Keeping busy at Lyme Green

I should have mentioned a couple of other things yesterday but forgot, distracted by recounting our journey up Bosley. The first of these is a query raised by the lockwheeler of the boat waiting to come down, a sometime blog reader. This is, why are there no visitor moorings at the top of Bosley? All the other major lock flights I can think of have VMs top and bottom, for obvious reasons, but at Bosley, there are only long term moorings at the top, a great line of them. Surely, some of these could be converted to visitor moorings?

The other thing is the absence of recycling bins all the way from Fradley to where we are now. There used to be some at Stone, but they've gone, and we had to dump a great sack full of recyclable stuff at Bosley top, there being no more room for storage of it in the bow locker. CRT has announced that they will be putting more recycling in, but I fear that what I've seen so far is pretty useless. It's just a Biffa skip with "Dry Mixed Recycling" on its side instead of "General Waste". We know from bitter experinece at Mercia that such a skip will get used for ordinary waste, resulting in the recycling material being lost.

You have to segregate the recycling bins and make them very distinctive – even differently coloured lids on an otherwise normal skip is not enough.

Heigh ho, on to today. The weather has not been very exciting, but at least it's been dry and warmish. I fear that we've had the best of the summer now and autumn is advancing upon us. We walked to the Co-op this morning for some fruit and veg and called in at Pets at Home on the way back to buy a new water bowl, stainless steel with a non-slip base, even.

I baked some bread rolls in the course of the morning, so that we could have them warm for lunch. Onion and Mediterranean herb bread proved very acceptable to the tasting panel. We've realised, though, that all this home baking isn't doing our waistlines any good. The problem is that I'm doing a standard mix (with added bits and bobs), using 500g of flour per batch and making eight rolls from it. At two each per meal, we're eating the equivalent of a generously large loaf every two days, far more bread than we'd normally get through.

The answer will be to cut down on the size of each batch, rather than try to spin it out. The home baked bread doesn't keep well beyond two days and anyway, the present regime of baking every other day works in well with the rhythm of our boating.

After lunch, we went back into the retail park and visited Next and Matalan in search of shorts and tops, without success. We had a mooch round Poundstretcher without finding anything we wanted beyond a chocolate and cherry version of Options, the hot choc drink Sheila has with breakfast at the weekend. Finally, we called in to Homebase and bought a complete set of replacement floor mats as a present for Sanity Again. We won't put them down until we've done the preshow clean, though.

What that retail park needs to make it ideal for boaters is an Aldi or Lidl so that we could food shop without the hike up a busy main road to the Co-op. Tomorrow, on through Macc to Bollington, probably.