Secrets of a happy marriage, or how to kill an earworm

1st & 2nd November

With the prospect of some serious boating to do, we leapt lightly out of bed (hoho) and were away by eight o’clock, working up the Bosley Flight. Sheila took the first six locks, and I did the other half.

We got into a really efficient routine, always a good idea when the locks in a serious flight are against you, as these were. Well, all bar lock 11 for some reason – funny how often you find an odd lock in a flight the wrong way round. In this case, number 12 had been full and 11 empty, which by all logic would require a boat sitting between the two, which there wasn’t.

Anyway, the problem with Bos is that there are no walkways across the double top gates. Originally, the boater worked the off side, and the lockkeeper the nearside, so there was no reason to cross over. In our case, in order to reduce the amount of walking up and down the locks, the lockwheeler (L) would go ahead to empty and open the lock above, whilst the steerer (S) waited at the top of the lock below to open the gates when it was full.

When L came back from the one above, the boat would just be leaving, so that L could hop across the bow to the offside gate and close it immediately behind the boat. If S let Sanity coast as she left the lock, L was able to nip back across the stern to close the towpath side gate and then go back to the lock above.

When the boat is in that lock, L closes the bottom gates and draws the nearside top paddle before going on to start setting the next lock. As the boat comes up the lock, S hops off and goes up to the head of the lock to draw the offside paddle, waiting there to open the gates when it’s full and so on we go.

There’s a service block on the offside at the top of the flight, and we backed in there and pumped out the toilet tank.

It was about 11 when all this was done, we having taken 2 hours to do the 12 locks, and then another hour or so to pump out and dump rubbish. We got to Oakgrove swing bridge half an hour later and decided to have an early lunch.

Then it was on to our usual mooring at Gurnett aqueduct. The weather still being fine, we hauled all the wood off the roof, swept off the leaves, cut up the wood and restacked it. By now we were quite weary, but still felt up to walking back along the towpath to the retail park by Bridge 45. There’s a Curry’s here where we found a portable DVD player we liked so we bought it – Sheila’s birthday has come early this year.

It’s a basic beast in that it plays commercial DVDs and music CDs and not a lot else (though it has a card reader for looking at photos) but it does have a decent size screen at 10”. Back at the boat, we found as we hoped that the earphone output would drive the boat’s radio system nicely, giving a high quality of sound without using earphones.

We had the first serious soup of the winter for dinner. I incorporated the frozen dinosaur soup from March, so in a sense we are still eating last Christmas’s turkey, though in homeopathic quantities by now.

Today we trogged down into Macc proper, buying a desk tidy and a load of stuff from Julian Graves for making stewed fruit and muesli for breakfast.

This afternoon, Sheila has been rewatching My Fair Lady as her first DVD on the new player. I surfed around the net trying to identify the song I referred to last time, which I have been burbling to myself ever since (and with Sheila beginning to look threateningly at me). It is, of course, “Lady Willpower” by Gary Pucket and the Union Gap, and it’s late sixties rather than 70s. I downloaded it from the iTunes Store (fast connection here at Gurnett), which seems to have abolished the earworm at last.