This and that in the sun

It’s been an odd sort of day, both in terms of our activities and the weather. The latter is currently pretending that it’s April, with alternating sunshine and showers, though still quite cold.

We took advantage of a sparkling* start to walk to Betty’s Farm for some meat and veg. A roast chicken will feature on the menu tomorrow.

This more or less took us up to lunchtime after a certain amount of newspaper perusal had taken place. Afterwards, we put in another brisk walk round the marina, ending with a chat with Geoff from the Black Pearl next door about this, that and the other thing. We were stood on the sterns of our respective boats watching the excavator on the building site filling the giant Tonka toy dumper. They’re taking the spoil round to the North Field again in a Volvo A35D, capacity 32.5 tonnes and 20 metre³.

Next it was time to give the boat a sweeping through; Sally’s coming to visit tomorrow and cleaning the floor before she comes makes it harder for her to indulge in her favourite “I’m fed up with the humans” dodge. This is to pick up a bit of grit, retreat to her bed with it and chew it whilst all around try not to hear the grinding noises.

Finally, I could get on with catching up with emails, ordering a replacement pair of heavy boating gloves for Sheila (this is a great time to buy ski gloves cheap) and doing this blog.

Tomorrow, we’ll have Elanor and Sally as I say, so a chance to get some more exercise; it might even be feasible to walk along the towpath making a game of copse and rompers possible.

*In English, adding -le to a noun means “smaller and repeated” (it’s a frequentative) so a sparkle is a small spark that keeps showing, gamble is lots of little games and a spangle is a small spang (spang is an old word for a jewel). Then there’s gruntle, a small repeated grunt such as a pig makes. Dis- can be an intensifier, so to be disgruntled means to be so irritated you are going around repeatedly gruntling like a cross pig.

You really needed to know that…

/wahaha