Friday, March 27, 2020

Lockdown day 6 - A great way to achieve social distancing

I treated myself to an exercise walk to Cracks Hill yesterday. The weather was just right for it. I only saw two people. One was a jogger who overtook me on the canal towing-path, and the other was a baby-carrying woman who hurrying down the Crick Bridle Road towards me. We passed with two meters between us, but she seemed rather distressed. She was probably the owner of an abandoned small saloon car further up the path. It was up to its hubcaps in soft mud, and pieces of turf covered the ground around it, having been thrown up by her spinning wheels. She'd well and truly dug herself in. My problem was understanding how the heck she had got there, having had to cross three very uneven fields and gone through four farm gates. Odd.

Cracks Hill was silent, and I sat there for some time enjoying the sights, the fresh air, and the music in my headphones.








Back at the boat I continued the out-door theme and sat at the end of the pontoon with a cup of coffee, my music, and the beauty of the marina. This could become something of  a fair-day ritual. I've just come in from today's.

I did much the same walk today. This time I was intending to take the photos I didn't take yesterday of the mud-stuck car. Unfortunately - though fortunately for the owner - it had been rescued but, judging by the new deep ruts in the mud further down the bridle path, it hadn't been easy going.

This is where she gave up trying yesterday...
...and this is clearly one of several places where she got stuck again on her way down the track later.
Strangely, there were signs on Cracks Hill that perhaps this is some kind of local sport.




Social distancing is fine when there are walks like this to do!



I didn't pass this boat. Walkers have been asked not to go near moored boats in order to avoid
the risk of contagion should there be someone inside who has symptoms of the virus.

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Lockdown day 3 - Spring arrives on the socially distancing marina

I've just come in from a wonderful half-hour or so sitting at the end of the pontoon, looking across the almost mirror-like marina pond under a warm, clear, blue sky, drinking coffee and listening to some of my current favourite music. Jan and Ed came back to Emma Jane a couple of days ago to make social distancing easier, and they're parked up next to us as usual. But they're inside the boat, and we're safely socially distanced. There seem to be very few people around. I can see one man on the other side of the water.




Well, we did our Paracetamol hunt yesterday, visiting four smallish supermarkets and one pharmacy, and coming home with two packs of caplets. We'd have liked it to have been four, so we'll keep our eyes out on those restricted shopping trips for food. Once again, the supermarkets were remarkably well stocked with almost everything, and shoppers were casual and sensible.

In the afternoon, we went for an hour's walk. It's not difficult to avoid people when you're living in the heart of the countryside, and the canal towing-path and a local footpath together offer some lovely walks of up to several hours duration. One Dutch barge passed us. The canal was very quiet. The weather was lovely - as it is today - and we only had to hold our breath on a couple of occasions when we passed other walkers. After the rough weather we've all had over the past weeks it's so good to experience the spring. The swans have nested here again, on a tiny island in a remote corner of the marina. They knew what season it was!





This really is the place to be at the moment, and I'm feeling very privileged, very grateful.

My new book has had its first review already! It was written by fellow blogger and author Valerie Poore, and I couldn't have hoped for a better write-up.


Check out Val's books. She lives on a barge in Rotterdam, and she writes about her years spent in South Africa as well as her boating experiences in Europe - very different from ours.

And don't forget "Out of the sunrise", will you?


Sunday, March 22, 2020

Lockdown day 1 - Current reality

I've met a number of boaters over the years who have told me how glad they are that they spend much of their time being separated from their spouse by the length of the boat. Typically, he takes the helm while she sits at the front knitting, reading, drinking G & T or tea, and trying to stop a couple of badly behaved dogs from jumping overboard. Fortunately for us, this is not the case with Grace and me. We stand together at the stern while we cruise, and share the whole experience. So the fact that we are now spending most of our time social-distancing together in the boat is not a problem.

Despite the weather.



