Sunshine and irritation

It's been a very mixed 24 hours – nothing dramatically good or bad but definitely some diamond and some stone. For a start, we had a bad night, partly due to the weather. With heavy rain forecast, we started out with the bedroom Houdini shut, relying on leaving the doors to the rest of the boat open to keep us a bit cool.

It didn't really work as we woke at around two o'clock, sweltering. I put the Houdini on its propped open on a cork position, which helped, and we tried to get off again. At this very point, a track maintenance train pulled up nearby with much squealing of brakes and sat there for about 30 minutes, panting softly to itself. Presumably, they had found a problem with the track which needed attention, fair enough, but still not exactly relaxing.

Of course, lying awake at that time of night involves brooding on a lot of things you really shouldn't be thinking about if you want to relax. I won't bore you with them here, I'm sure you've got a set of your own.

We finally got off again, rather in the manner of the Lord Chancellor's "repose in the form of a doze with hot eyeballs and head ever aching," and woke a bit before (me)/after (Sheila) six. At least it meant that we got a prompt start just before eight.

It was a good morning's boating, four solid hours up to Westport Lake. The washing and the washing up got done, the locks were reasonably co-operative and there were no less than four volockies at Etruria. There's a Canalfest there this weekend, so there were folk all over the place setting it up. The Bone and Flint Mill was very much "in steam" – when we got up to the arm next to it, four guys were standing around outside whilst steam poured in large volumes out of the door, the windows, the spaces between the roof slates...

I'm not sure it's supposed to be like that, you know.

On we went along the top pound. It's a bit down, so Sanity Again couldn't quite get up to her usual 4 mph on the deep bit, but still an exhilarating run. Plenty of room to tie at Westport Lake when we got here at noon, but it's filled up now.

This afternoon's cause of irritation was the boat which chose to tie immediately in front of us, get out a Honda suitcase genny and run it positioned so that the exhaust was behind their boat and so poured over our well deck. I can quite see that some boats can only run a washing machine, say, in this way. We can't all have high output alternators and inverters or a TravelPower. But in that case, some consideration should be shown as to when you do it.

Preferably not in the middle of a popular mooring on a sunny day in half term week, people strolling around all over the place with kids and dogs. At least tie at the end of the moorings where you'll cause minimum inconvenience, not smack in the middle. We kept our bow doors closed and a sharp eye on the CO detector for the two hours this went on.

Hey ho, they've stopped now and peace has descended once more.

Tomorrow, we'll make a half seven start to get to the tunnel in time for the first passage at eight.