Blogstop

We're currently in the biggest marina in Europe at Penton Hook near Chertsey.  Work is needed on the boat from previous leaks and there's been a family crisis too, so I think it's fair to say that we may be here for some time...

On the plus side, there is a laundry here (and really nice showers!) but it's hard to keep the batteries charged when we're not moving, so there won't be any more blogging for the time being.   Not sure if anyone's interested anyway, but if you are I didn't want you to worry!

Good old Boaty McBoatface!

We're alive, and the new life-jackets are still untested.  It felt like a close thing, though.

Even though we weren't booked in till 1.30pm, we got up early to ask the Limehouse lock-keeper for advice on buoys, horn signals and so on.  We might as well have had a lie-in.  I don't know what we were expecting, but I think it was slightly more than "not ta worry, keep right, and try not to hit anyfing."

"You do know we're in a tiny plastic boat...?"

"Like I said, keep right, try not to hit anyfing."

In a way, the casualness was the most reassuring thing of all.

At 1.30 p.m sharp - maybe these lock-keepers aren't as casual as they seem - the gates to the lock opened, and in we went.

The Thames was several feet below and the lock emptied fast, then the gates were opening onto the river - with two feet still to go!  It was lucky we were roped on, otherwise we'd have shot out like a barrel over Niagara (well, that's how it felt), but we hung onto the ropes until the levels were more or less the same, then we were on our way.

It was bouncy from the start, but when the big boats passed it was INSANE.   I'd been intending to video the whole trip, but I gave up after less than two minutes on account of needing both hands to hold on.  I'm going to try to post it on Facebook, but the camerawork is very wobbly and the soundtrack is almost entirely nervous giggling.  In my defence, the waves were much bigger than they look...

Mike was wonderful - he seemed really calm and I actually believed him when he said everything was fine.  I only found out later that he'd been as scared as I was.

We went under Tower Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, all very much faster than we wanted to on account of the tide.  The boat's top speed is only about  five knots, but we were easily doing twice that.  The sea really does come in fast;  you can see the flow piling up against the pillars of the bridges.  We did a couple of circles, just to check, and even on full throttle and rudder we still found ourselves a hundred yards upstream from where we'd started the turn;  it's phenomenally powerful.

Everything calmed down a bit after Charing Cross.  I took over the steering, which was lovely - and ironically the biggest waves I had to deal with were from an RNLI boat speeding past.  But by then we WANTED waves.  Boaty McBoatface might have bobbed around like a cork near Limehouse, but she didn't sink, we didn't fall in, and now we want more - in fact Mike is itching for me to finish this post so he can Google seagoing boats for sale.

But it was good to pass Hammersmith (where Nathan was born - more lovely memories from half a life ago) and then to reach Teddington Lock again, where we moored up for the night.  Couldn't sleep though - still too high about this amazing, wonderful day.  What a trip it was, and I'm so glad there's still a little bit more to go:  we're now on our way back to Reading where we'll join the Kennet and Avon Canal, heading for Devizes and then Bristol.

London was fab.

Paddington to Limehouse

Sunday, and we fitted under the Maida Hill tunnel with feet to spare - don't know why we were worried - and were soon going through Camden Lock.  There were LOADS of people watching, and I got a bit flustered and forgot how to operate locks, but we got through all right with help from Laura and Gov, who were visiting for the second time.  Seems that they like boating - and seeing us - which makes me very happy.  And Laura, I will take the photo off here if you insist, but you look so lovely!

We dropped them off just before King's Cross and tied up for the night.  It turned out not to be such a good choice of mooring: later in the evening a boat just a few down from us was broken into. Luckily, the police noticed before we did and we missed everything bar the tail-end of the arrest process.  It still made for a slightly unrelaxing night though.


The following day we moved on less than half a mile and found a lovely place to stay right next to the station - another area that's been ponced up out of all recognition since I lived in London in the olden days.  There were chrome railings and fountains everywhere, not to mention security guards. Most of the day was spent on admin, but we had a bit of wander in the evening and marvelled at the new additions to King's Cross St. Pancras.  Now that's what I call a railway station!

It's hard to imagine even thinking you could improve such an incredible building, but all the new bits just work, somehow.

On Tuesday we went through the Islington tunnel - about half a mile long - and tried to find a spot close to where my niece Kathryn and her husband Zsolt have their boat moored, as we were due to meet them the following evening.   We passed their boat, and then literally dozens and dozens of others, all moored two abreast - and not a single space, not even for a little tiddler.

And so we went on, and on, past Hoxton and Shoreditch, past Dalston and Haggerston, and past South Hackney and Bethnal Green, by which time the light was fading, it was starting to rain, and the crew was getting fractious.

And then we saw it - a perfect little space with mooring rings, and even a fish and chip shop nearby.

We were past caring about the company (there was shouting on the next boat about someone leaving their hypodermics on the sofa) and thankfully it was too dark for us to appreciate the view.  We stuffed ourselves with chips and had the best night's sleep we've had in ages.

Wednesday, and we had to decide whether we should turn back towards Islington or press on to Limehouse.  Wonderfully, Kathryn and Zsolt said they'd come to us in Limehouse, so on we went, and moored in Limehouse Basin - the junction with the Thames, which is very, very exciting.  Soon we'll be going under Tower Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, all in a tiny plastic boat!

