Old Friends, New Friends

Over the past few days I’ve finally stopped dithering and decided that I’m heading towards London with some sense of urgency, and actually made what, for me at any rate, is a surprising amount of progress at long last.

After my parents left, somewhat abruptly, I was able to get away from Milton Keynes and on towards Leighton Buzzard. I met Carrie again on the way, and we shared the last few locks into town. She was gracious enough to describe my ham-fisted efforts as “help”, when perhaps “better than nothing” would have been a more appropriate description (I can do most things, but I’m really still getting the hang of this boating business, and there’s virtually nothing that comes as second nature so far).

Our paths had crossed a few times in recent weeks and it was with a degree of regret that I left Leighton Buzzard, knowing that it was not likely to happen again, certainly for several months. Still, this is all part and parcel of life as a bridge-hopping overstayer CCer. Old friends are left behind and new ones are created, seemingly by a haphazard process of magical randomness.

Such as Dave, who I met almost immediately after leaving Leighton Buzzard. I’d spoken to him on the towpath on Friday as he was out walking his dog, since when we’ve shared around 34 locks and about four bottles of wine. Dave is also single-handed and one thing I’ve learned over these past few days is how nice it is to share locks with another single-handed boater. I’d never done this before (like most things on a boat) and it’s refreshing to know that the other person has an understanding of what is involved in working a lock unaided.

Dave is going to Rickmansworth which, weather permitting, we might possibly get to today. That would put London within reach tomorrow. Reaching London means catching up with old friends I haven’t seen for months. No doubt there’ll be an endless procession of visitors to the boat, all asking the same questions. Of course, there will be the inevitable trips up the canal to the pub. Maybe I’ll even get some work done too.

Eventually I’m sure I’ll tire of all this and it will be time to move on to pastures new, where I’m sure I’ll be meeting up with some of the old friends I won’t have seen for a while.

I could get to enjoy this.

Celebration Day

Apparently, today is VJ Day, a time when some people celebrate the bombing of the Japanese people into submission 65 years ago.

Well, I’d like to celebrate something too. By way of contrast with the horrible mutilation of what was clearly once a magnificent oak tree in the middle of a Milton Keynes shopping centre as part of the Mother McNature^TM display in my last post, here is an example of how it is possible for trees to be treated with dignity, even in the middle of an urban landscape.

Six Ginkgo trees that were close to the hypocentre of the bomb blast in Hiroshima in 1945 nevertheless began to grow new buds afterwards and the buildings surrounding them have been rebuilt around the trees, allowing them to grow unhindered by the developments around them.

These trees were no part of anybody’s war, they simply carried on living their lives regardless of what evil they were subjected to. For that, they serve as an example to us all and deserve our respect.

Irony

Or not. It's so hard to tell sometimes.



The information board accompanying this abomination said:

"Created in 1978 by artist Liz Leyh, the cows were once cynically said to symbolise a new town consisting entirely of concrete. The reality, of course, is very different..."

Caution - Blogger Under Construction

There's a saying that what a caterpillar thinks of as the end of the world we call a butterfly.

A few weeks ago, a friend with a deck of tarot cards predicted that I would be facing a process of spiritual death and rebirth.

Both of these seem particularly appropriate at the moment. I've been dealing with some pretty weighty issues recently which, amongst other things, have caused me to sleep very badly for the past few days. Yesterday just felt like death. This morning has rather more of the tone of a difficult and painful birth. Some feeling that there may be a purpose to it all is beginning to crystallise out of the general turmoil, some sense of what needs to be done.

Ever since getting the boat, in May, I've been oscillating between needing to get somewhere in a hurry, to some deadline, and wanting to slow down and take things easy. Just a few days ago, I absolutely had to get to London as fast as I could, to meet somebody else's unspecified deadline. After two days I stopped and since then I've moved about 400 yards in three days.

I still need to get to London - I'll need to make an appointment to see my doctor at some point - but there no longer seems any great hurry, and I can always get the train if I need to pop down for the day.

To me, this has been one of the most obvious symptoms of a lack of a genuine sense of purpose to anything I've been doing recently.

One very major spur to me to do something about this was the two zines that Carrie gave me recently. (I'd post a link but I don't think they're available online). Part of her reason for giving me them was to convince me of why I should be a vegan, as opposed to to just being a vegetarian. What I got from them was much bigger than that - a stark picture of the horrors that can come about when people with principles don't do anything to act upon them. Next to all that, not buying cheese doesn't seem much of a sacrifice.

Monday's News

Today I went to Blisworth and it was nice and then I went in the tunnel and it was nasty and dark and then I went to Stoke Bruin and it was nice and then I went down the locks and there were seven of them and it was nice and then I went for a walk to Grafton Regis and it was nice and then I went to the pub and it was shut.
______________________________________________________


This isn't why I bought a boat. I want to be able to stop at interesting places, have a look around and maybe stay for a few days to get a proper feel for the place before moving on to discover another equally interesting place around the corner.

