Hooray, it's Alrewas again!

5th & 6th March

Needing to get to Alrewas as soon as possible for Sheila to get an emergency appointment at the dentist, we got away at 8.15, and worked steadily down the remainder of the Fradley flight. Sheila chose to ride the bike for this stretch, as she often does, as it means that when we get to Alrewas she can check ahead for moorings in the village before the boat has worked down Bagnall Lock.

Her last attempt to ride it a few days ago had resulted in her abandoning the effort after one lock, complaining that she had become wholly unfit over the winter. Investigation, however, showed that it was the bike tyres which had become flabby, and some vigorous work with the pump magically restored Sheila's muscle power.

We got to Alrewas at 9.30, having crossed with just one boat, our first moving Canaltime of the year, at Common Lock. There was plenty of space in the village, although many of the usual suspects of continuous moorers were around, mostly near the bypass bridge above Bagnall.

An exception to this was the "Hotel Boat" Montmorency, which as usual was taking up a space on the village moorings. At this time of year, of course, they might have a winter mooring there, as BW doesn't always issue mooring permits for short term moorers, but we've seen this boat hanging around here whenever we've been around ourselves – it never actually seems to go cruising, which is a bit odd in a hotel boat.

All very well, you may say, and live and let live, but it's the behaviour of boats like this that gives the rest of us continuous cruisers a bad name, and provides ammunition to those members of APCO who would like to see us paying an inflated licence fee.

Sheila was able to get an appointment at the dentist for later in the morning, and came back from it with a prescription for antibiotics and a follow up appointment for root treatment on Monday. This exposed an aspect of Denplan cover they don't mention in their advertising – it doesn't cover prescriptions, so it had cost £26 at the dentist, and a further £4 at the pharmacy.

Meantime, back on the canal, we saw a steady trickle of Canaltimes going by – it must be Spring.

After lunch, I took a walk along the river, Sheila not feeling in the need of further exercise after her biking in the morning. Later on we had a brief run in with the time clock for the Eberspacher central heating, which refused to switch the boiler on. It seemed basically to have got itself into a state of microprocessor confusion, and in the end I had to disconnect the thing at the battery and reconnect it, after which it behaved perfectly.

Elanor dropped in to see us in the evening – it's one of the advantages of being here that we are on her route to and from work.

Today we had a relaxed start, apart from being woken at 6 o'clock by ducks shouting their fat heads off about how it was Spring and morning and anyone got any bread? We managed to doze off again, being rewoken by the Eberspacher starting up at 7.30 as proof that the time clock is fully recovered (I hope).

We've had a generally lazy day, apart from cutting some wood for the fire, and doing various bits of office work that had been put to one side whilst we boated down here.

Whilst cutting the wood, local resident Harry Arnold stopped for a chat, having noticed my WRG hat. Together with the late, great Graham Palmer, he was a crucial figure in the early days of the Waterway Recovery Group, and later went on to edit Waterways World for many years.

He still has one of the major collections of waterways photographs, and remains active in the IWA. Andrew Denny wrote about him the other day in his Granny Buttons blog.

Elanor is taking tomorrow and Monday off to use up some leave before the end of the month, so we shall have the use of her car over the weekend – it'll be interesting to see if I can still cope with a high performance hatchback!