We had a little look at the churning water beyond Limehouse Lock and caught the train to Surrey Quays where Decathlon sells life-jackets.  We are now kitted out with rather sleek-looking grey harnesses which explode into inflated orange tunics on immersion in water.  Apparently rain isn't enough to set them off, but we looked at the weather forecast anyway and decided to spend another night here - there'll be more sun and less wind on Friday and the tide will be less ferocious.

Had a lovely evening yesterday in the Grapes pub with Kathryn and Zsolt.  It's one of the oldest pubs in London and is owned by Sir Ian McKellen.   Gandalf's staff - the genuine article, we were told - is in pride of place behind the bar, and there's a little deck at the back where you can look out over the river.

We were even more pleased we'd decided to stay when we discovered that Laura could meet us for lunch today.  She works in Canary Wharf and we just ambled over there from our mooring and met her outside her office.  Laura works on the 45th floor, only four below the pointy bit, and we realised - again - how bumpkinish and slow-lane we are when she received more than twenty emails during lunch, and Mike and I had...   well, none, really, unless you count somebody wanting to know if I'd had an accident that wasn't my fault.

After lunch, we ambled back to the boat again to start preparing ourselves for tomorrow, only stopping to play a few rounds of crazy-golf in one of the big Canary Wharf office courtyards.  Yes, how bizarre is that, but it was free of charge and we aren't in a hurry.  London is full of surprises - including, I have to say, that Mike beat me at golf.

We're seeing Anita tonight - it really has been lovely meeting up with so many people - and then getting ourselves ready for tomorrow.  The trip up the tidal Thames is something we've been hoping to do for ages, and suddenly it's happening.  A little bit nervous, but mostly just very excited.

Not sunk - just busy

We've have had some calls from friends concerned that we may have sunk after all, so I'm sorry for the recent lack of blog-roll. A similar thing happened in Spain six years ago:  there was a post talking about how we were shrouded in fog, and then... nothing.  Last time it was the sheer difficulty of getting online and the fact that it took half an hour to upload a photo;  this time, though, it's more that we've been incredibly busy.  Well, it's Lundun, innit - HUGELY exciting for a pair of Dawlish Warren bumpkins like us!

From suburban Hanwell, it's just been getting more and more interesting.   We crossed the North Circular on an aqueduct, which was really odd. We haven't even seen cars for weeks, and to have so many of them going so fast just beneath the canal was an unwelcome reminder of what modern life is really like. We were glad when we left the road behind, although the wafting from all the curry factories in this area meant we got very hungry:  another bad day for the diet plan.

Even on the quieter stretches of canal you can float around a corner and suddenly there are gasworks, or huge blocks of flats - but you know you're really getting to the business end of things when all you can see, in every direction, are cranes and construction sites.  The photo is of the approach to Little Venice (more cranes in the distance), and we're now moored just outside Paddington Station, opposite where the vast Brunel Building is going up.

We were really lucky to get a mooring - this area is absolutely packed with houseboats - but small really is beautiful.  Most canal boats are 40 feet long, so there are often little spaces that only a boat like ours could fit into.

So, off to see the sights.  On Thursday it was King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe (only £5 for a 'groundling' ticket, and all the more special because Lear is played by Kevin McNally, who lived with Gary and me in the flat in East Twickenham 35 years or so ago - the same one we shot past on the Thames a few days ago). The names of those who sponsored the building of the Globe are inscribed in the paving stones, and although I wish I could say it was me a couple of slabs down from Maureen Lipman, it wasn't.

After that, we went to the Tate Modern - another extraordinary building - but Mike was less impressed with the exhibits, which made for a slightly tense afternoon.  Then again, we had some interesting conversations about what constitutes art.  We we are still divided over whether the signed urinal really can have been "one of the most influential works of the 20th century", but both of us quite liked the stuffed sacks:

Mike was very keen for me to take a picture of the building, but I'm glad I managed to get one of him too.  He thinks I'm photographing the vast, cavernous space, but what I'M thinking is that it's a boiling hot day and that he's looking after my warm top as well as his own - just a small illustration of the kind of man he is.

Then it was on to see Claire again, who's recently moved to a beautiful house near Goldhawk Road. I've seen more of her the last few weeks than since we were at school, and it's been lovely.  We also got the chance to road-test her and David's new bathroom;  it was wonderful in every way, but I did have to mention the obvious inaccuracy of the bathroom scales.

We walked past Hammersmith Grove on the way there.  I lived in a basement flat here in my early 20s (£30 a week rent!) so that was another reminiscence overload, and also cue for a dinner-table diatribe about young people being priced out of housing.  I learned that I am known at Claire's - fondly, I hope and believe - as Red Sooz...

The most moving thing of all, though, was passing the burned-out shell of Grenfell Tower, just yards away from the Hammersmith and City Line.

I have no words for that at all.

Yesterday we saw Laura and met her boyfriend for the first time.  Gov is absolutely lovely, and they're coming for another boat-ride tomorrow, yay!  We're getting itchy feet again and planning to move on to Camden Town, as long as our boat will fit underneath the Maida Hill Tunnel - we went for a recce today and it does look quite low....

Hooray - it's the water tank!

Not sure this post needs much more than the title, but I'll probably ramble on for a bit anyway.  I haven't kept a diary properly since I was about 12, and I'm remembering that it's a really nice thing to do. I have no idea where the old diaries went (I think they might have been a bit dull - "had breakfast, went to school", that sort of thing), but I hope I'll last long enough to be able to look back at these later ones and wonder at how crazy we were.

Anyway, great, great news this morning.   The bilge was dry, which means no holes in the boat itself - we're not sinking just yet.  We repaired the water tank and refilled it - so far no more leaks - and set off towards Paddington.

I have been very spoiled by the locks on the Thames - mostly manned, and even when lock-keepers are off duty, all you have to do is press a button.  So the Hanwell flight (allegedly six, but there are a couple of extra ones at the end) took me and my weedy old biceps by surprise, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to be helped out of bed tomorrow morning :(

We're now moored at Bull's Bridge, just before the right turn onto the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal.   These are official 24-hour Canal and River Trust moorings, and there are lots of other boats, taps to top up the water tank (if we dare), and even a Tesco Extra 50 yards away.  It's a gorgeous sunny evening too, so all in all we're very happy.

We've also had such a nice journey.  The canal between Brentford and here isn't always pretty...

... but we've had a really lovely time on the way.  I've had proper conversations with people from Eastern Europe and beyond, and have been helped at locks by a Sikh and a Rastafarian who happened to be walking down the towpath and saw me struggling.  An absolute jewel of a day.

You know I said the leaks were fixed...?

Today started so well, if a bit earlier than is entirely suitable for Spanners:  at 7.15 am sharp we were in Teddington Lock.

Teddington Lock

This is an address I remember from my childhood as the home of ITV's Magpie - the much cooler alternative to Blue Peter with their wussy Christmas-decorations-out-of coat-hangers malarkey (although I DID like Shep).  Not quite sure what happened after that - somehow I ended up watching Noel Edmonds on Swap Shop rather than Tiswas, a cultural deficit I still feel quite deeply.


But there was no time for reminiscing.  We left at high tide, but within about 10 minutes the ebbing water was carrying us along faster than I think this boat can ever have been. Marble Hill Park and Eel Pie Island went by in a flash, and I completely missed taking photos of Meadowside, the riverside block of flats in East Twickenham I lived in when I ran away to Gary and London aged 17.

Richmond Bridge 

I did catch a glimpse through the trees, though, and thought again of how glad I am that I still know Gary now, nearly 40 years later.   He was as unselfish then as he is now, and the fact that I went back to school and finished my A Levels is almost entirely down to him.  We met up with Steve Goldie last night at Teddington, too (another friend from that time) and I am thoroughly enjoying all these blasts from the past as well as seeing things from the very different perspectives of the river and of middle age.

I did manage to take a photo of the very beautiful Richmond Bridge, though.  I used to walk over it every day to get to my rubbish job as an accounts clerk (yet another oeuvre unsuitable for Spanners, I feel, or certainly for this one: I failed my probationary period, mainly for paying copies of invoices as well as the originals.  Nobody told me there were copies, but they certainly noticed when I paid the one for a quarter of a million twice.  Not one to stay where I'm not wanted, I resigned and went on holiday.   Perhaps, looking back, that's where the die was cast... :)

But back to today.  I was intending to cook a healthy breakfast on the way to Brentford, but things were happening so fast I couldn't even risk making a cup of tea.  I'm not sure I should post this picture as it's so very shameful, but this, dear friends, was what we had...

Moving on very swiftly, we shot past Syon House on the left and Kew Gardens on the right, and thankfully managed to turn onto the Grand Union Canal at Brentford. Calm at last, although - unbelievably - we were told off by the lock-keeper for being late!  How so?  I doubt a helicopter could have got there faster than we did.

We didn't argue though - Brentford Gauging Lock (so called because it was here that cargoes were gauged and tolls levied) has 14-day moorings, drinking water, Elsan disposal facilities, toilets and even showers, so we really thought our luck was in.  Until we peered into the bilge, which, for non-boaters, is the space you don't normally look at, right at the bottom of the boat.  It was rather worryingly full of water...

I didn't take photos of this either - things were a bit fraught - but we've bailed it all out this afternoon, and think and hope that it's a leaking water tank, rather than a hole below the waterline.   We will know one way or the other by the morning, but either way I'm definitely buying lifejackets. xx

Onto the tidal Thames tomorrow

A lovely slow glide from Walton on Thames to Teddington today, passing Hampton Court Palace on the way.  Poor old Wolsey, building all that and then having to give it to Henry VIII.

We're moored just above Teddington Lock tonight, with a passage booked down onto the tidal Thames at 7.15 tomorrow morning.  We're very excited, and a bit nervous too.  The books we've got all talk about how casual boaters (which I'm sure we are, very) should take extra care and make sure that they get to Brentford or Limehouse within the very narrow time-window prescribed or risk being "abandoned to the tideway" - which doesn't sound at all nice and makes me want to snuggle under a duvet with a teddy.

The dangers are illustrated with lots of scary stories about 'inexperienced' - or sometimes 'reckless' -boaters being swept away, and it seems that even the ones lucky enough to be rescued get a very stern telling off from the Port of London Authority.