Nonetheless, I do feel physically cramped on occasions, and feel the need to get out and go for a walk. So I braved the weather on Friday, and headed out for a good stride on one of the several possible local, circuitous routes. It was cloudy, but not raining, but... the wind! I got to the top of a bit of an incline on my way to the marina gate and stopped. Not voluntarily, mind, but physically brought to a standstill by an oncoming gust. It ceased, of course, as gusts do, so I took a few more hopeful steps. Then I was halted by another. This gave me sufficient incentive to consider the option of abandoning the walk, but the sudden and painful freezing of my hatless head (silly me, forgetting my trusty beanie) persuaded me in a split second. Had I continued, my cranium would have surely turned to ice, and I would have died of hypothermia before got to the gate. I turned around, and was blown back home.

I tried again the next day. It was still a bit blustery, but nothing like as cold, and the deserted canal and countryside under greening trees and a clear blue sky were a delight. Social distancing was implemented to the letter. I met Phil Achernar taking Oscar for a walk, and we stood several metres apart for our brief chat. After that, I met no-one.

Today, the sky's the same, but we have a Friday wind. I have my beanie at the ready, but I'm not likely to face those gusts again.

I am very impressed by the people of Yelvertoft village and the current residents of the marina who go there for shopping. A couple of recent visits to the tiny Co-op there revealed shoppers with sensible amounts of goods in their wire baskets, and shelves that are almost totally full. People were walking past stacks of toilet rolls. True, there was little in the pasta and rice section, but the lovely Irish lady at the till told me that daily deliveries continue, and they rarely find themselves short of a stock item. There's a lesson there to be learned by the rest of the world!



A Sunday morning may well find us either at Dagnall Street Baptist Church (top) in St Albans or Rugby Baptist Church (bottom), but this morning such gatherings were - and will remain for n weeks - out of the question, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic (Covid - the new C-word) so the two of us joined DSBC virtually by means of the internet. It was otherwise a normal morning service of about an hour's duration, but sound only, and a recording made during the week by Simon and Jonni, our minister and his associate. Hymns were provided by YouTube (joining in was encouraged). It was strange, but oddly moving. I look forward - don't we all? - to living a life that feels more normal, though I think the end of Covid will start a new reality - but these simple socially-distanced services will serve the church very well in the meantime.

Tomorrow, we're going on a Paracetamol hunt. This is not stockpiling or panic-buying, but simply us making sure that, should either of us go down with this flu, we have enough for our needs. I wonder how many empty shelves we shall find.

Thursday, March 19, 2020

PC or not PC, that is the question

Wow! We went to Sainsbury's yesterday. Just to do the week's shopping, I assure you. This was not panic buying on our part, but our twentieth step into the supermarket showed it to be far from super. We had never before seen so many empty shelves. Fortunately for us, everything we wanted was available in relative plenty, though I do confess to having taken the very last two-pack of tissues, which was hiding behind all of the empty boxes.

The interesting and useful thing is that out local Co-op rather small supermarket is very much more super. The only shortages they suffer from are toilet rolls and paracetamol, though these are both restocked daily along with everything else. In truth, the only reason we did our shopping at Sainsbury's is that we had three large bin-bags of recycling we were pretty desperate to get rid of, and Sainsbury's, though it's a twenty-five minute drive away, has our nearest recycling facility. We thought we might as well get the food in while we were there.

Back on the boat, we continue to pass our time reading, writing, knitting, doing jigsaws, fixing a few things the fixing of which is a bit/a lot overdue, and trying to find a break in the rubbish weather when we might go for a decent walk.

