I n 1992, I moved to a houseboat called The Chairman, in Chelsea. The address was HB (meaning houseboat) The Chairman, 106 Cheyne Walk, London SW10. I was divorcing and sad to be leaving my flat in Hammersmith, which had a view of the Thames. An estate agent showed me various flats, but I hated them all. He told me that a friend of his was selling a boat; he said he’d find out more.

I left thinking: “From his description, there’s only one place this boat could be.” I went straight to Chelsea and walked along the row of boats. A woman came out of one. We caught each other’s eye, and I said: “Is this the boat that’s for sale?” She said: “Yes.” A man came to the door. He was bigger than me — and I’m 6ft 3in — with a booming voice. He was in his seventies, suntanned, with white hair, and he was wearing espadrilles, very brief shorts and nothing else, apart from a paisley cravat and a captain’s hat.

They were psychotherapists, and the man was a Jungian. They thought it synchronicity — a word invented by Jung — that I’d turned up. They prepared me a eal and I ate with them.

The moment I clapped eyes on the barge, it was love at first sight. It was a summer day, and beautiful sitting out on the deck. (Really, when you buy a boat, you should go when the weather’s at its worst.) The couple explained that they were moving to a house, and told me exactly how much they needed for the boat, so there was no haggling. I agreed to pay £120,000 for the barge and mooring.

You say you’re going to live on a boat and everybody thinks you’re going native, but there I was in Chelsea, with 24-hour security, a lit pathway that was gritted if the weather was icy, and a locked parking space on Lots Road. In a pretentious way, I was able to say “Look at me. I’m so bohemian; I live on a boat”, but in fact I was living in more mansion-block-style luxury than I’ve ever done before or since. One newspaper did a piece along the lines of “Nigel’s had a divorce and he’s living on this run-down old barge”, but it was an 80ft boat with three bedrooms, two living rooms, a breakfast room, two decks, and a kitchen.

The Chairman was a former customs and excise barge, built in 1947 and converted in 1974. When I moved in, I found that the boiler was faulty and the roof leaked. It was hard to see where the leaks were coming from. There would be a puddle on the roof above the kitchen, but as soon as the tide came up and swayed the boat, the water would go rushing down to the other end and come through the sitting-room ceiling. I replaced the roof, got a new boiler and put in twice as many radiators.

The bedrooms were below deck, and I painted my son Stan’s ceiling dark blue and put up luminous stars. He was five in 1992, so we had to have rules: no going out on the deck without an adult, and no messing about. He could swim, but I’d heard stories of kids falling in the drink and dying because they were sucked under the hull.

Below deck, at the bottom of the stairs, was a cramped dining room with a chandelier and chinoiserie panels. It had been put in by a famous chef called Ackerman, who lived on the boat before the psychotherapists. The panels dated from the 19th century and were from a hotel in Paris. I sold them for £3,500. I painted the dining room raspberry pink and put in zebra-fabric cushions.

When people visited, they liked to sit with their back against a wall; they didn’t want to sit in the middle of a room, because the boat was moving all the time. Sometimes I’d sit a guest on the sofa, go and put the kettle on and, in the time it took to make a cup of tea, they would have dozed off. The boat was like a big cradle, rocking you to sleep.

I sold the barge in 1997. My girlfriend — soon to be wife — also had a son and a dog; two kids, a border collie and a boat is not a good combination. We decided to sell both our places and move in together. The boat was valued at £215,000, and it sold within two weeks. The first person to see it said: “I’ll have that, but I want it now.”

Death of Long Pig, a play by Nigel Planer, opens at the Finborough Theatre, London SW10, on Tuesday

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