I was thinking we needed to buy armbands and maybe even a small life-raft before setting off, but we've been moored here for two hours now, and have seen boat after boat come up through the lock. No-one's wearing life-jackets - not even toddlers, in most cases - and when I asked one passing skipper if there were big waves, he laughed at me.

So I'm feeling slightly more relaxed now - I still want to be careful, just not neurotic.  London, here we come!

Maidenhead to Staines (or how to feel inadequate even on a 10-week boating holiday)

Much better weather today, so we took the boat canopy down and were on our way.  There's not much to beat floating down the river on a sunny day, especially as it meant I could finally wear the sun-hat I bought in Banbury - which now I come to think about it was the last day it didn't rain.

But the sunshine brings out all the really big, smart boats - vast, glossy gin-palaces and newly-built wide-beam barges which (as I know from a visit to a boat show) have televisions that rise up out of the polished hardwood floor, and king-size beds which you don't have to construct every night out of a jigsaw of sofa cushions.  They also had impossibly slim, elegant and well-dressed female crew members.

We then passed what seemed like hundreds of extraordinary - and extraordinarily expensive - houses, where apparently nothing was considered too much:  turrets, castellations, and statues of lions that were bigger, I swear, than the ones outside Buckingham Palace. The manicured lawns ran down to boat-houses bigger than our flat, and we did start to feel a bit impoverished, unsuccessful and inadequate.

We snapped out of it pretty fast - sunshine is a truly wonderful thing - and met some lovely and very normal people while we were going through locks: mostly people hiring boats for the day, who don't look down on our poor battered old Boaty McBoatface.  Unfortunately these are the very people who aren't used to driving boats, and we narrowly avoided a possibly terminal battering when someone forgot to tie up in the lock.  When a tiny fibreglass boat is squashed between the lock wall (stone) and a drifting narrowboat (steel) there can only be two winners - neither of them would have been us.

Luckily, Mike is a super-fab seaman and averted disaster with a nifty bit of reversing. It's gone to his head, though: we are moored up in Staines tonight, and he is enjoying Captain Pugwash jokes way more than a man in his mid-fifties should.  As long as he doesn't try to rename me Roger I suppose I can put up with it.

Another blip in boating happiness was mooring up last night having failed to buy any provisions (motto: staying in hotels makes you soft).  Boveney Lock is just opposite Windsor Racecourse, but many rainy miles' walk to the nearest shop, according to the rather sadistically cheery lock-keeper.
This would have been just about ok - we have horrible emergency boat food such as Pot Noodles and cans of sardines - but when we surveyed the cellar/bilge, we realised we'd drunk everything bar two cans of lager.  Even this would have been fine (as per previous posts we've been meaning to cut down) but the people on the boat moored next to us had obviously found a secret riverside branch of Majestic and were really quite tactless about it:  "A cocktail, darling?  Or shall we open the fizz?"

We considered piracy, but we only have a 15 horsepower engine.  We also considered a game of dominoes, but in the end we just put ear-plugs in and went to bed early.

Going past Windsor was amazing.  Loads of rowers, tourists, rowing-tourists, and yet more grand houses, including this one:

Well, Windsor Castle's ok if you like that sort of thing, but as you may be able to see from the picture, it's right under the flight-path to Heathrow!   The really amazing thing about today might be that we STILL prefer our boat and our flat.  Maybe we're easily pleased, but that's very useful when it comes to being happy, sunshine or no.

Rain

When you think of Henley, you think of straw boaters, striped blazers and Pimms, sunshine sparkling on a river full of rowing boats...

It wasn't like that for us.   For us it was more anoraks and hot tea, and we were the only ones out on the water (everyone else having sensibly coughed up the £10 mooring fee) when the sky went very dark.

Here's Temple Island, just before the thunder and lightning started and I had to close the canopy completely.

We limped on down the river until we got to Maidenhead, which has 24-hour moorings near the town centre for £8.  That seemed like a bargain in the circumstances - yet more rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow morning -  so that's where we're moored up tonight.

Well, that's where the boat is.  The captain and crew are in a hotel just across the road, and while some might say that's cheating, I really don't care:  we're washed, warm, watching daytime telly and feeling pretty wonderful.

Abingdon to Henley - and beyond

We set off early from Abingdon - in blazing sunshine, which made a welcome change - and thoroughly enjoyed seeing people heading off to work.  As everyone knows, part of the loveliness of having a holiday is knowing that other people aren't, but we soothed our shadenfreude-tainted consciences with the thought that at least they were walking or cycling along a beautiful riverside. We even tried to look a bit miserable as we waved at them, and you can't say fairer than that.

Or maybe you can.  We've seen and talked to yet more young people who see life on the inland waterways as their only chance to have a stake in the unfair society we've built for them. They are the lucky ones, too - they can't see any way that they could ever buy a house, but they still have enough money behind them to be able to afford a boat, just about.  We met a young couple in Reading yesterday who've been living with parents for five years so as to be able to buy what's known as a 'sailaway' - this is a boat with an engine but not much else.   It had grey primer on it, no loo or shower yet, but they were so pleased and grateful and proud, and it was a joy to see.  We keep meeting them at locks, and it's lovely.  But they had parents who were able to help; not everyone does.

We've also just been through Henley on Thames, which doesn't make you feel much better.  Beautiful riverside homes, but for miles either side there are 'No Mooring' and  'Private Property' signs (sometimes both nailed to the same tree - we were very sorely tempted to moor up there!).  Even where mooring is allowed, it costs £10 a night. It's not the money exactly, and we wouldn't dream of parking up in someone's back garden, but I really don't see the harm in pulling over next to a rural riverbank.  

It's also not as if the river is busy (it's raining pretty much all the time and the Regatta was over by mid-July), so it seems a quite unpleasant aspect of Henley:  controlling, exclusive, and just wrong.  On the plus side, we saw another boat flying an EU flag today - much beeping and smiling and waving, and even shouts of "Yay, Vince Cable!"  

Well, I'm more of a Corbynista myself, as you know, but I'm absolutely there with Vince that "the old have comprehensively shafted the young. And the old have had the last word about Brexit, imposing a worldview coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe".  I'm very glad someone is saying so.

Things ARE so much harder for young people these days.  My dad was rescued from Dunkirk (and knew the value of a united Europe first-hand), and he and my mum lived on a council estate till the year after I was born.   The house we moved into cost £5,000, and it was entirely possible for one person on very ordinary wages to afford it.  That same house is 'worth' getting on for a million now, and would be completely out of reach for a butcher, which was my dad's job at the time.  People who own houses now really don't know how lucky they are - we all like to think it's our own cleverness, but it it's not:  housing poverty is a choice that has been made, election after election, by the older and better-off to continue to profit at the expense of  the young and the poor.  I have been one of the lucky ones, but I'm hopeful that the young and the poor are finally starting to realise how thoroughly they've been shafted - and that a fairer society will eventually come out of it.  A society that fails to look after its weakest members is unsustainable in the long term, as I'm sure Marie Antionette would agree.

So, enough of politics!  Today we went through Days Lock at Little Wittenham, which is the home of Pooh Sticks!   Apparently the National Pooh Sticks Championships are held here every year as a fundraiser for the RNLI.  That seems slightly bizarre on the Inland Waterways, but it's a good cause regardless - and actually everything is a bit bizarre on the Inland Waterways, including the almost total eradication of the word Isis.  The Thames, upstream of where the river Thame joins, used to be known as the Isis, as was Oxford University's student paper and a dog in Downton Abbey - all gone now.

Another thing gone - temporarily - is our resolve to make this a healthy holiday:  walks on the towpath, lots of vegetables, and only a moderate amount of booze, that was the idea.   We're doing ok on the walks and the veg;  not quite so well on the booze.   Drinking does seem to go with the boating territory (we're seeing a LOT of bottles at the recycling facilities we pass, and some of our fellow boaters do seem quite pissed, not that we can cast aspersions) but we're still going to have to acquire some discipline from somewhere if we want to stave off alcoholism and bankruptcy.

In the meantime, here's a song about drinking too much.  It's very dark but very good, and was written by Charles Aznavour (something I also find bizarre).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6i5mOgWd6s

To Oxford and the Thames

Well, once we'd got the windscreen screwed back on in Banbury, we were on our way to Oxford.

We left a day earlier than planned - for some reason Nathan decided to stay in Devon and focus on getting ready for his new job rather than spending eight hours on six different trains and two buses to spend one night on a small and slightly leaky boat with a couple of old people.   We'd promised him a top-notch dinner and everything (see photo on the right) but there was no tempting him.

Maybe it was just as well. South of Banbury, our progress was slow. Some of the bridges are very low, and even barges - much lower in the water than we are - were scraping their top-boxes and wrecking their flowerpots.  Luckily (too much crap boat food?) we didn't even need to recruit extra ballast.  It WAS close: once we had to cling to the side of the boat and lean out like proper sailors to tilt it enough to get through, but we managed to get all the way to Oxford without having to dismantle everything again. Yee-harrrr!

We had a great evening with my old friend Claire halfway down, too, at a place called Aynho Wharf. It's hard to believe we've known one another forty years - she looks just the same, and unlike many people our age, has really kept her sense of fun and wonder at the world.  We chatted and drank and sang our old songs - thanks to Mike's techie tendencies, we have an ace music system, not to mention colour-changing LED lighting - and it was almost like being back at the school disco.  It was completely lovely.

When we were fifteen, my parents were so convinced that Claire was a good influence on me that they went on holiday for a week on condition that she stayed over to keep me in line.  Meanwhile, Claire's parents were so convinced that I was a good influence on HER that they actually agreed to this plan, on condition that we went to Claire's house for dinner every night. We did exactly as we'd been asked, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that both sets of parents were mistaken.

Oxford was also lovely, but the canal is set back from the city centre and almost hidden away, which seems a waste.  There is talk of extending it, but creating a new city-centre basin would involve losing a car park.  Apparently the powers-that-be assume that people arriving by road are likely to contribute more to Oxford's economy than ramshackle boaters like us.

In all honesty they'd usually be right, but they hadn't banked on Gary.  He is another old friend - a non-driver, but a lover of smart hotels, champagne, fine dining, culture, business, and gambling.   Thanks to the latter two, we ate out every night (I can highly recommend Pierre Victoire), and thanks to the one before that, we saw the Bodleian Library, the Bridge of Sighs, numerous college quadrangles, and the Ashmolean Museum - which was absolutely amazing.   We were stunned by so many things: the beauty of a real Monet, the guilt of all the stuff we plundered from Greece and Crete, and the impossibility of ever getting on the list of benefactors.  When the list includes the Queen AND Monsanto, you get the feeling that you're talking millions. But hey, I think Oxford has enough money already.

