... you call this spring!

A Bid for freedom.....

I was standing by the kitchen window when a boat hoved into view.  That’s odd I thought the rivers still on SSA. Then I noticed it was the rusty old tub that is moored next to me.  That’s odd I thought it never goes anywhere, somebody must be moving it for some reason.  Then I noticed there was nobody at the helm. Oh dear I thought.  So I went outside and found it had broken it’s stern rope and turned 180 degrees and was now pulling at its bow rope.  It must have decided that today, when everybody was tucked away hiding from the biting wind and the sleet,  was a good day to make an  escape bid.

So I went and informed people that it was seeking freedom, the sort of people that are going to do something about it and not just stand at the kitchen window saying ‘Oh dear’.  The paparazzi arrived first (hence the photo, thanks Carol) and then the waterborne cavalry followed.  The first idea was to push its stern round and then re-tie it.  But although the river has gone down the flow is still strong and once it had reached 90 degrees to the bank the flow was too strong to enable it to be pushed any further.  By this time the rapid response unit, having finished his beans on toast, had arrived so the next plan was to pull the bow along moor it up and push the stern back in to where the bow had once been.  That worked and the rusty old heap is now facing upstream having travelled further in half an hour than its travelled in the last three years.  I didn’t help much I just stood there and said ‘oh dear’.

This morning it’s snowing and settling.  The snow has been forecast for a number of days, so which idiot still leaves her car at the bottom of a steep slope.  The sort of idiot that means to move it later then falls asleep in front of a warm fire while reading a not very interesting book, then wakes up, looks out and discovers all is white and she’s left it too late.  Over the next four days I’ve got places to go and people to see.  The spectre of public transport looms.

Sunday Lunch?

My submerged herbs might be out of the way of peeing dogs but they are now within the range of marauding ducks.  There is a flotilla of them chomping away on the herbs.  The most voracious is the drake with a chunk of chest feathers missing.  Just watch it Matey. I know who you are and I know where you live and I am rather partial to thyme flavoured roast duck.

I thought the river was going down but it came back up and has stayed up.  The shed is going up again as well. Let's hope the shed stays up and the river goes down.

'ere we go again

After two days of heavy rain, the river has risen, the water is racing passed, Strong Stream Advice is issued and nothing but ducks and debris are moving on the river.  The boat is high above the mooring and I have to remember which leg has the dodgy knee and hip.  If I get it wrong I’m suspended with one leg out the boat and the other one in and too stiff to lift over the gunwale, sometimes I’m stuck like that for a long time. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere but there is a psychological difference between not planning on going anywhere and not being able to go anywhere. So the SSA is pissing me off. My herbs are submerged and I can’t be bothered to rescue them.  Maybe it was a bit premature of me to remove them from the dryer place higher up near the path and putting them nearer the river but passing dogs kept peeing on them. That must have been what gave my casseroles their distinctive taste.

To be positive: The Met Office isn’t forecasting much rain for this area in the next few days. Looking at my well-worn favourite site the EA River and Sea levels the levels at the gauging stations upstream are slowly going down (often more important than the rainfall here is what’s happening in the Nene catchment areas). There is only one flood alert and that is at Coggenhoe Caravan Site but that’s OK as Coggenhoe Caravan Site seems to be permanently underwater and it does make one wonder why they built it there.  The fields opposite have very little standing water. 

The other thing I noticed is the flow in my water feature.  Last December when the flooding was at its worst a spring sprung(actually three springs sprung) in the bank across the roadway. We channelled it across the roadway and down the middle of my mooring where a soak away had previously been constructed.  It became quite an impressive waterway, we thought of naming it and putting a notice ‘Beware of The Ford’ in front of it. It ran so clear we even thought of bottling it and selling it as our own mineral water (as Essence of Sheep because the sheep field is above it). The birds loved it when all else was frozen, the ducks came out of acres of river to paddle and drink in it.  I could lie in bed at night and listen to the sound of a waterfall.  I was even planning on buying a fishing gnome to stand by its side and fish.  Now its started to dry up and the rain this weekend hasn’t made it flow faster, so maybe out there the land isn’t as soggy as it was a couple of months ago and maybe the river will go down quickly and maybe I’ll be able to take the boat down to the pub and maybe spring will arrive and be followed by a glorious summer. Maybe

Stop Press:  The sun is out!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ... Part Two

I’ve almost completed the first draft of the script for our Mary Poppins sketch but my spell checker isn’t helping.  It keeps changing the word wellies to willies.  So now I not only have to cope with writing this script accompanied by visions of pantomime cows, ostriches and dancing chimney pots I also can’t get out of my mind the image of all the women of Barnwell wearing willies.  Not the sort of thing that will be appreciated when we go to the Co-op in Oundle, in fact they don’t really appreciate wellies in Oundle unless they are green, clean and worn with Barbours. We might be OK going for a night out in Corby wearing willies, that sort of thing is acceptable in Corby actually in Corby it’s almost expected, they’ll just think we’re out on a hen night.

