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!