Final two days at Alrewas

2nd & 3rd April

We've had a pair of misty murky mornings yesterday and today, the difference between them being that yesterday's went on all day. It made for a cool, rather dull and disappointing day, rather than the great sunshine we've had this afternoon.

Yesterday morning started with me making a trip to the newsagent via the length of the towpath, so as to count how many totems BW had used to impose their 48 hour moorings. There were 5, but all now covered in black plastic bags as a monument to the problems BW gives itself by not keeping its promises about consultation.

Back at the boat I emailed Phil Sharpe, Chairman of Lichfield IWA Branch, both as courtesy to acknowledge his to me of the day before, and to report the new development. A brief email conversation between those of us whom Phil had included in his reply to me showed that there's general agreement. What is needed is a mix of 48 hour and five or seven day restrictions, backed up by sufficient enforcement to make it stick.

Otherwise it was a quiet morning, with Sheila doing finance stuff and myself loafing a bit until she'd finished. I then did a blog post about toilets on Building Sanity Again.

After lunch, a cold stricken Elanor put in an appearance, bearing post for us, and part of our latest present to her which she's returning. The post included a new mouse, to replace the Apple one that's got plastic fatigue internally. It's the Macally BTmini, and works very well.

One of the oddities about Macs is that their mouses still have only one button, and you have to control-click to get the context menu that you'd normally use the right click for. Why they continue to do this I don't know – modern Macs are perfectly capable of utilising a two, or in this case three button plus scroll wheel mouse, so why not supply one?

The present is a sad case; Elanor had asked for a roasting tin as part of her birthday present, and I had found one, with nifty self basting lid, on the Lakeland site. I'd had it delivered directly to Elanor of course, but when it arrived, it turned out to be too large on the outside, but managed to be too small on the inside.

Lakeland as usual made no trouble about taking it back, but will actually have it collected from Elanor. Since she'd left it with us, she's had to come back today to take it away again.

The other problem arising from the mail was our insurance renewal. Towergate Mardon's renewal notice said that they would no longer offer us the contents policy that was the main reason why we went to their predecessor, Michael Stimpson, in the first place.

We've had 24 hours of hunting about on the web for an alternate, before Sheila decided to ring Towergate (on their expensive to us 0870 number) and found that they'd made a mistake, and that there was no problem about our renewal for contents as well as the boat insurance.

Apart from that, it's been another quiet day. We've polished the Houdini again, and I've been to the GP to find that all is well, except my BP refuses to behave in the surgery. It's fine when I take it on the boat, but I suffer from "white coat" hypertension in the surgery.

I blame all the years of looking at a full waiting room and flinching before getting on with a clinic.

Tomorrow we'll set off for the BCN; Whittington at first, so that we can have Des and Gill Barnard round for dinner, then on to Fazeley and subsequently Bodymoor Heath, where we'll probably put in a couple of days birdwatching.