I’ve also had a complaint about my penchant for killing people off. I don’t think there is anything wrong about a few dead bodies and a stage smeared in blood it could add new dimensions to the saccharine story of nannies and chimney sweeps and sweet little children.

So ‘Who killed Mary Poppins? Was it the pantomime cow, the one man band, or that woman in wellies wearing a strap on dildo?
 

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious...............................

Books and sheds

I woke up this morning later than usual and with a headache so I was glad that my job in London had been postponed yet again (although my bank balance isn’t too happy about it).  Then I went to make a cup of coffee and saw the cause of my headache, there were a quite few empty bottles sitting on the kitchen cabinet.  Last night was the inaugural meeting of our boater’s book club and a good night it was too.  Only four us at the first meeting, one member sent her apologies they’d high-tailed it to the canals before the forecast rain caused the EA to slap more Strong Stream notices on The Nene.

We read Tideline by Penny Hancock, a tale of the kidnapping of a fifteen year old and a spiral into madness.  Two liked, one disliked and one said it was not the sort of book she would have read but did enjoy reading it.  Probably the most surprising thing was that for the most of the evening we talked about the book and books with only a few deviations into unrelated subjects.  As we opened the fourth bottle of wine we agreed that we found it difficult to understand how women slid into alcoholism. So we’ll look forward to the next meeting and I’ll enjoy reading the chosen book when I remember what it is.

My next door neighbour is building a shed. He made use of a passing digger to dig out the foundations a few weeks ago.  We were grateful for the extra mud that was spread around because we really felt we didn’t have enough mud around here.  It meant that I could tramp lots of dirt in and make my white rug (which idiot lives on a boat and buys a white rug) become a sludge coloured rug all the sooner. Now he’s laid concrete foundations and is putting up the rest of it. I thought there seemed to be a lot of walls waiting to be erected (I think four is the usual number of walls for sheds) but that’s because there are two old sheds being revamped into one new shed. I wondered if he’d got some details wrong because as it was going up it looked as if he was going to have four walls two windows and no door.  I kept listening in case I heard cries for help when he was inside hammering the last panel in place and found he couldn’t get out.  The next time I went out a door had appeared in just the place one expects a door to be.  It was starting to look like a shed, not a thing of beauty, not even a well constructed shed but it was definitely a shed.

This morning the wind blew it down.

Definitely Dreary

My new smartphone isn’t that smart.  It is unsure about where I am.  When I’m on the boat it sometimes thinks I’m in Barnwell and sometimes in Ashton and sometimes in Peterborough. How can I travel miles simply by walking the length of a sixty foot boat?

 It tells me what the weather is wherever it thinks I am.  I don’t need a phone to tell me what the weather is I can look out of the window.  This morning I woke up and looked at the phone for the time.  It said the weather was dreary.  I looked out the window and it had got it spot on.  The sky was grey, the river was grey and there was a faint cold drizzle. It was definitely dreary.  Maybe the phone is smarter than I give it credit for. I closed the curtains and took a mug of coffee and a book back to bed with me.  I’ll emerge when the phone tells me that the weather in Ashton, Barnwell or even Peterborough is cheerful.

 
Looking at the weather forecast I may be in bed for some time. Where’s spring gone? I thought the warm couple of days, the faint yellow bud on the daffodils, the mallards getting amorous were all harbingers of spring but now it seems Spring has been postponed.  It’s forecast to be cold and wet and windy. Just when I was thinking of retrieving my sandals from beneath the bed the forecast is for snow.  I can just about cope with the cold, I have ways of keeping warm, at least I will have when I go and scrounge some coal from one of the other moorers. It’s the wet that’s the problem. At last the river is open to navigation. It’s just about dried out here, we don’t have to plough through knee deep mud and we can get on and off the boats without having to wear waders. So if we have to have sub-zero temperatures we will manage but please Lord don’t make it rain.

