Keeping busy

9th & 10th March

It’s been another busy couple of days, in weather that has continued to hover on the boundary between winter and spring. We’ve been able to make a fairly relaxed start each morning, but then have kept fairly hard at it for the rest of the day.

Yesterday morning, I had a chat with Peter first thing and he confirmed that there was no need for us to move from the hire boat mooring until this morning. I then strolled down to the paper shop in company with Barry Cooper from The Shouting End, and he showed me a footpath route back up the hill.

It just shows that you can visit a place on and off for six years and still have things to find out about it. It is much nicer to come back over the fields than to slog back up the deep slot which is Anson Road.

Barry came and had a coffee with us on Sanity and we had an interesting chat about our respective backgrounds, which both feature the North East of England.

After lunch, we all set to and reduced another overgrown bush to something much better controlled, in the course of which we unearthed a five barred gate which had been dumped there by BW some years before. Barry returned our hospitality with a cup of tea on The Shouting End before we finished the job and retired to our boats for a quiet evening.

This morning, the main event in prospect was towing the shell for Braidbar number 123. This will form the basis for the Janet Grant which will belong to Keith and Alison Evemy. Before that, however, we were intrigued to note a gratifying upsurge in hits to the blogs and website. A good proportion of these seem to be coming from the United States, but we haven’t been able to spot any common feature in them to explain the peak in activity.

After another trip to get a paper, and a quick cup of coffee, we shuffled Sanity back onto the shop mooring so as to be able to extract The Shouting End from the yard and put her on the hire boat mooring. All three of us then boated off on Sanity to High Lane, arriving in just nice time to buy some lunch time barms from Danny’s Deli.

The shell turned up at around half one, and we were able to give a hand preparing her for launch before the tow back to the yard. It all went very smoothly; Keith and Alison, who were accompanied by their aunt, Catherine, were very pleased. Aunt Catherine travelled with us on Sanity, making her first encounter with narrow boating at the age of 87. Her only regret, as for so many of us, was that she hadn’t started earlier in life.

We’re going to be lazy again this evening and indulge in another meal in the Boar’s Head, this time accompanied by Barry. (Note to Annie: he really didn't want to come, but we persuaded him we needed looking after.)