"Out of the Sunrise" is now published, the failure of the Kindle publishing machine having been overcome by my persistence - fifth time lucky - and has had a few sales already. With my tongue close to the inside of my cheek, I'm wondering if the story might be too non-PC.
  • The lead male character in this book is not politically correct
  • The lead dog is male
  • Some of the characters are sexist
  • All of the characters are White Caucasian.
  • The only religion depicted is Christianity
  • The only Christian denomination is Church of England
  • Male and female characters do not play an equal part in the story
  • The vicar is a man
  • The dentist is a woman
  • So is her receptionist
  • Injury is caused to some of the animals in the story
  • All of the human characters are apparently omnivores. Those who may not be don’t advertise the fact
  • None of the characters are apparently LBGTQ (but they can be if you want them to be. I won’t mind)
  • None of the characters speaks out against human slavery
  • Christmas is called Christmas
  • A spade is called a spade
I hope this won't put you off buying it. My beta-readers gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up, so they weren't offended. One of those readers was Valerie Poore, herself an author rather more prolific than me, and well versed in the art of writing. I'm very grateful to her for her thorough reading of it, and the several useful criticisms she made.

Maybe this book of mine might help you pass your self-isolation time enjoyably!


Out of the Sunrise
a boating adventure with Billy the Dog






Monday, March 16, 2020

List of jobs to do this time last week

List of jobs to do this time last week
Clean Bubble stove and adjust it so that it burns cleanly
Buy and run new cable for TV aerial
Spring-clean
Major food shopping (NOT panic-buying!)
Fit new catches on various cupboard doors
Replace old-and-getting-dangerous fan heater
Deep-clean well-deck
Get AJ Canopies to replace broken cratch cover fasteners
Publish my new book

List of jobs still to do
Spring-clean
Fit new catches on various cupboard doors
Deep-clean well-deck
Get AJ Canopies to replace broken cratch cover fasteners (I've emailed them, but had no reply)
Publish my new book (I've tried, but the Kindle Direct Publishing website is giving me grief. I'm awaiting help from their support team)

The thing is, when the weather's as bad as it's been recently, I don't really feel like doing that sort of thing. I'd far rather be reading and writing, listening to music, learning Italian, watching TED Talks, playing brain-games... So I've been very glad of the beautiful breaks in the weather to give me the oomph I need to get up and go!



The temperature in the saloon at the moment (16:30) is 25°C, and there has been no heating on for over five hours. We woke up to 8°!

As for my book, readers of this blog post are the first to hear about it. It's not about our boating experiences like my previous ones have been. This one's a novel, I loved writing it, and it's been given the thumbs up by beta-readers.



"They chose a narrowboat, and canal life changes things. It changes people, too. And dogs."

It'll be available alongside my other publications at the Kindle Store, hopefully soon!

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not...


...Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot,
   We'll weather the weather, whatever the weather,
   Whether we like it or not.
   (John Ruskin)

If I told you how strong the wind was last night, you probably wouldn't believe me, so I won't tell you. But whatever the weather, it's good here! It was a very noisy night, with the wind bouncing Kantara around a lot - well, that's what it was doing throughout the evening and when we went to bed, was doing when I woke up in the night, was doing when Grace woke up in the night, but, apart from those two brief awakenings, we slept well. We did wake for the dawn chorus. The opening bars from a beautiful avian voice I didn't recognise. Sadly, I'd recently deleted the Bird Nerd app from my phone. It would have identified it for me. My bet is on the Song Thrush, but the Nature Watch website tells me it could have been the humble Dunnock. It was a fabulous song, whichever it was.


(photos courtesy of Nature Watch)

I'd been postponing putting in a new bottle of gas. There are two in the front hold, and one had run out a few days ago. Since you don't want the second one to run out before the empty one is replaced, and since it's easy to forget it if you don't do the job straight away, and since the office is closed for the next three days, I had to do the job today. It's not usually a big deal. The full bottle is a bit of a weight (26 Kg) to manoeuvre into the hold through a hatch only just big enough and with the other bottle partly in the way. But it's do-able without too much fuss. Today, however - and this was the reason I'd been putting it off - the wind constantly threatened to knock me off the front deck. It failed, but it was a bit iffy.

