Quiet days and better weather (and a burglar alarm)

8th & 9th December

The high spot of Monday evening was solving both the cryptic and concise crosswords in The Independent. This gave us a sense of achievement and some feeling of reassurance that dementia has not yet made much inroads into our cognitive ability.

The night before last we spent on the hire boat mooring as previously related, thus avoiding returning to our own mooring in a tricky cross wind. We should perhaps have made the attempt, since we were woken at quarter past three by a burglar alarm going off.

Investigation showed that it was one of the Braidbar alarms, so I dialled 999 and reported it. They said they would assign it level 1 priority for immediate investigation, and thus reassured we went back to bed. Inevitably, it took quite a while to get back off.

In the morning, after nipping off to get a paper, we consulted one of the Braidbar joiners about some minor maintenance we’re going to have done on Sanity before handing her over to whoever buys her. (They hadn’t heard anything from the police, incidentally, but then neither was there any sign of a break in.)

We were all sorted by lunchtime and, as the weather continued fine, popped back onto our home mooring after eating our butties. We had some minutes of panic when we were preparing to move, as one of Sheila’s newly completed fenders had deserted the ship. I had tried creating a hanging loop for it with a short splice, but it hadn’t been up to the job.

Fortunately for my self esteem, I spotted the fender floating between the next boat in front of us and the bank just as we were about to leave.

We had to do a bit of cleaning up when we got back, as it was apparent the Canada Geese had been taking advantage of our absence to hang about on the mooring.

There’s not much more to report from yesterday, except an unusual request, via a comment on the last post, from a nursing student asking about providing care to a live aboard boater. She had an exam question coming up about it, so it’s noteworthy that the NHS obviously recognises the needs of us boaters.

The weather today has shown a very pleasant change with much less cloud, sunny intervals and a light breeze. We haven’t done a huge amount after the exertions of the last few days, but did fit in a short walk and a call in at the boatyard.

The Chancellor having confirmed that VAT will return to 17.5%, we needed to order the saloon chairs from IKEA this month. Out of courtesy, we checked with Susan Mason that they will be able to store the flat packs for us in the bungalow at the yard.

We also had a chat with Peter about Sanity Again, but I’ll talk about that in my regular post on the other blog on Friday.

We’re looking forward to a few days of better weather and a chance to get more exercise, but have no plans for further boating trips at the moment.