The highlight for me:  the Botanical Gardens.   I wish Belinda had been there to talk us through everything (she not only gave us our Spannerish name; she is also a plant ecologist) but we really enjoyed it even so.   Gary is very camera-shy but here's one of him and some plants...

... and there were lots of other lovely plants too, including ones that eat insects - could do with some of those on the boat as I'm apparently irresistible to bitey things - and giant waterlilies that looked as if you could sit on them (we didn't try).

Gary left yesterday morning, and thoughtfully vacated his hotel suite early to allow us to make use of it till check-out time.  Mike and I had baths - utter bliss - and watched telly for the first time in six weeks (not sure we've been missing much).  We also found a launderette, which - take it from me - was not before time.

We got up early this morning and went down the lock which separates the Oxford Canal from the River Thames.  It's only a few feet down, but what a difference!  Suddenly everything is wide and expansive - even the locks are huge (and electrically operated - bad for bingo wings but fab for morale), and it really is incredibly exciting.  There's a mythology about this river, a sense of history and civilisation, which I'm finding very moving.   It's not just that it's been here long before I ever was and will still be here long after I'm gone; it's all the stories connected to Old Father Thames: paupers, princes, palaces, and all the rest.  I've even been thinking about David Walliams swimming it, and have to say I have a new-found respect for him: it's a long way.

The Thames just is very special.  We're hoping to go all the way through to Limehouse, which will take us through Shakespeare's London and past the Houses of Parliament. I will try to take pictures but I might just be too awed.

On the downside, we had to buy a special Thames licence this morning.  We've already paid six hundred quid for a year's Canal and River Trust Licence (and another £70 for a month on the River Avon) but the Thames is administered by the Environment Agency and the Port of London Authority, and we had to pay £80 to the EA today - possibly more to the PoLA in a week or so.   I'm not complaining - we can see all the work going on to keep all these waterways open - but it's no wonder that fellow boaters say that B.O.A.T is an acronym for Bring On Another Thousand.

Tonight we're in Abingdon - a really pretty town - and here, the councillors have made a real effort to attract tourists. Two hours' car parking is free, and there are also lovely free moorings. Here's the view from the boat tonight...

... so can't complain, really.   Maybe the wonderful thing about this slow boating life is that I don't even want to, any more.

One last thing - in what has turned out to be a very long and rambling post; thank you for bearing with me - is narrowboat names.   We've seen a lot: a Jennifer May, a Shelby, not to mention a Susie AND a Suzy (they were best, obviously), but also dozens of Narrow Escapes, Pipe Dreams, Dreamcatchers and Carpe Diems.  There was a Last Command (retired military?), a P45 (redundancy?), and a Kids' Inheritance too.   The only one that made both of us laugh out loud, though, was Flat Bottomed Girl.

Off to put a Queen album on now. xx

Banbury and poverty

Well, Cropredy was a bit strange.   The festival doesn’t start for a fortnight, but most of the moorings were already taken up: you really do have to plan a long way ahead if you’re travelling on the canals. There were a few spaces left, especially for a little boat like ours, but beyond the centre of the village most of the moorings were long-term residential ones, and we decided to press on.

We have passed a lot of places like this:  permanent moorings, which usually involve some sort of decking or garden behind the boat.  Some of them are festooned with flowers and really well-tended, but a fair few are decorated with mannequins in stockings, scarecrows, soaking wet plush toys and rusting cars.  
I think there is real poverty - and mental illness - on the canals. On the one hand there's the middle-class boating community, helping one another at locks and brightly discussing the weather and where to find the best canal-side pubs; on the other, there are people who can't afford to repair the rusting barge that is their only home, and can't afford the fuel to cruise around either.

There is a huge divide here: the rich baby-boomers, doing this for fun, and the others - the bereaved, the divorced, the depressed and (increasingly) the young - who are on the canals out of necessity, who are here because the alternative would be sleeping rough.  It's a microcosm of the fucked up society I think we're living in now, and it makes me feel uncomfortable, angry, and lucky too.  Vote Labour!  I know I promised not to say things like that, but I just can't help it.

We've also noticed that most of the middle-class boaters are elderly.  At least we thought they were, but it turns out that some of them are only a couple of  years older than we are. Looks as if we can add self-deception to our long list of unmarketable skills, then...  :(  

Gin-drinking, anyone?  Sitting around a swimming pool and chatting?   Please do let us know if you come across an employer with these requirements - we'd be a perfect fit.

We’re in Banbury tonight, of the cross/horse/lady fame (which rather unfortunately reminds me of the worst of our domestic service jobs, mentioned in a post the other day) but this is fine – there are really good moorings right in the centre of the town, and we’ve also just spent a really lovely couple of days with Jackie and Pete.  

Nathan is paying us a flying visit tomorrow, then we’re meeting my old schoolfriend Claire a few miles down the canal on Saturday before moving onto Oxford where we have a rendezvous with Gary on Monday.   This is quite a social whirl, and about time too:  we’d started talking to ducks and eating with our hands again.  We’re fine now though – you could take us anywhere, more or less.