I can't really write a blog post without mentioning the one thing that's dominating the news and everyone's conversation at the moment. It used to be Brexit (remember?), now it's Covid-19. We're not overly anxious about it. We're the wrong side of 60 according to somebody's statistics, but we're generally very healthy, and living here on the boat in the marina we stand far less chance than many of contracting the illness. At this time of year, there's not many people around. The number who actually live aboard has decreased over the years, so days go by without us meeting more than four or so people. So we pretty much keep ourselves to ourselves, we eat well, we take a few useful supplements, and we keep our alcohol consumption low - it's bad for the immune system. Oh, and we wash our hands frequently!

A downside to that is that we've decided not to go to Cineworld in Rugby to take advantage of the vouchers we have that would give us free seats for a couple of films. There are seven that we want to see, being screened over the next several weeks.

  • Little Women
  • Emma
  • Dolittle
  • Cyrano de Bergerac
  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
  • Military Wives
  • Misbehaviour
 We'll have to wait for the DVDs. We may be over-reacting, but it'd be a risk we don't have to take. At least we're not stockpiling toilet rolls!



Tuesday, March 10, 2020

We're drying up!

And I'm not talking about what we do after washing up.

The weather has been interesting since we arrived back. At nights we've been rocked to sleep by the waves under the boat, stirred up by unrelenting, gusting wind, often with thrashing rain. Last night and most of today we have experienced unbelievable wind speeds. It's really quite fun in a strange way.

But these extremes have abated from time to time, leaving us with beautiful days that would be quite warm if the wind were to drop altogether. I spent an hour under such a sky as these washing the algae off the roof, dumped there by the soggy ropes that had grown the stuff over the past months. The trouble with spot-cleaning like that (though "spot" doesn't adequately convey the actual size of the green patterns that snaked down the length of the roof on both sides) is that it shows up the dirt on the areas you haven't cleaned. The job will have to be done the next time we have a dry, still day. I'm in no hurry.







Meanwhile, we find Kantara's suffering, not from the wet, but from the dry!

Who would expect that a boat, sitting on the water, in weather that frequently pours rain over us in large quantities for prolonged periods, can be too dry inside? About a year ago, we bought a combined thermometer/hygrometer to monitor the humidity inside Kantara. Too damp is obviously not good for furniture fabrics, books, and other things that shouldn't get too damp lest they get mouldy. Too dry isn't good for the woodwork, nor for people, though it's only the wood that shrinks. 60% is where you might expect mould to be thriving. Around 50% is good.
We have a dehumidifier that we leave running while we're away over the winter, and we run it overnight while we're here in the sort of weather we're getting at the moment, too. But during the day, come rain or come more rain, our Bubble stove keeps us both warm and dry. Yesterday, however, we saw that the humidity was down to 43% - far too low. (The picture above is not of our device. We wouldn't want 56% humidity, and 25° Celsius is rather too hot!) And that happened with a window open, mushroom vents in the ceiling, grilles in doors and various other gaps where the air gets in. How can that be?

The problem was simply solved by putting a pan of water on the stove.





Wednesday, March 04, 2020

And at last we're back!

We awoke this morning in a very cold boat. 8° cold, in fact. No matter! We're here, come storm or coronavirus! And it's good to be back. And 8° is soon remedied with a fan heater in the bedroom and the Bubble stove lit in the saloon.

It was cold and damp when we arrived at the marina yesterday afternoon. The boat was fine, but I did have to spend an inordinate amount of time persuading an in-line power connection (to the water pump) to connect, and investigating a slow leak from around the immersion heater in the calorifier. After that, the rest of the day was spent off-loading from the car and putting away in Kantara.

We were treated to one of those Yelvertoft sunsets. What a welcome!


So we're back. We have no plans at the moment. We're certainly going to wait until the storms are past and the various waterways closures are over before venturing forth, but we have plenty be busy with here, and today's to-do list is pretty long! But I'll be blogging regularly again, and posting on Twitter and Facebook after an almost-total-absence over the past six months or more.

Good grief, it's hot in here! 20°!