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.