Boatguests

At long last today we played host to Carl and Sean, our next door neighbours from home. We'd nearly got all the brass finished by the time they arrived. They were delighted with the Bill Fen CL, and we were impressed with their new caravan.

Of course, we went out for a boat trip. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we thought we'd better make the most of it and set off straight away, making and eating sandwiches on the way. We went out onto the Nene Old Course and past Floods Ferry, where Carl and Sean came with the caravan once. All were agreed that it's not what it was, and Carl in particular took a dim view of the addition of static caravans. Then we turned round and came back past the marina and on into Ramsey to introduce them to the delights of the Rainbow before returning to Bill Fen. On the way back Carl got me into Bad Ways, and we were both sitting on the foredeck trailing our feet in the water. It was lovely. So nice to feel the sun on my back at last.

It's just getting dark now, after a beautiful delicate pink sunset, as I write this; Jim is asleep, and I'm sitting in the back cabin with the doors open, listening to the plaintive, demanding calls of the peacocks. Earlier we saw a kingfisher, not just the usual fleeting glance, but over and over as he flew and settled, looking just like one in a picture book, and flew and settled again, always just a little ahead of us. And there was a hawk, hovering low and completely stationary as we went past, again, the closest I've ever seen one.

Carl and Sean are hooked, of course.

Ready for inspection

Carl and Sean arrive tomorrow. Their house is spotless. Their cats are impeccably trained. And sleek. When Carl feeds our cats while we're away, Jim always makes sure to wash the kitchen floor first. Carl has a very damning way of describing people as 'a stranger to bleach.'

Ever since we first got Helyn, Carl has followed our boating progress with great interest. He is the only other person I know personally who has not only watched all of Narrow Boat, but also Locks and Quays (which I've never seen). A lot of honour is at stake here. This is why we had to come up a day early in order to get all the brass done and the whole boat shipshape. It has taken me all day to do the back cabin, but I have polished everything. I have washed don all the walls and scrubbed the floor. I have blacked the stove. And coiled the rope. I've also removed the blue velvet-upholstered fitted cushions, and am now sitting on the bare grained side bed. It looks so much better, I don't know why I didn't think of it before. The cushions required for the bed all (just) fit in the bed cupboard, so I think it can stay this way. It's so much more practical, as well as looking brighter and less cluttered. The side bed is used far more as shelves than seating anyway.

Really, we should have a visit from Carl and Sean every spring - it's such a great incentive for getting ready for the summer.

The river at Lewes

We went into Lewes last night. Ostensibly, we were going to check out the Snowdrop, our formerly absolute favourite pub, now under new management having gone downhill and being closed for a while.

We didn't need to go in though; the sign outside saying 'DJ tonite'; the tracksuited clientele getting out of their souped up Astras outside, and the range of shiny new lager taps glimpsed through the window were sufficient to prevent us wasting our time and energy (and hope. Farewell Snowdrop; you were a lovely pub, but to everything its season. I wonder what's happened to the bust of Plato, latterly covered in glitter, which used to grace the window.)

However, my main reason for driving into Lewes, rather than patronising the Prince of Wales, our genuinely local local down the road, was that I wanted to get a closer look at this narrowboat moored on the Ouse near the pub, which previously I had only seen from the train. Walking a little way back along the main road Baz and I were able to find a path down the riverbank, from where we could just about see the boat. More exciting was to recognise the scene from that picture I mentioned a while back of a sailing barge in the early sixties. We were standing at almost exactly the same spot as from where that picture was taken. The gasometer has disappeared from the background, but much else remains the same, and the narrowboat is, I think, tied up to the same wharf as the barge was. How they get on and off other than at high tide is a bit of a mystery, but I must say I do envy them a bit. They're almost in the heart of Lewes, secluded from the road and pretty much the only boat on the river.

Magic smoke

Moominpapa, I'm sure he will not mind me saying, is a very very clever person. He programmes big computers and he understands eckeltricity. He explained to Jim that electrical devices (and possibly some other sorts) work because of magic smoke. All is well as long as the magic smoke is contained within the device. But sometimes there is a bang or a phut and you can see the magic smoke escape. Then the thing doesn't work any more. That's the kind of electricity I understand.

I bought a 12v car charger for my beloved phone. I tried it on the boat, and it didn't work. Oh dear, I thought, obviously duff, shouldn't have bought a cheap one. Although it was proper Nokia I bought it cheap on the internet, deriving some unjustified comfort from the fact that the supplier was based in Eastbourne, i.e. local, despite the fact that I kept no record of their address or contact details. So when I was in Maplins last week, I bought another one; a universal one this time that will charge everyone's phones. This time we tested it in the car first and it was fine. Got to the boat, plugged it in, went phut and the magic smoke escaped - saw it happen that time. That had me worried of course, that there was something wrong with our 12v system (although the vacuum cleaner worked fine, at least as fine as you'd expect a 12v one to work, and so did a little LED light we have).

