Pottering in the sun

16th & 17th April

We’re settling down to our stay in Alrewas, enjoying being back in this picturesque village, and getting stuff done at an easy pace.

Yesterday, we made an early start and boated Sanity Again down to join Sanity above Bagnall Lock, tying with lots of choice upstream of the main road bridge, so that the bedroom is away from the road noise.

We gave Sanity a clean through, and then waited for a prospective buyer to show up. He turned out to be a really nice guy called Ian, and we found ourselves hopeful that he feels able to buy her. It’s even worse than selling a house, we find; we really want our baby to go to a nice caring owner.

After lunch, Elanor rolled up and took me shopping in Morrison’s, replacing the stores we’d used on the way down here. She then went off to get ready to go to the BCN clean up, and came back to have dinner with us before going on to Birmingham.

Today, we had a more leisurely start on a bright but very fresh, not to say frosty, morning. We ambled into the village to get some fresh meat for tonight and to buy a paper, then came back to Sanity Again and gave her engine its first oil change.

It was sunny and warm enough to have lunch out on the bow, luxuriating in the fact that the well deck is long enough to put a table out on it and still have room to stretch your legs. Afterwards, we set to and hauled all the stuff out of Sanity’s bow locker, throwing away a proportion of it and dividing the rest up to stay behind or join us on the new boat.

We’d no sooner got it all stowed in Sanity Again’s two decker locker that it was time to go back to Sanity.

During lunch, ABNB had called and asked us to do another show round for a couple whose friends own Braidbar 42, Trisuli, who came along for the ride. We had a good time showing them both boats (after making sure they understood we weren’t parting with Sanity Again); they too seemed really interested.

Since then we’ve been chilling out a bit, drinking tea in the sun and reading the paper. Sheila had run a wash load after we’d serviced the engine, and it dried on the whirligig in the course of the afternoon.

Tomorrow is another chill out day; we might move a bit more stuff from one boat to the other; there’s just a load of bits and pieces to do now.