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...