With any luck, I might yet get to do some of that before too long but, for the moment, I've just got to bear in mind that even this is a million times better than living in a box with a bail hostel next door and a nutcase upstairs.

Oh, and one other thing, from Bugbrooke (and it was nice):

A man with a barrow gave me a marrow but he told me it was a courgette. I've yet to try it, I think I might fry it with some spices to see what I get.

The Omnibus Edition

Aaargh!

I thought this blog business would all be pretty straightforward – a bit of harmless nonsense to pass the time – but it’s getting too complicated, and it’s making my brain (such as it is) hurt…

I had a pretty good idea that there wasn’t going to be an army of readers eagerly awaiting the next instalment – I suppose I sort of imagined that I could use it as a place where I could write stuff and keep everyone updated on what I’m doing without having to say the same stuff to everyone every time I see them. But that’s not as simple as it seems. I don’t want to say the same things to everyone (or put them in the same way), some people don’t read it, some people read it and I don’t know they’ve read it, others don’t know what a blog is… And then there are the people who stumble across it by accident and find themselves reading some random post that they know nothing about.

I’m forever stopping myself from writing “…as I was saying yesterday…”, “… person X thinks that…”, or other constructions that are meaningless unless it happens to have been you I was talking to yesterday (which might be last week or last month by now), or you happen to know person X. As a result, I’ve probably written stuff that’s out of sequence, or relies on the person reading it knowing things I haven’t put in the blog. Each person reading it is therefore probably getting a different picture depending on how they found there way here, which means I must be doing something (or lots of things) wrong.

So I’m going to have a stab at bringing things up to date, hopefully in a way that doesn’t rely on some conversation in a pub or an in joke that isn’t in anymore…

The boat

It started out grey, with green bits around the windows. It’s now resplendent in two coats of red primer. I like the word “resplendent” – it sounds as if you’re being complimentary without actually having to say anything nice about something. I imagine, for example, Bob Dylan singing about someone who would have been “resplendent” in a Brand New Leopardskin Pillbox Hat. (Not the original version – sorry, it was the best I could find at short notice)

Tigs

Tigs seems to be enjoying life onboard. She was ill for a while a few weeks back, which meant I had to spend more time in and around Braunston than I really wanted. She seems to be OK now, although hygiene is something of a concern since there isn’t often hot water available. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing medically wrong with her now, although, as one vet had suggested she might have kidney trouble, I didn’t want to take any chances. She’s growing a lot more comfortable around strangers she meets on the towpath (she was originally very shy) and also getting considerably more bolshy with passing dogs.

The journey

I’m currently in exactly the kind of place I like best – just outside one village and not quite into the next one, in this case Bugbrooke, in Northants. Following an incident in which I came close to having my laptop nicked through being far too casual about security, I’m not too keen on mentioning such things as my exact location in case I need to leave the boat for any length of time, but it’s not so critical at the moment as I’m not staying here very long.

I’ve been heading towards London since I picked the boat up in mid-May, sometimes with some imagined, or temporary, sense of urgency, at other times at a leisurely stroll. I now have a definite reason to be in London at some, as yet unspecified, time before the end of the month, because one of my tenants is moving out. (It’s a hard life being a Tory fat-cat property tycoon!). Given my self-imposed limit of around five hours’ travelling per day and about a dozen or so locks, that works out at around nine days to Kensal Green.

This isn’t the way I like to travel – I’m much happier pootling around and staying in the middle of nowhere – and just now I’d rather be doing pretty much anything than going to London, but it’s got to be done, and I’ll be glad when it’s all over.

Me

In theory, I’m waiting for my parents to arrive at some time in the next few weeks. In practice, they seem to be finding it difficult to arrange a suitable time. I’m also hoping that a friend might be able to come and join me on the boat shortly, although I’m not sure how she’ll cope as she’s been having quite severe back trouble recently. Now the painting’s finished for a while, this means that my next job will be to make some steps so that it isn’t quite so taxing on the joints to get on and off the boat. Even Tigs, with her almost cat-like agility, finds it challenging at times, so perhaps that’s a more urgent job than the plumbing, the wiring, the stove, the lining, and all the other contenders to be done next.

That’s the main things covered for now. Time is moving on, and I have to be too.

Let There Be Light

And there was light… just not such an awful lot of it.

I bought two of these solar powered garden lights from Homebase – a snip at a mere six quid each, reduced from twelve.



It’s not the most powerful light; with only 3 LEDs, I wouldn’t have expected much. But it works by charging two standard NiMH AA batteries, which means it’s much more useful as a solar battery charger. Since much of my battery use on the boat involves running an inverter to run battery chargers to provide power for the radio, camera, torches etc., it will be a useful addition if it can save me from having to go through all that palaver just to charge 1.2V batteries.

I’ve no idea yet how quickly the lights will charge the batteries but it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man to cannibalise the lights to charge more than two at a time. If they can charge eight batteries over a couple of days, that will keep the radio and camera going, with more than enough power left over to use them as lights as well. I suspect that it will work fine during the summer; I’ll be well pleased if it can carry on working into the winter.