So I asked Moominpapa. He said, maybe the polarity is the wrong way round. That immediately made sense, because for all these things we've been using an adapter, from our three-pin sockets to a car-type one, and of course the three pin plug was wired the wrong way round. MP demonstrated this by poking it with Jim's multimeter, and I then put it right. Next time I visit Maplins I will buy a third 12v charger and hope for the best.

Jim, who has missed his vocation as a careers adviser, is determined that Moominpapa should retire from crunching the human genome and become a boat electrician.

Shiny shiny stripey stripey

Warrior is all shiny. Out it sailed from the paint dock on Saturday morning... I stayed behind to pull the dock back in to the bank - you have to swing it out to get a boat in - and walked back along the bank, alongside warrior. The boat looked fantastic, and I had such a brilliant view, from above, at the top of the steep bank ... without the bloody camera. We trundled over to the pumpout, where I did get a picture, but nothing like the view from the bank. Then we went off for a little run, up the Nene Old Course as far as the junction with Whittlesey Dyke. For those unfamiliar with the terrain, it's not like a canal where you can just hop on and off; the banks are high and steep (and private); it's pretty hard to stop anywhere, so no photo-opportunities here either.

It has not all been quite plain sailing. Wandering around the boat for about the sixteenth time in the paint dock on Friday, cooing admiringly, I suddenly let out a little squawk. 'What is it?' cried Jim. 'Nothing, nothing', I said desperately, but he wasn't fooled. I had to break the news that where there was a one-inch gap between the two panel-framing vertical stripes, there should in fact have been a four-inch gap. There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the weekend but I think the final upshot is that if there is time, it will be redone. It's an absolute bastard, but it'll be the right thing for the long term. That painting's going to be there a long time.

Paint progress

I'm back in Ramsey and I've bought the horrible weather with me, contrary to what the forecast for here promised. Still, no matter that it's freezing and pouring with rain, because Jim has done an amazing job over the last ten days with the painting. I really can't believe the time and effort that's gone into the three extra undercoats and the three topcoats, including stripes that had to be masked separately with every coat; the handrail, the hatches various, the elephant's toenails at the front and loads of other bits, in this paint dock which must have been like a greenhouse in last week's heat. So naturally I was very impressed when I turned up last night.

Work continues; even as I write Jim is giving a second coat to the roof hatches. These are red; I'm not 100% sure about the red myself (shades of the saga of the injectors); it has turned out to be a particularly virulent vermilion which is great for the handrail but perhaps best in small doses, but he likes it and as he's done all the work, who am I to argue. I am certainly more sawyed by the argument that he likes it than by the other one he's proffered, which is that we've got a whole tin of red paint and need to use it somehow...


This morning I helped mask up the fore end with some special bendy tape I bought on the offchance. We are going to have the name on there (sorry Dave); technically we need it for the Thames and it'll be nice to have it done properly. I think it should look nice too. I'm not quite sure what the objection was; whether it was a matter of aesthetics or convention, but I can't really see a problem on either front.

Anyway, having done that I was ceremonially handed a tin of blacking and an old brush and reminded of my vocation. All very well but this was the final inch and a half of two year old blacking, with the consistency of black treacle - until I got it slapped onto the boat, when it suddenly developed the ability to run quite fantastically. Still, I know my place, and didnt rest until the entire contents of the tin (at least, those that still moved about) were transferred to the hull. I have a feeling that were this boat's steel to mysteriously be vapourised by some kind of alien deathray (hmm, apart from the baseplate) it would continue to be perfectly serviceable as a boat made entirely from paint and blacking.

Tomorrow we vacate the paint dock - which has actually worked very well. Then at last I'll be able to see Warrior properly, from a distance, in all its new glory. And be able to light the fire.

What's happening then?

It's not that there's nothing happening; it's just that I'm not there, my presence having been required elsewhere last week (and this). A lot is happening, in terms of painting, but communication links between here and Ramsey (well, between Ramsey and anywhere, to be honest) are not excellent; however, the latest update is that Jim finished three coats of undercoat yesterday and this morning started preparing for the topcoat. All the undercoat is black, which was thus relatively simple, but the top coats are black and grey, so that will be rather more complex. It's a bit too hot really for doing it, and I imagine that the paint dock is like a tomato house. He started painting yesterday at five in the morning.

