Red Diesel, cratch covers and getting a bit lost

10th & 11th October

We’re still in hanging about mode, and Wednesday was the day this week we didn’t have any commitments at all. So we made a lazy start on a fine but cool morning. After shopping in the village and wandering back to the boat we had some lunch and spent the afternoon reading emails and cleaning the cratch cover.

There’s a lot of correspondence on the canals-list about the IWA National Festival and Boat Show at the moment. St Ives was, as far as we know, very successful from a commercial point of view, but a lot of correspondents on the list feel that it lacks appeal for the visiting boater.

The event used to be called the National Rally, and there’s a feeling about that it’s gone downhill since those days. One of the problems now is that it is one of the biggest events of its kind in the country, which restricts its options for location, and makes it attempt to be all things to all comers, with usual mixed success that attends such an ambition.

Cleaning the cratch cover was much more straightforward. Over the years, the pale inside of the thing has got scruffier and scruffier. We took it off the boat altogether, laid it out on the towpath and scrubbed the underside, rinsed it off and sponged it dry.

Then we put it back on the boat to dry, and sponged the nearside half of the black outside. Then I sprayed it with a vinyl feeder to discourage it from cracking. After all this, we worked out what books we’d like Elanor to bring us from our stock at her house, modified the spreadsheet where we keep track of it, and emailed it to her.

Today, the weather was even cooler and brighter first thing. The day's appointments at the surgery were at the end of the afternoon, so this morning we went for a walk, trying to retrace one we’ve done a couple of times with the Willy Walkers. We didn’t get it quite right, and ended up doing rather more road work than we’d planned, but it still made a nice couple of hours’ exercise.

We got back to the boat just on lunchtime, and treated ourselves to the pasties we’d bought from the butcher first thing.

In the afternoon, I composed our response to the HMRC consultation document on the loss of the UK’s derogation on red diesel for leisure craft. For many years, diesel for all kinds of leisure boats, both offshore and inland, has been taxed at the lower, agricultural rate. Now the EU has insisted that the UK stops this and charges the standard rate for propulsion fuel.

No one in the UK actually wants this, least of all the Revenue, who are faced with policing something that will bring in only a trivial amount of revenue in their terms (0.06% of all fuel duties), so the exercise is to find the least problematic way of doing it that will satisfy Brussels. There’s a link on the IWA website about it.

At the end of the afternoon I trotted round to the surgery and had a routine ECG and got a fresh prescription. No big problems there, though the folks in the surgery were tearing their hair out as the IT system had gone down at lunchtime, and at half four they were still waiting for their IT support people to come out to it.