We’re back on the move, with this week encapsulating the variety of life afloat on the inland waterways of Great Britain.
In five days we’ve travelled 28 miles up 42 locks. We’ve moored in a city (surprisingly quiet considering we were alongside university student accommodation), outside a village (peaceful) and in the middle of fields where bleating lambs and frogs croaking to attract a mate made for noisy evenings!
We’ve shared the waterways with kingfishers (every time I see one, I haven’t had my camera), herons, swans, ducks, and moorhens. We’ve passed frothy white hedges of blackthorn blossom and brushed under bright lime green willow curtains. Everythjng smells fresh and new.
Moving as we do through nature really makes us feel that Spring is all around us. Nesting swans are greedily amassing broken reeds to build their platform nests, and signs from last year remind boaters not to endanger the sitting swans or their impending young by letting highly territorial families meet.
We’ve travelled alone and in company, supporting for 12 locks and 9 miles a solo boater. We had the help of Canal and River Trust volunteers on the staircase of 10 locks at Foxton, as well as the help of gongoozlers, including a family from Israel with two young children. Over here to visit English family they said their time watching slowly travelling narrowboats was welcome respite from their part of the world and the conflict raging there, but when I asked if they wanted to stay here in safety the mother said no, she wanted to be home with her children.
Our world is very different from theirs, from that of many people who watch our slow progress at places such as Foxton, and yet it is a world that always elicits curiosity. One of the delights of living afloat and travelling at walking pace is the many conversations you strike up with curious Gongoozlers. In the past 5 days we’ve been asked where we’re going several times, and people have been astonished to hear us say London, Bath, and Birmingham. We’ve been asked how long it will take us to get to London, and we have to say we could go rapidly to get there in just over a week but it’s likely to take us between two and four months! (To the tidal Thames at Brentford is 60 cruising hours, so it depends how often we stop and for how long, as to how long that journey takes.)
Boatdog has enjoyed being back on the move, meeting new people, exploring new places, and she’s gained confidence to jump up onto one of the seats at the back of the boat as we cruise. Until the bird scarers fire in the fields protecting the crops that is – she hates them, and they make her cower every time they go off.
We’ve worked this week too, and this weekend we aim to trade from the boat in the sunshine at Foxton, making the most of the Spring weather although stock is low after Christmas and with all the work on the boat I haven’t crafted much to restock but hopefully that will now change.
I also managed an unexpected couple of trips this week – and on both occasions revelled in not having the car. It has meant walking much, much more, and discovering things en route. The first was a chance encounter with the Leicestershire Records Office in a former school in Wigston. In their archives, I unexpectedly found details and an image of my great grandfather’s hosiery factory. I learned with astonishment that: “The works and warehouses comprise a group of lofty brick buildings I a very convenient and accessible part of the town, with every facility for the receipt of raw material and the despatch of the finished hosiery goods to all parts of the world.”
I learned that the three partners were “gentlemen of great energy” and that they employed up to 500 staff at their Leicester factory alone with more employed in works at Burbage and Wigston. My next task is to discover what happened to these businesses and their buildings.
The second unexpected trip led to a new innovation on board. Thanks, Aldi, for the supply of a larger air fryer, and astonishingly it’s in the same colour as our fridge – almost as if we planned it! Staff at Aldi in Wigston were delightful after I visited to ask on Wednesday night if they would have any of these specialbuys in the next day, because if so we would stay on our mooring overnight and set an early alarm to ensure we made the half hour walk up to get one when they opened. They couldn’t guarantee them but an early alarm, an early walk and I arrived in store to be beckoned to one side by a delightful man (stupidly I didn’t get his name) who had a mint green air fryer in a box just ready for me to buy. A walk back, rapid unpacking, and we were off our mooring by 9am with it proudly in place. At some point this weekend, I shall have a go at baking with it – there – I’ve committed myself!
Being back on the move is energising, exciting, and bizarrely simultaneously relaxing. We seem to pack more into each and every day.
Pickingupducks 