Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Magic! Pure magic!

This has absolutely nothing to do with Kantara, nor any other boat, nor canal, river or other wet thing. This post is written to record the making of a piece of musical theatre history that will be remembered by hundreds of people for the rest of their lives.

On Friday and Saturday evenings of last week, St Albans' Maltings Arts Theatre hosted the official launch of The Company of Players' debut album, "Shakespeare Songs". The band playing and singing the songs would have been excellent entertainment alone, but on these two nights they shared the stage with three members of the Maltings' resident theatre group, Ovo, who interspersed the songs with brilliant performances of excerpts from Shakespeare's plays, each chosen to complement the song that followed.


The result was unforgettable. There was laughter, there were tears, there was huge excitement. Magic! Pure magic!

All photos are by the amazing Keith Bache, who must be the UK's foremost supporter of folk and acoustic groups and soloists, and a very big fan of The Company of Players and Said the Maiden.













 

Yes, my appreciation of the show is very prejudiced. Our youngest daughter Jess is the founder of The Company of Players, and the one who had the vision for the album launch - that's her in the middle of the last photo - but two full houses with standing ovations endorsed my fulsome homage of the twelve very gifted, talented people who made those evenings so special. Social media comments have been rapturous, and rightly so.

Those of you who are persuaded by my almost-hyperbolically glowing account are advised to keep your eyes open for my announcements, some time in the not-too-distant future, of this show coming to a theatre near you. It's already under discussion, and it shouldn't be missed!

Find out more on their website.

And buy the album here!



Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Biding our time busily

'Winter's behaving like an angry relative who keeps storming out of the room and then rushes back in shouting "And another thing!"' quotes Val Poore in her blog. I love it. It sums up the situation perfectly. So we, like Val, continue to be off our boat, doing very landlubbery things.

We returned from Kantara as The Beast was withdrawing its assault. The marina water was thawed, the pontoon taps were working well. All was back to normal, though that didn't stop us from winterizing again, just in case. We left earlier than anticipated, Thursday 8th March. Jess had an early hospital appointment on the Friday, having spent a long afternoon and evening on Tuesday and most of  Wednesday being observed, prodded and poked and tested in the hope of finding the cause of bad abdominal pains. Steve had been her chauffeur, and missed work for the privilege, so it was time for us to lend a hand, and we took her back on the Friday for the completed test results, the outcome of which was a referral to a specialist. In seven weeks' time.

It's been useful to be back in St Albans. We both went to the doctor's for annual MoT checks, I thought I'd broken a filling, and had two dentist appointments, and we went to the beautiful Odyssey cinema to see "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri". Did I tell you we'd seen "The Shape of Water" there a few weeks ago, and "Paddington 2" back in January? Brilliant films, all of them!





Last weekend, we attended a retreat in Crowhurst, Sussex, with a crowd from our church.


After an eye-check, an NHS blood-letting (they couldn't get enough out of me the last time, nor could a GP nurse) the two-day launch of The Company of Players' fabulous album, and then Easter, we're off to a slightly breezy Skegness for Spring Harvest. Except it won't be very springy.


It's very likely that we'll go straight back to Kantara from Skeggy. That'll be in the second week of April. We've never before left it as late as that. 

And what will the weather bring? Will the Beasts have retired? Will we be able to cruise?

"Oh! And another thing!"

Thursday, March 01, 2018

Upgraded to IC5!

Having left the Alde gas stove on low all night, we were plenty warm in bed, but disturbed from time to time by the thudding, grinding noise of the hull moving against the ice that envelopes us.


The wind was gale-force, battering the boat with mighty gusts. I ventured out first thing this morning, and conditions were arctic. The snow is very fine, but it's actually hard to know if it's falling or being swept off the drifts by the wind. Or both!

I was out in it because I wanted to empty a toilet cassette, but I found that the Elsan disposal unit is unusable. Frozen. I wanted also wanted to fill our 10-litre drinking-water container, to reduce our use of the boat's water tank, but none of the running water in the marina is actually running. Also frozen. And it's not just the water that's frozen. After I'd changed the cassette, I found that the replacement one, stored in a hold on the well-deck, wouldn't open for use because the mechanism was... frozen stiff! Fortunately, that didn't take too long to thaw once it was inside the cabin.

So, our situation is now a firm IC5. We watched it enter IC4 yesterday afternoon.


We're happy to sit tight and weather this out (what a strange expression!) We won't starve, we won't get cold, we won't get bored. There are folk around the country who are in far worse straits then this, and my heart goes out to them. And it'll all be over soon. Won't it?

PS Grace and I have just come in from helping friends to get water into their tank. The marina manager has contrived to get access to an outlet under a manhole cover, and the idea was to attach hoses to this and thus run it to the boats that need it. It failed miserably. The water froze instantly in the hoses!

PPS I seriously thought I'd got frost-bite in my (foolishly) ungloved hands. I haven't.