Coal

I used to think that a cup of coffee was a cup of coffee and then the likes of Starbucks introduced choice and made ordering coffee a complex business.  I’m beginning to think the same about coal. I used to think a bag of coal was a bag of coal and then I found there were choices.  At the beginning of winter I ordered lots of bags of coal and burnt it without taking much notice about what sort of coal it was.  Then it ran out and I had to buy some more.  The coal merchant had choices between Supertherm and Taybrite and Staybrite.  Should I just go for the cheapest? I know from bitter experience that you get what you pay for.  My last two purchases prove that.  The vacuum cleaner that I bought from the back of the market in Birmingham for only £17 has less suction than a baby pulling on a dummy.  The radio that was the cheapest Curry’s had to offer manages to tune into two stations at the same time.  I can listen to the news on Radio4 with the background accompaniment of the soprano on Radio 3. When I get fed-up of listening to two things at once (I’ve got two ears so it really shouldn’t be too difficult but it is) I have to switch either to local radio or Radio5 because those are the only ones with a clear signal. But there is a limit to the amount of time I can listen to Angela of Northampton complaining about the state of the roads or Ian from Grimsby moaning about referees so I switch it off and listen to the ducks on the river. So when it came to choosing coal I decided to splash out and spend an extra pound for the 25kg bag on the assumption that it would be better.  Then I couldn’t get it to light so spent more than the price of the coal on firelighters and kindling.  Once alight it did seem to burn hotter and last longer but I haven’t done a scientific study on it.
 
In the March issue Waterways World have done a scientific study, well sort of. I think they had a bag of coal one stove and two thermometers but they’ve managed to fill a lot of pages.  I was killing time, waiting for a train, at the Smiths on Kings Cross Station when I picked up Waterways World and saw that they had an article on heating a boat with a solid fuel stove.  I did wonder why they ran an article on heating when Spring is about to arrive (hopefully) and we can scrape the coal dust from under the fingernails and stop scavenging for wood and forget about all types of coal for another six months.  Surely they should run an article on fuel for stoves in October. Glancing through the magazine, while keeping one eye on the destination board to see if Kings Cross had decided from which platform my train was leaving, it seemed they were testing a few burning options not various brands of coal.  I spent most the time puzzling why the graphs sometimes showed the heat of stove as a blue line and the heat of the boat was red and sometimes the colour scheme was reversed. I don’t like inconsistency. Then the train was announced. I suppose I could have bought the magazine and read it properly but I'd already spent too much money on firelighters to be able to squander money on magazines as well. Anyway by the time next winter arrives (aahh I don’t even want to think about that) when I need to purchase more fuel I will have forgotten all their good advice.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious……………….

For the next boaters rally our club has drawn Mary Poppins as the theme for the concert party.  They say they drew it out of the hat, I have my doubts about that I think that our representatives have secret desires for strict nannies and they deliberately chose Mary Poppins. 

But however we got it we are supposed to do a 15min performance on the theme of Mary Poppins which includes two songs and one dance routine. Last night we had a get together in the local to try and come up with ideas.  It appears that none of us can sing or dance or act. None of us has any great wish to get up on stage and perform. None of us can arrange music or choreograph dance routines. However, somebody’s mother has a pantomime cow so that might come in useful. 

There were plenty of ideas, the ideas seemed to become more bizarre and numerous in direct proportion to the amount of beer consumed.  We were all forgetting that our little group would have to be the ones to build the complex set, remember all the complicated words, play all the instruments and at the same time dance and sing. In retrospect it might be best to keep it simple. Then after all the flights of fancy about one man bands, flying Mary Poppins, gangome style Chimney sweeps, ostriches, dancing chimney pots and brushes, bottles and booze had been floated they said I had been given enough ideas to be able to construct a performance piece so go away and get on with it. Thanks friends.  

 
We have an ideal Mary Poppins but she said she’d have to have a lot to drink to do it. That can be arranged. Not sure about Bert yet but he needn’t worry about the cockney accent, anything would be better than Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent. Last year we did a sketch based on King Canute. In the rehearsals King Canute tried a Danish accent, it started in Scandinavia then headed towards Africa hovered there for a while then moved on to India and Pakistan before coming back via Ireland and settling back down in the East Midlands.   It made us laugh but we were doing a serious piece of drama not a comedy so we ditched the accent.  In comparison to King Canute Bert’s accent will be a doddle.

We managed a performance last year so no doubt we’ll manage one this year.  How does Mary Poppins and the Pantomime Cow sound?
 
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious………