A road trip, and cleaning drains

15th & 16th November

Yesterday I had agreed to attend a meeting of the IWA Finance Committee, which was being held at Rowington Village Hall (near the Lapworth Junction and lock flight), so I had a comparatively early start. This meant setting the alarm for seven, and leaving just after eight.

It's technically only an hour's drive from Alrewas to Rowington, but it involves traversing a lot of motorway junction stuff, firstly the A38/M42, then following the M42 over the M6, so I wanted to allow plenty of time for hold ups on a Saturday morning.

This meant, of course, that there was no trouble at all, and Elanor's Civic behaved itself as it always does, so I was there an hour early, and had to hang about in a pub car park to avoid turning up geekishly soon. The meeting went OK – there are eight of us who have agreed to be considered for two places on the committee, so I'm not assuming anything at this stage.

It's a bit odd that of the two of us, IWA have approached me and not Sheila, who is, after all, the ex-finance professional and who was doing a finance job at the last National. I suspect that the structure of the IWA tends to make it institutionally sexist, although there are a handful of women involved, and a woman has been National Chairman in the past.

I got back to the boat just after two, to be told that Elanor was back at home after a hair appointment and would be glad to have her car back. A quick shuffling followed so that she could get off for a riding lesson in good time.

We had a quiet afternoon after all this excitement. At bedtime, we could hear a bunch of youngsters enjoying themselves somewhere out in the darkness. It seemed likely that they were on the other side of the canal, hanging about under the big by-pass bridge, and so no particular threat to our peace of mind.

Whether because of that or for some other reason, it took me a long time to get off last night; Sheila fell asleep straight away, so it was one of those situations where you lie awake, listening to the noises in the night, whilst your partner kips steadily on. I got off eventually, and woke just a little late this morning. We didn't have anything special on first thing anyway, so no big problem.

It was a damp and grey morning as I went into the village to buy a paper. I had a look under the bridge, and there were indeed some signs of jollification the night before, in the shape of discarded fast food wrappers and a couple of drinks cans, so it seems likely that our diagnosis was correct.

Before setting off, I'd checked the engine to make sure that all was well after the service I'd given it, which it was. The manuals and courses tell you to check the oil and water every time you start up, but in practice I do it once a week. With a modern engine in good nick, that seems to be all that's called for, frankly; how many people do you know who check their car engine every morning?

On my return, I found Sheila cleaning out the drain in the bathroom washbasin. It was due for a clean anyway, but had started emptying really slowly. We attacked it with boiling water, and in the end toilet cleaner, and it finally agreed to run more smoothly.

Like almost all such installations, it drains through a one inch pipe to the skin fitting on the hull side, which makes it very vulnerable to just getting cagged up with soapy sludge. Why they don't fit a wider drain, more like the one you'd find under a domestic sink, I don't know.

Having started out on this line of work, I did a general clean of the bathroom and toilet, including using some of the LeeSan descaler under the rim of the loo. This led me on to attack the nozzle of the filtered water tap, which has also been looking a bit scaled up.

Finally on this theme, I spent a bit of time trawling the net for potential sources of loo seats. The bowl of our LeeSan toilet is of a compact size, and the normal seat won't fit properly. The seats LeeSan provide are both expensive and made out of plastic covered MDF; probably OK for leisure use, but we've got through two in the four and a half years we've been on Sanity.

I didn't have much luck, so I've put a query on both the canals list and the Braidbar Owners list to se if anyone has any bright ideas.

Elanor came over after lunch, and we went off to give her a hand to dispose of her old mattress at the tip. It gave us a chance to collect some more of her old fence, which is proving to be excellent as kindling.

She's stopping with us for dinner tonight, and then Will and Jane are coming tomorrow night so we're in for another burst of socialising.