Some sense of closure

8th & 9th September

It's been a busy couple of days, but things are gradually getting sorted out. Yesterday we walked from Branston Water Park to Morrison's again, and bought fresh supplies such as bread. Then we made the short cruise down to Shobnall Marina. The cut continues quite busy but at mid morning there was no difficulty in finding a mooring.

Leaving Sheila guarding the boat, I wandered into the chandlery and swapped a wrong sized fuel filter for a bottle of FuelSet. Early afternoon was spent pottering, then at three I walked across to the Eye Clinic in the grounds of Burton Hospital. As these clinics go, it's quite efficient, but it was still an hour and a half before I got the all clear and could walk back to the boat.

It was a busy evening; Sheila gave me a haircut, I had a shower and then cooked chilli con carne for tea.

This morning we went into Burton, calling at the council tip on the way to unload our recycling. My sixtieth birthday is in the middle of next month, and we tried going into the Council Offices to see if I could apply for my bus pass. Unfortunately, we were a week too soon, so I'm going to have to wait for six months before I can get one.

The trip was not wasted, as we went into Julian Graves to get some more dried fruit and stuff, and did some more general shopping before going back to the boat. It was still only mid morning, so we winded and set off to go back to Branston. Sheila seems to be doing all the winding at the moment and on this occasion disproved the variant of Sod's Law that says you only do a good job of manoeuvring the boat when there's no-one watching.

The Saltire was waiting to leave the marina and hovered with her bow sticking out from under the towpath bridge whilst Sheila spun Sanity in her own length. Who needs a bow thruster?

We've had a very pleasant sunny afternoon on the visitor moorings just to the east of the bridge at Branston. We've sorted out the ilst of all Braidbar boats, and uploaded the current version to the relevant area of the Yahoo! Braidbar Owners' Group webpage.

We've had an emollient e-mail from Clive Henderson about our blue shirt hassles; it feels perhaps a touch complacent, but in the interests of good relationships there's no point in going on any further.

I'd also sent a stroppy e-mail to Nick Wall, the editor of Canal Boat, about the continuing non-delivery of the bottle of whisky the magazine owes us after winning last year's Christmas Quiz. I had a phone call from him today, apologising and undertaking to get things sorted out within the week. Watch this space.

All in all, there's a developing sense of getting some of these vexatious issues closed off.

IWA continues to struggle with the issues around the National Festival. As I've said, it's operated under the aegis of Inland Waterways Enterprises, the charity's trading arm, and I am told that this means it must make a profit so that the charity is not subsidising the trading arm. This doesn't actually feel quite right to me, based on my experience as a senior official of a very much larger charity, the British Psychological Society.

Since I wasn't chosen to serve on the IWA Finance Committee, I'm not privy to the detailed arguments, so I can't comment further.

It seems to me, though, that the National serves far more important purposes than just making money. (This is just as well; we're told that it's made a net profit of £120,000 on an outlay of £1.5m over the last six years, which is not particularly good in commercial terms.) The National is a campaigning event and a massive PR exercise, which has a huge reputational effect. It also brings together something of the order of at least 1200 IWA members, which could not be achieved in any other way.

I'm told that the Festivals Committee has had to argue strongly to ensure that the Festival continues at all; in my view it would be an act of monumental stupidity to abandon such an iconic event.