Making the most of time in Alrewas

Having arranged to have lunch with Will and Jane here tomorrow, and with the weather not as pleasant as the weekend, we've been doing our best to make good use of the time. Indeed, the dreaded (b)easterly wind has returned. It's not as fierce as it was last month, but it's still good not to have to try to boat about in it.

One downside of this mooring is that the boat on the private moorings opposite us has a wind genny rigged and it is making the most intrusive noise. Where the big turbines just go whum, whum quite slowly, a noise that can be quite soporific, this thing is whirring away, sounding like a bad BBC sound effect for a blasted heath. What it's like actually inside the boat if we can hear it inside ours and on the other side of the cut, I dread to think.

This morning's excitement, after we'd dragged ourselves belatedly from our pit, was a shopping trip. We stocked up with meat and pasties at Coates the Butcher and carried on to the newsagent and the Co-op. The two are soon to become one indeed, the newsagent having sold up to the Co-op, who  are presumably going to expand into the extra shop.

As well as the inevitable Independent I got some handy small paint brushes there. At 69p each, they'll be very useful for touching in jobs on a use-once-and-throw-away basis.

Back at the boat, I ran the engine for around 90 minutes, from just before to just after lunch. That got the batteries up to 98%; even on this rather cloudy day the solar panel has finished the job off.

After lunch we braced ourselves, bundled up in fleeces and scruffy waterproofs and washed the starboard side of the boat. We found a couple of small stone chips in the process (probably the result of contractors strimming the towpath), so I've anointed them with Rustconverta and will include them in the touch up session tomorrow.

It's meat free Monday (OK, apart from the pasties at lunch), so we're having Chinese pancakes tonight, with bamboo shoots and prawns as the filling.