He wasn't left totally on his own during those 19 days. He had a visit from a fire and rescue team in a rubber dinghy, checking to make sure he was all right - and at one point his girlfriend Brenda floated supplies down to him from Skeldergate Bridge wrapped in plastic bin-liners. "They were on the end of a line, and I caught them and hauled them in," he says. "Not even the eggs were broken."

He also had the mobile phone. One morning, he was sitting in his studio about 9.30am when it rang. It was Radio New Zealand, asking for a live interview. "I was broadcast nationwide across New Zealand," he says, proudly.

John admits that next time the river floods, he will retreat to Brenda's house in Dringhouses rather than sit it out on board. Not because he's frightened - simply that he knows the Waterlily can handle whatever the floods throw at her.

"In fact, mine is the one riverside property that can't get flooded," he says. "She might get cut off - but not flooded."

It's probably true. With global warming on the way, maybe more of us should follow his example.

Updated: 09:31 Saturday, November 03, 2001