Our first cruise since... blimey, was it that long ago?

Just two days ago, I was amusing myself wandering around the marina taking photos. "Blogography" was the mindset, and there were only three photos that were worth posting.

The weekend was wet and windy again, and we were looking for a weather window which lent itself to a comfortable boating experience. On Monday, it rained hard in the late afternoon, but the sky was worth it.

And then Tuesday morning hinted at the possibility that we might enjoy the first outing on Kantara since August last year. That long! So off we went. Nothing too adventurous, just a paddle down to Welford Junction to do some repairs to various chips and scratches on the paintwork.

The marina's resident swans were out, having blurry photos taken.

The weather was good to us, and the canal was... well, it was a bit the worse for lack of use, I think. There were a few places where dredging would be appropriate, and a lot of places where reeds were intruding far too much into the width of the cut. But of course, CRT have been hit by the virus just as badly as everyone else, and simply haven't been able to get done the volume of work they normally do. We were very happy just to put up with it!

Mooring a few hundred yards away from Welford Junction, we were subjected to the worst wind I can remember; off-side and very strong, such that we found it extremely difficult to bring Kantara in to moor her. We managed eventually, but it was touch-and-go for a while, and the wind remained that way for the rest of the afternoon, so we didn't manage to make any kind of a start on the work.

But, hey. Who cares? It was so good to be out again.

There just were few others there when we arrived.

It's a truly lovely place to be.

And then the wind died, and we set about washing, scraping away flaky paint, sanding, and priming all down one side of the hull. We weren't dealing with very much that was more than just superficial, so it didn't take us too long.

Before...


...and after!


And as we worked, lots of boats passed, coming and going, mooring and leaving, and several stayed for the night. And as we sat alongside the towing path, watching paint dry and celebrating with a couple of pints, we enjoyed the sun and the simple beauty of our mooring.

The next morning, the weather forecast said we were to expect high temperatures, which would not have been best for painting, so we started early while it was still relatively cool. Sanding and top coating the hull was the order of the day. We had the whole stretch of mooring to ourselves.

The hull before the topcoat...

and after!

I took the cratch cover off  to brush away dozens of dead flies and vacated spider cocoons that had accumulated in the nooks and corners over the past months, years, and to give a good cleaning to all of the steel and woodwork that had been under the cover.

The quiet of our day was punctuated regularly by a light aircraft towing gliders to their release altitude.

And again at the end of the day, we rested and just took it all in.

And this morning, we set off, smiling, back to the marina. We have a plan!

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Gremlins bubbling now, then?

(This is getting silly! I'm sorry, but this time five of you got to see the totally-not-even-started post on Thursday. Gremlins abound, and I'm on the warpath!)

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The problem I allude to in the brackets above made me think that perhaps my brain was overheating under my dense mop of hair. Grace concurred, and cut it. It was getting rather too Johnsonesque, anyway. I'm much cooler now - in both senses of the word!

Lots of boats have been coming and going over the past few days. NB Cantrememberthename next to Bob and Jenny on Infinity has gone, though possibly only to a berth at the other end of the marina. NB Achernar arrived back in the marina and went out again within a few days. Several others on the same jetty have gone, too. NB Emma Jane went out for another weekend day-trip, and more than a few other moorers who don't live on their boats have chugged off, possibly for their annual holiday. The marina's looking quite empty now.

The swans are still here, though, making their twice-daily tour, and stopping off at selected boats for the feeds they've come to expect. The cygnets are almost the size of their parents, but they still make the peeping sounds they were using when they were just a few weeks old.

It's good to have neighbours again. John and Sue are back on NB Lindsey Ann, their home, having been locked down with family for months. On the other side of them, Trevor arrived recently to spend several hours digging NB At Last out of the cobwebs, and generally preparing her for their cruising season.

Underneath the layers of spider-web that cover Kantara lurks a substantial coating of grime. It's quite alarming to consider that it has all come down with the wind or the rain. Where does the countryside air get all of its dirt from? I need to give the boat a very good wash - when there's not a gale blowing! Meanwhile, we're gathering together all the tools, paints, varnishes and brushes that we need to do the paint-repair work we're planning to do.

It'll happen before the end of the month. We've just arranged with "the kids" that we're going back to the house to form a family "support bubble" with them for just a few nights. It's Grace's birthday on August 3rd, and a meal is planned. We're really looking forward to it.

