It's one of our favourite villages, and today we are here on market day for the first time. To be frank, it wasn't a desperately impressive market, large but very unenterprising, but fun to stroll round all the same. We also visited the butcher and finally got some chicken, as well as a couple of nice looking pork steaks. Following that, a visit to the Co-op topped up the supplies sufficiently to get us through to Rugeley in a few days time.
The run down here was uneventful; we stopped at the top of Gailey to top up the water tank, the tap pressure there being good, and then followed another boat all the way down to Penkridge, Sheila steering and myself locking as planned.
Most of the locks are in reasonable nick, though a couple have badly leaking bottom gates and Filance Lock has a couple of "pissers" in the left hand wall as you descend which are quite spectacular. Close all windows if your boat has them.
[A pisser is a void behind the lock wall, which fills up with water when the lock fills and then empties itself in a Mannequin Pis style stream all over the boat descending the lock. There is a, I suspect apocryphal, story about the late Queen Mother being taken by boat to the opening of the Stratford canal. As they descended a lock, she was hit on the back of the neck by just such a stream.
HM QM: "Oh, what was that?"
David Hutchings (embarrassed): "Er, it's a pisser, ma'am."
HM QM: "It certainly is, but what's it called?" ]
The weather, having been quite horrible this morning, cold, damp and windy, is slowly improving, and we are promised better stuff for the weekend, so here's hoping. Lots of a baby ducklings here, so the drakes of the other week must have had their wicked way in the end.
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