Beautiful gift

I've been meaning to put up a picture of this wonderful gift I was given a few weeks ago. I love it completely! I can almost play a couple of tunes now.... with both hands!!!
What I also like is being out in the countryside where no-one can hear me practise- ha!
Thank you, my love x

Leicester

Having a lovely cruise along the Leicester section at the moment. I like the way the river Soar meanders in and out with the Grand Union so that one minute you have canal and through the next lock, you have wide river and scary weirs. I love the wiggly bits of the Soar - I had to keep my wits about me to make sure I didn't wander up one of the many little branches off the main flow that don't appear on the map!
In some fine company, I got to explore Leicester for a couple of days, highlights being a folk festival, a quirky bar and delcious curry. I think I like Leicester very much. We came across this wonderful building designed by 'Tanky'!
There are 16 heads along the front and at first, I thought they were all different people but the plaque tells us that they are all Tanky - Leicester's first private detective, in various disguises, which seem to mainly comprise of changing his hat and re-arranging his beard :-)



I didn't get any good pictures of the other faces but it's up from the station if you're in the city and want to take a look.

Aren't the days wonderfully long and the nights woefully short! I woke at 4.15am and it was so light I couldn't go back to sleep. My brain tells me to get up and do stuff! I took this photo at 4.30am:

Erewashed onto the Soar

I'm on new waters here. The Erewash canal was an interesting adventure up the 12 miles of cul-de-sac canal to the west of Nottingham. There are 15 locks so you're kept busy and they are very hard work - or at least I found them hard work! The locksides are kept very tidy but the paddles are the most difficult I've come across and I'm afraid to say that most of the locks had at least one paddle that didn't work or whose anti-vandal lock wouldn't open (it recognised a vandal when it saw one!). After the first mile, there's no-where to moor except at lock moorings but there are so few boats (I maybe met 3 boats on the move in the whole there-and-back trip), it doesn't seem to matter. There are proper moorings up at the very end.
I met several BW workers along the way, clearing branches etc and what friendly, helpful guys they were. One pair stayed on after they'd finished work to help me through one awkward lock. I'd like to rant wholesale against BW, but then I meet such nice BW employees!
At the top of the Erewash is Langley Mill boatyard and, if you need anything, Pete is the lovely one to talk to. There's a sleepy basin of boats where you can leave yours at a reasonable price, as well as a busy boatyard where it looks like you can do your own boat blacking or Pete will do it for you. A boater told me his welding is excellent. I think I took photos up there but can't find my camera at the moment (hey, I do live in a narrow tube of 52 ft you know!).
Now I'm on the river Soar. It was funny emerging from the bottom of the quiet canal and getting whooshed out into the wide river Trent and across to the Soar. The Ratcliffe power-station cooling towers are amazing and beautiful - if only they weren't such terrible polluters! The river is lushious and green and winds around, overhung by trees dropping blossom, where cows stand in the shade, belly deep in the water. I guess that could be any river, it's just the first one I've been on in my boat so it's special :-)

Preston Brook to Shardlow - in 5 years!

Back in 2005, before I bought my boat, I went to the IWA festival at Preston Brook. My daughter came too and we have funny memories of arriving late at night in the dark, having forgotten a torch and trying to put up our tiny tent and inflate a big double mattress, with the stopper dropped somewhere in the grass... When it was finally done, we were weak with laughter, shushing each other to not wake people up. I folded the mattress over to get it in the tent and when it opened out it was too big, curling up at the sides and bringing the tent roof down a couple of inches above our noses. More giggling late into the night.. The next day (after we'd moved the tent from the 'lane' area we'd pitched it by mistake!) lots of excitement vistiting new boats and seeing all the possibilities of life afloat. We had lots of wild plans and of all the lovely things we saw, we knew our boat would be more beautiful than any of them! And of course, it is ;-)
Since then, I've been on parts of the Trent & Mersey canal a few times, heading to the Macclesfield or the Staff & Worcs canal or down towards the Oxford Union and seen these Preston Brook/Shardlow signposts. Always, Shardlow was many miles off. So it's funny to finally be able to take this photo!
A couple of villages back, I walked from the canal to the river Trent where there used to be a ferry wharf and place where goods were transferred from river to canal or maybe from canal to river? Anyway, on the other side of the river was a big sort-of manor house where a wedding party was gathered. If a strange woman and dog are in the background of your wedding photos, I'm sorry!