Here's a question for those of you who love language. "Now then". What does it mean? How can anything be Now and Then at the same time? The OED tells me how the expression's used, but I already knew that. It doesn't tell me what it means. And words are supposed to mean something, innit?

(Answers on a postcard, please.)

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It's curtains for us...

(Apologies to the two of you who read an unfinished version of this post three days ago. A gremlin must have pressed the Publish button when I wasn't looking.)

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...curtains and blinds, in fact. Grace made the current ones and the upholstery for Kantara back in March, 2012. Eight years on, she's decided it's time to replace them. They were a triumph, I thought. Curtains and blinds in gold, floor cushions and dinette seats in the same fabric, but in wine red. But Grace likes change, and now seems like a good time to replace them.

The fabric is chosen and ordered online, and we take a trip to Burford in Oxfordshire to collect it. It's a nice-looking town. We may well go there again some time to investigate further.

 (Photos from cotswolds,com)

Jess, our youngest, often has vivid, lucid dreams. She remembers them in great detail the next day, too. It's quite uncanny, and I'm envious. I dream a lot; fascinating, fun dreams. But they usually evaporate as soon as I wake up, and I can recall them at best only vaguely. However, an odd thing that has happened twice to me recently is that I've come out of my sleep with, in one case a song in my head, and in the other, a verse of a poem.

The song is a folk song set in the Napoleonic Wars - inspired, I have no doubt, by the TV series, Sharpe. It's a song of ten verses and choruses - yes, long, but not as long as some folk songs! - and I wrote the whole lot down in the twenty minutes after I got out of bed. 

The second one was just a verse, or perhaps just half a verse, of an Elizabethan-style poem that leans towards the surreal in rather un-Elizabethan manner.

I have been warned that these could be signs of impending insanity, so I'd better enjoy it while I can!

On another note, encouraged by people's reactions to my photos on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. I have entered a photo in a competition on Flickr. The entries are very many, and mostly amazing, so my chances of success are slim, but - hey!

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Lock-down Hair

It's been a source of great relief across the nation that hairdressers have now been able to resume business, and it's been a source of great humour that so many of us grew "Lock-down Hair" while they weren't able to work. Of course, what was bound to happen, happened. After some time, people turned in desperation to friends and family to cut their hair for them. Many did it themselves, possibly because they didn't trust anyone else, or maybe because there was enough stress around already without the risk of falling out with their nearest and dearest because the resulting coiffure was so frightful. And thus the easily-recognised "Lock-down Haircut" was born.

I reported a few weeks ago that fellow sufferers amongst the staff at NT Upton House were displaying a notice at the entrance, "We'll forgive your lockdown haircuts if you forgive ours." In some cases, there was a lot to forgive, though the guys above were not amongst them.

One has to ask what kind of nutter would have lockdown hair when they were married to someone to whom the art of hair-cutting is not unknown, and who has been practising it fairly often for the past few decades. If one did ask that question, then I'm afraid the answer would be "my kind of nutter". My hair hasn't been this long since the seventies. That's fine. I quite like it like that. Grace is in the same situation, and hers looks lovely, but I think she'd be happy to have it trimmed. Her problem with that, though, is that I don't share her snippy skills, she doesn't fancy doing it herself, and she can't bring herself to go to a hairdresser yet.

If I need an excuse for going back to the hair-length of my student days - and I'm down to the same weight now as I was then, too - I think I've grown it from a sense of solidarity with other lockdown hair men. Grace and I have noticed a very common attitude of "we're in the same boat"ness amongst people over the past months. It's true in the marina (where, of course, we're not all in the same boat, but in quite similar ones, and all of us are wishing we'd been out cruising since February). We've experienced it in the National Trust gardens, where all of us are enjoying hours of wide open spaces and fresh air such as we'd not had for a long time, and we exchange greetings with strangers we would probably normally (remember 'normal'?) ignore; and it's been evident in the few shops we've been in, too, where there is patience and tolerance amongst customers, the like of which I can't remember before Covid. So I can catch the eye of another baby-boomer with passé hair-length, and we exchange a nod, and a grin of complete empathy that says, "Yeah, me, too!"

For the sake of posterity, I hope to remember to record in this blog when I finally give in and ask Grace to cut the mop.

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