Winter returns

7th & 8th February

Yesterday was Sunday, so we had a very lazy start and finally surfaced at around 9 o’ clock. It was one of those days for leisurely pottering; the major activity was taking some recycling to the tip, which involves a walk of all of half a mile each way.

We had a minor domestic incident when I went to get the bag which contains the stuff for waxing boots out of the cupboard under the washing machine. It’s a bit dark down there, so it wasn’t until I got through into the saloon that Sheila drew my attention to the fact that I had Brasso all down the leg of my trousers.

The drama was accentuated by the fact that she did not at first identify the yellow goo, and thought I must have encountered something even more revolting. After the panicky running around with pieces of kitchen towel had subsided, we discovered that the family size bottle of Brasso which was sharing a storage box with boot waxing stuff had rusted through and sprung a leak.

Fortunately, partly to allow for such a contingency, we do store all such materials in B&Q's best polythene storage boxes, so it was possible to clear up by bringing the box through into the galley, rescuing what could be wiped off, and jettisoning the rest. It will now be apparent why the trip to the tip seemed a good idea. We have also made a note to stop buying Brasso in litre containers.

In the afternoon, we converted some more of the pallet to kindling, and otherwise had a quiet time in the boat, sheltering from the deteriorating weather. In the evening, I cooked another meal from the new Indian cookbook; Sheila says I am to say that it was fabulous. It does seem to be the case that cooking these meals with just a few stir fried spices, sometimes whizzed to a paste with the magic wand, produces a much lighter and tastier meal than resorting to a jar of curry paste.

The weather has been even more wintry today, with snow flurries and a biting northerly wind. I braved it to go and get a paper in the morning, and after lunch we walked round to the yard to hand over a cheque for the latest stage payment on Sanity Again, and to sneak a look at the progress of Andy Russell's work on her signwriting.

She looks absolutely fabulous already; Andy is pulling out all the stops, with extra touches like her name in the non-slip on the well deck gunwale. It will all be done by Friday, and she will have been moved out of the paint dock by then, so I should be able to post some really interesting pictures at the end of the week.

When we got back to the boat from the yard, we decided to play safe and top up the water tank again. It was still 60% full, but there is a real risk of ice in the next couple of days, and this way we can go on taking showers for a while before we have to move back into water conservation mode.

There’s no obvious end in sight to this cold spell, there’s a blocking high just to the north of the British Isles, and it’s always hard to predict when such a system will decide to move away.