Banbury Cross itself, though:  very disappointing.   Ride a crocked boat to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lorry on...  well,  a wide roundabout, really. I loved the rhyme as a kid, but maybe sometimes you just shouldn't look back.

The other disappointing thing is the lowness of the bridge in the centre of town.  We’ve been out with a tape measure this evening, and unless we can find another coachload of game oldies prepared to act as ballast, we’re going to have to unscrew the windscreen before we can get any further.  The canals seem as if were designed for bloody narrowboats!

Still, things could be worse. Not a bad view out of the back door tonight....

Clean pants and Mooring Fairies

We're now a few miles further down the very beautiful Oxford Canal.  It winds round all the hills like a river, hence the very welcome absence of locks for the time being.  Fitness is all very well, but it's nice to just sit back and watch the world go by sometimes.  And I am still recovering from locks, really - it's a bit like going horse-riding and realising the next day that there are muscles you don't normally use much;  I had to be helped out of bed two days ago, which wasn't very dignified.

We are very happy today, though.   After my telling-off at the locks yesterday, six elderly people climbed off their steel boats and onto our yoghurt pot in order to weigh it down enough to get under a low bridge.  Faith in human nature completely restored!

We've also found a canalside launderette, and just in time too:  one clean pair of pants left - each, not between us; that would only have led to arguments - and a dirty clothes bag starting to take on a (rather unpleasant) personality all of its own is not a recipe for boating happiness.

So tonight we're moored at Fenny Compton, not far from Cropredy (of Fairport Convention and festival fame).   But it's lucky we're moored at all.  Some moorings have iron rings set into the towpath and some don't - just as some boats have competent crew and some don't - and here at Fenny Compton, we have the much more usual arrangement of corrugated iron....

.... which means you need a thing like this....

Sadly - incompetently, when push comes to shove - I cast off the ropes this morning and left the hooks still in the corrugated iron. Lucky that Mike had done the same thing only the day before, but at ten quid or so a pop, it's no wonder we're not dining out very often.  We have just about forgiven one another, but I have nonetheless come to understand why so many boats have statues of the Buddha on them. From a Karmic point of view, though, there will be boaters today or tomorrow who didn't have the right hooks to moor up - and then they find that they do after all. It's quite a big consolation, really.

Grand Union to Oxford

We turned from the Grand Union onto the Oxford canal this morning, and they really are so different, as was the Stratford canal before the Grand Union.   They have different lock mechanisms, different bridges, and even different coloured water, depending on the kind of land the canal was cut from.

For instance, bridges on the Stratford Canal all have this split in the middle - it was to allow the ropes from the horses to pass through so you didn't have to unhitch them.   I find this amazing, but Mike knows all this.  He was taken boating by his parents and hated it because “it’s boring - all they do is dawdle along at three miles an hour and stop at pubs.” One of the pleasures of this trip, for him, is seeing through my eyes all the things he didn’t realise he’d forgotten.  I can’t quite see what his problem was with the pace of canal life or the pubs, but I suppose he was only 12 or so at the time.  He’s getting the hang of it now, for sure :) 

Meanwhile, I’ve taken to this like a duck to water (and we’ve seen a lot of those, not to mention herons, kingfishers, moorhens, dragonflies, and one very beautiful leopard moth sunning itself on a canalside woodpile – which was also one of the neatest woodpiles I’ve ever seen).

I am still completely awed by the simple cleverness/clever simplicity of locks; it is, after all, pretty amazing for boats to be able to travel uphill.   There’s also the etiquette involved, which is mainly down to water-saving but also involves politeness:  if you’re going uphill and the lock is empty, in you go - but if it’s full and there’s a boat approaching from the other direction, you wait for them to come down first (which involves emptying the lock, thereby making it ready for you to go in once they’ve come out. Sorry if this is completely obvious to you, but I’m still having to work it out). 

So far so good, but yesterday I took the view that a narrowboat coming down THREE locks ahead couldn’t reasonably be described as “approaching”…  

The boating community is supposed to be very friendly, and I’ve found that to be mostly true.  Not this time, though:  as our boats passed there were dark mutterings of ‘Tupperware’ and ‘yoghurt pot’ - common insults hurled at gorgeous little plastic boats like ours, how very dare they – but then they told me that GRP cruisers and hire boats simply shouldn’t be allowed on the canals!  We’ve seen more of this than we’d like, and it’s sad to realise that snobbery is alive and well even in this last bastion of freedom.  We are thinking of re-naming the boat Activia (though sorely tempted by a temporary sign saying Foxtrot Oscar).

But generally, all is calm, lovely, and the best holiday I’ve ever had.   We’re moored up at Napton tonight – there’s a pub and shop right next to the canal, and we have full water, empty bins and bog, and enough gas and petrol to see us through to the next bit. 

Nathan and Laura are well and happy too, so all in all - just wow, really.   Life will undoubtedly come and bite us in the arse again at some point, but we’d have to be idiots not to enjoy the smooth sailing/cruising while it lasts.  

