A curious pub and heading back

We walked the mile back up to the Dog and Doublet for dinner last night. I'm left with mixed impressions of it. The food was very good – two excellent pieces of pie and a sirloin steak, all with chips – and I had a decent pint of Abbot Ale. But Sheila's Kipling was newly tapped and a bit cloudy and the only dark beer available was Guinness.

It's very much a locals' pub and the smallish bar was full of large men and their dogs. In days of yore, no respectable woman would go in a pub by herself and even when accompanied would expect her companion to enter first. Those days are long gone, and quite right too, but it felt as if the old rules applied in the Dog. I didn't feel that much at home myself.

So we ate outside, with Sally quite on edge with so many other dogs around, and didn't stay for a second drink. I doubt if we'll go back.

We had a straightforward run back to Fazeley and have tied on the exact same rings we used two nights ago. A bit more shopping has been done in much more comfortable weather. In fact, as Sheila and I came out of Sainsbury's, some wet stuff started falling out of the sky.

There's a name for that, can't quite remember it...

Tomorrow, back to Whittington or Huddlesford or Kings Orchard. Somewhere, anyway.

A therapeutic sort of day

Things are looking up, including the weather, though it's not quite flaming June yet. With no locks for quite a while, Sheila did one of her flying starts and was boating by quarter past six. I took a bit more time to rise and shine and took over steering an hour later. It was pleasantly dry and sunny, albeit with a chilly breeze still hanging around. We had a good run through Polesworth, Alvecote and Amington to the Glascote Two. The top lock was full and the bottom one empty, probably because the top gate of the one and the bottom gates of the other were leaking merrily away.

As we came over the aqueduct over the Tame, we could see a mud hopper drifting about across the cut. One end had come free of its blue string mooring alongside the CRT maintenance yard just there. I tried ringing CRT to report it, but the central board couldn't get the Fazeley office to answer. Accordingly, we stopped briefly outside Peel's Wharf and I nipped in to let them know.

By eleven we'd reached Sutton Road Bridge where we found a mooring amongst some liveaboards. This is one of those locations where there are either no boats at all, or quite a lot, presumably because of the floating community that wanders about these waterways.

We had time to get some retail therapy in before lunch. A visit to Sainsbury's got some provender that hadn't been available at Aldi. I also bought some more rechargeable AA and AAA batteries from Maplins and we had a look at hose reels in B&Q; our current one isn't the most convenient to use. We were really looking for an empty reel we could transfer out existing hose onto, but instead got a nice Hozelock job with 25 meters of new hose. It will need a good rinsing before we use it to fill the tank, though of course our Seagull IV water filter will strip out any nasties left over from the manufacturing process.

We've been pottering after lunch, sorting the new hose reel, potting up a basil plant that we got in Sainsbury's, refilling the handwash dispenser. Serious efforts have been made in the sitting out on the bow and crossword completion directions too. Tonight, a salad since the weather is even better than it was, Melton Mowbray pork pie, cous cous with bits in it, fresh basil leaves, stuffed olives, chilled white wine and so on.

Could be a good evening...

Oh Indy, where art thou?

Regular readers will recall, he said, summoning alliteration's artful aid, that I've been reading the Independent electronically for the past three months, using the iPad app and paying £13 per month for the privilege, a big saving on buying paper copies every day. It also gets round the problem of finding a newsagent within walking distance of the boat every morning.

The only problem is that the app is awful – clunky, slow to start (it goes through three screens before you can even get to the one for downloading the paper) and prone to fall over in mid read. This is odd as it's basically a fancy web browser linked to a fancy PDF reader. In addition, sometimes the app gets corrupted in some way and won't start, crashing out with that ultimate sign of rubbish programming, a few lines of code on an otherwise blank screen.

When it does that, you have to delete the app altogether and reinstall it from the App Store. This happened yet again today, only this time when I did the reload, it promptly failed again in exactly the same way.

So I've given up on it for now and will go back to collecting heaps of dead tree in the boat. I've cancelled the auto renew for the monthly sub and written a snotty email to the Editor explaining what I've done and why.

Apart from that, it's been another successful day, with yet more shopping, mainly in Sainsbury's, though we also bought a new duvet cover from the Next Home store near B&Q.

Tomorrow, on to Whittington, Dick, and the extremely pleasant prospect of an evening with Des and Gill, who live there.