I include this rather dull photo to remind me of what it felt like to be crossing the mouth of the river Derwent - scary! But the water level was low so I needn't have worried at all. Nevertheless, now I'm at Sawley cut and preparing to go on the river Trent to Nottingham, I must admit to having bought myself a life-jacket. I do feel a bit daft putting it on but am a rubbish swimmer and travel alone so I'd rather feel daft than scared. I'm also thinking it'll be useful when I come down the river Soar later. I considered buying one for my dog but the designs were really bulky with squarish blocks that I don't think my dog would be comfortable with and which might actually cause him to catch on back doors etc and fall in! I'll see if there are other designs out there and meanwhile, he'll have to take his chances.

Chunky monkey & the big lock

It's fun being on a whole new canal - in this case, the Trent & Mersey between Fradley junction and Nottingham. It's a time of other 'firsts' too. I met a wide-beam for the first time since starting my life afloat. That seems strange after four years of cruising where I've always been on narrow-lock canals but here I'm flirting with the river Trent, on and off ;-) Seeing the widebeam, I was transported back to my first ever trip on a narrowboat with a lovely friend and teaching colleague, Cat, who called widebeams 'chunky monkeys'. She's got a lot to answer for, bless her! That first trip was all it took for me to be hooked.
The other first is doing a wide lock by myself. I haven't done it yet, just went to have a look at it ;-) I think it'll be ok although I forsee a small problem coming out of the lock... I'll be locking down and will need to bow-haul out as I can't get my dog back on otherwise. There's a bridge at the foot of the lock so I'll drop the rope on the roof as usual, only I'm worried cos it's much wider a space to be able to retrieve the boat out the other side. I need to remind myself that like everything else that has ever worried me about boating, IT'LL BE OK!

Memory block

On radio 4 this morning, I heard an interview with a couple of academics discussing work done at Oxford University. AC Grayling and A Sandberg were talking about the possibility of blocking or erasing painful memories. I cannot believe the utter pointlessness of this exercise. We are born, good and bad things happen to us, we die.
We can seek help in learning to live with traumatic events if necessary, but they make us who we are, even if that isn't a little ray of sunshine every day. If this was a couple of guys just chatting about possibilities, I wouldn't mind, but this involves experimenting on living animals of course, giving them severe pain, mucking about with their brains and trying out drugs so that some bloody pharmaceutical company can cash in on some miracle cure for the blues. I think of all the animals, including the poor primates imprisoned at the Oxford torture lab, awaiting their fate. Meanwhile the SPEAK campaign goes on to free them and I wish them every success.
But what also shocked me was the final comment from one of the two interviewees when asked something along the lines of "Do you think in the future, we'll look back on this time and be surprised that we ever endured painful memories?"
The reply: "oh yes, in 200 years time there will be 7ft healthy blonds who will be amazed at how we used to be" Gives some insight into his vision of an 'improved' society.

Stone & bone

Survived the Harecastle tunnel, having dismantled my rainwater-harvesting roof and taken in planters, plant pots, spare fenders and other bits of rubbish I usually keep up there. I'd remembered a very low tunnel roof the last time I'd come through, but that had been after some very heavy rainfall and this time was much easier. I could have left most of the stuff up there! But it did force me to finally tidy things up a bit and that's good.
On through Stoke-on-Trent and the fascinating industrial buildings that line the canal.

I love the bottle kilns you can spot among the factories and read that there are still 47 of them standing in the area. I know it's easy to have a romanticised view of the landscape and a picture I found on this site reminded me of how it was 'back in the day' : http://www.thepotteries.org/did_you/003.htm

All this pottery industry around - there's bound to be a few mistakes!

Looks like one hell of a Greek wedding celebration!
It's been fun doing locks again after such a long break from them (having had the mooring on the Peak Forest canal for 9 months). The Stoke locks were great though I did struggle a bit with the top lock at Meaford where part of the bridge below it has collapsed onto the steps. There's a road immediately at the foot of the lock so, if you have an awkward dog that won't stay on the boat without you, you have to drop your boat in the lock, bow-haul it out as far as you can, drop the rope onto the roof and hare it across the road, down the lane to the nearest opening in the hedge, then back up the towpath to retrieve your boat as it emerges from the bridge hole. Oh fun and games! :-)
Now I'm at Stone, where there's a shop selling Dunoon china made in Staffordshire. It specialises in 'fine bone china' and I must admit, I hadn't really understood that bone china is still made from bone ash. Something for us vegans to think about when buying our cups! I immediately checked mine and was relieved to find they are stoneware.
Something lovely at Stone is the seat at the bottom of the flight of four locks.

It was made by artist Phillip Hardacre, working with local schoolchildren. (I looked him up and he's done other collaborations which sound amazing, including a memorial grand piano for a much-loved music teacher, though I couldn't find a picture unfortunately). On this seat, there are tiles and ceramic plaques showing aspects of Stone like its shoe-making past, the ale industry, the canal, current organisations and retailers as well as signature pieces by the children themselves. I think it's lovely.