Hoping to see Pete and Jackie somewhere near here soon, and then Gary early next week in Oxford – and you are all welcome to do the same. Carisbrooke/Boaty McBoatface/Activia/Foxtrot Oscar only sleeps two (and even then it’s so compact that we have to be extraordinarily patient with one another J), but if you have a campervan, a tent, or the money for a night in a canalside B&B, you are very welcome to see for yourselves how calming and beautiful the inland waterways are.  We’d make you a nice lunch too – we’re professionals, after all…

Talking of catering, Pete has sent me the link to the Microwave Cheffery Song.  It cheered me up no end at the time, but alas failed to prolong my career as a campsite warden. Oh well.     

https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds...

Still spanners, just a different vehicle

We must do this again, we said.  No, we will do this again - next year for sure, or maybe the year after.  But it’s been more than five years since the last blog post, since the last really proper adventure.  For me that’s quite a scary confirmation of how life trickles away if you don’t pay attention.

Lots has happened, don’t get me wrong.  We tried being campsite wardens but that was horrid:  a lot of cleaning and a lot of kitchen work where all the food was frozen and there were no ovens or hobs, just microwaves.  The final straw was being told that I had the “makings of QUITE a good microwave cook”.  Pete Sears wrote a lovely song about that, and once I’ve asked his permission I will put a link on here.

Edit:  and here it is - https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds...

We switched to domestic service then – better paid, and again with accommodation included – but we mostly failed at that too:  I found it difficult to be properly subservient if the Lady of the House was stressed because she had an art class AND a nail appointment on the same day, and Mike was similarly irritated by the Viscunt telling him that the stripes he’d mown on the lawn weren’t quite straight enough. 

We will leave aside, for now, the job where I was threatened by a drunk racehorse owner with a carving knife and told that I was a fucking useless housekeeper.  Madam may have been correct, but it still made sense to leave (under the by now usual cloud).  We found out later that, at three weeks, we’d lasted twice as long as the previous incumbents; not sure if we should be proud or ashamed of that.  The agency that sent us there came up trumps, however – guilt, PR, call it what you will – and sent us to a beachside villa in the south of France.

It was a lovely drive.  Good to be away from knife-wielding maniacs, obviously, but also sunny, lovely, leisurely and with the promise of working for nice people at last – a bit of driving, a bit of pool maintenance:  a nice, easy, semi-working holiday, we thought.

“Oh goody - the chefs are here, the chefs are here!”

“What?” we said.

“The kitchen is your domain!” they trilled.  “Did the agency tell you we’re low-carb?”

“What?” we said.

We did explain the mix-up, but it was too late to hire anyone else so we became chefs.  We even turned out to be quite good at it, thanks to a really fast internet connection (for the recipes) and our acting experience (for presentation skills and general aplomb). Cooking IS quite like acting, I think – or maybe a meal is like a play – but certainly you can’t stop once you’ve started and you always try to make it look as if nothing has gone wrong.  It was also a nice change to be welcome to use the swimming pool; at our previous job, the myriad incontinent dogs were allowed in but the staff weren’t.

We spent the next three summers in France.  In the winter we did building work, started a dinner party catering business, and worked in NHS communications skills training (we kind of fell into that too).  Maybe we have a low boredom threshold, I don’t know, but come the start of 2016 we felt as if another proper adventure was long overdue so we cleared our schedule completely and bought a canal boat. We tried to buy a proper steel one, but the surveyor seemed so astounded it was still floating, and so kindly in his advice that on our budget we really ought to be looking at plastic, that we ended up with Carisbrooke/Boaty McBoatface.

But then Mike’s mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  She wanted to stay at home, and Mike’s brother and sister lived far away and had work commitments so we stored the boat and lived with her in Cheshire until she died.   It’s a very strange thing, thinking about it now.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the most wonderful and privileged, and also the most guilt-inducing:  I know I could have looked after her better, and wish I could turn back the clock and do it perfectly.  All we’re left with is the very imperfect knowledge that we did the best we could at the time.  The district nurses were wonderful, as was a particular carer called Marina (whose 11am visits we absolutely needed and clung to), but Mike and I were still knackered and floundering and wondering how long we could go on.  It’s a year ago, almost, and what I think now is that none of us in the so-called First World have enough experience of death.  Like birth, it’s been removed from the natural realm and specialised, medicalised.  We have lost our knowledge and our rituals, and I think we need them back.

The referendum vote was also a turning point.  I really didn’t think it was possible that we’d vote for Brexit but then we did, and the world we thought we knew changed overnight.  I know some people feel differently, but for me, Brexit represents the wanton destruction of the social and political progress of an entire generation for the sake of a long-standing Tory feud. I think Mike and I changed, on June 24^th last year, from people who had always had faith in our country to people who thought, for the first time, fuck’em then, we need to look after ourselves.  Overnight, we’d become fearful - ironically the very state which I think brought about the Leave vote in the first place - but also more determined to do things our own way.   There's nothing like losing your faith in society AND someone you love in the space of two months to make you sit up and take stock.

So - moving on from death and destruction - we’re on a boat now.  It's a small plasticky one, very vulnerable to big hulking barges and also to rain (!) but it's lovely.   We’ve been through Stratford upon Avon, Warwick and Leamington Spa, we’ve been through tinned food and enforced teetotalism (not as many canal-side shops as we'd hoped), and we’ve been through enough locks to make even unfit lazy people lose weight and tone up a bit.  

Turning right onto the Oxford canal soon and will be in Oxford next week and London a week or two after – unrecognisably slim, maybe...