Gently on through glorious weather

27th & 28th October

It’s been another couple of laid back days, in marked contrast to all the people taking a canal break this half term. The reopening of Shebdon Embankment and thus the Four Counties Ring has not stopped people coming round the Cheshire Ring as we thought it might. We’ve seen a steady procession of Black Prince, Alvechurch and Heritage/Sherborne Wharf hire boats chugging (and in some cases zooming) past. (Mind you, as we type this, privateer Destiny has just charged past, moving us back and forth on our mooring despite the spring at the stern).

We even saw four Empress line boats from Nantwich come past one after another this lunchtime. I don’t think it was a formally organised convoy, they must just have followed each other up the Marple Locks this morning.

Meanwhile, we had a long lie in yesterday and then chugged down to the Macclesfield town moorings for a trip to Tesco. After lunch, we ambled on through Bollington to Whiteley Green for the night. It’s a good mooring only spoilt by a tedious data connection on T-mobile which kept dropping out, switching from 3G to GPRS or else just so foozling the modem that it had to be unplugged and reconnected.

Nonetheless it was good enough to look up the words of “My name is John Wellington Wells” from The Sorcerer and even to find a brilliant amateur performance thereof on YouTube:



Sheila provided some local entertainment by sitting in the well deck and continuing to dismantle my abortive vee fender. It’s not clear why this was of such interest to the passing gongoozlers, but I guess it’s good to bring a little pleasure into people’s lives however you do it.

This morning, we woke early and had to spend some time in bed drinking tea and listening to the Today programme before we got up. Sheila steered through to Poynton, where we stopped to top up the water tank and start a wash load. Then we ignored our mooring and came straight on through to Deer Farm Bend. It was a remarkably fine day, which is nice for those on holiday. We, of course. get the benefit regardless.

The data connection is much better here so we’ve had a quiet afternoon, Sheila proof reading and Bruce downloading the product of other people's proofreading, in this case from the MobileRead Forum, as a change from Project Gutenberg.

Tomorrow it’s on to Marple for another physio appointment and then back to the mooring before the weather breaks on Friday.