I'm kicking myself for bringing the digital camera home and not leaving it with him. It was because the batteries had run out, but of course he could have got some there. It's a little bit of a walk to the shops but Moominpapa has been lending Jim his car!

We decided that it wasn't worth my going back up to visit this weekend, but I will go on Thursday, and then we'll both come back tomorrow week. Then at the end of the month, Carl and Sean are bringing their caravan to the Bill Fen CL, so we'll be back up there then, hopefully to take them on a little boat trip. They've been listening to us going on about the boats for so long, it's about time they actually got to see it in the flesh. It would be nice to think we might even get the signwriting done by then, but I'm not sure how and when John will be able to fit us in for that.

Twenty Questions

Don't you love those questionnaire things that celebrities (or worthies, depending upon your publication of choice) answer in the Saturday and Sunday papers? Don't you always go through them answering the questions yourself? Or is that just me?

Well, as he reported on his own blog, Granny Buttons' Andrew is the respondent to this month's Canal Boat Twenty Questions. Naturally miffed at not being asked myself (I didn't get a column either, grr), I swore that I would answer the self same questions here, and would like to suggest that other boat bloggers do likewise.

One little thing though, just to make it more interesting (and less arduous, and with less risk of copyright infringement), I thought I would just put my answers here, and not reproduce the questions. So you can either read it in conjunction with your well thumbed copy of Canal Boat, or, if you like an element of mystery, you can guess at what the questions might have been. You may even find it amusing to mix up the questions and answers randomly. I recall this was something I used to find unconscionably funny as a child. The answer 'Wiping it with bread' can still reduce me to helpless laughter. So here goes:

1. The Huddersfield. Stunning views and seventy-four lovely locks.
2. The Nene. Pretty views and thirty-something horrid locks.
3. Someone calm and quiet who doesn't shout.
4. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris. Random library choice.
5. Dawn.
6. Daily Mail readers.
7. Now. But second choice, the thirties. For the boats, obviously, but also the silk underwear.
8. I'm afraid I haven't, yet.
9. Barrister.
10. Have more money but be much poorer.
11. Generally superior to a random cross section of society.
12. Beer. Of course. Mind you, I had a bath once, and that was nice.
13. Bloody minded boaters.
14. Are you lost?
15. Portholes.
16. Pump out (but it won't fit in my Walkman)
17. Canals. Rivers are pretty, but canals are canals.
18. On a boat.
19. Too early to say.
20. The ability to steer.

Suddenly, it's summer

Suddenly, it's still light at 9pm (granted, BST); not only that, but I'm out in the garden in a sleeveless vest, feeling only slightly chilly, hanging out the last of the woolly socks and tights for the year. It's been a long time coming, but surely, at last, summer has arrived.

Baz and I drove back from Ramsey this afternoon, leaving Jim up there, brave and carless, to make a start on the painting. It now looks as if the paint dock won't be vacated until Wednesday, but it'll still be worth it. Kevin and Vicky are in there at the moment with Star, which is looking lovely. They painted it themselves, and Black Boat John (for that is the name by which everyone calls him) has done the signwriting, and we're very impressed with it. We'd seen a lot of his work around the place, obviously, but most of it was in a style we didn't really like - too fancy, or novelty-ish. But Star's signwriting is very plain, exactly how we want ours, and it's fantastic; not too perfect; just right. So it looks as if we will be getting him to do Warrior.

After looking at lots (and lots and lots) of boats we have decided to go for just two framed panels on the cabinside - rather than two written ones and two smaller empty ones, or some other combination. After waving Jim off to the Rainbow this morning to stock up with food for his sojourn, Baz and I equipped ourselves with tape measure, pencil and 2" masking tape to see how it might look. Imagine the tape line in black, on a dark grey background, with cream and black signwriting and a red handrail...

I can not believe this...

We have had a lovely day. We went off happily this morning to the RN open day, there to meet Steve who is returning our pistons, liners and con rods. It was a bit disappointing to discover that Compo wasn't there but apparently he has been getting his knees done too. But it was nice to meet up again with Brian and Allister and David of RN, and drink some rather nice bottle conditioned specially brewed RN beer. There was a barbecue too, at first just inside the works, until it got a bit smokey. The works was looking pristine and Brian's speech made it sound as if there are exciting hings happening there. For a start they are in the process of producing an engine which isn't destined for a boat, but for a domestic combined heat and power unit, that will run on almost any sort of oil. I do think it's still a bit optimisic though, to think that we'll all be able to run our boats on chip fat and waste engine oil, because once the raw suff has run out, I think we'll be at the end of the queue for the substitutes.

Then Steve followed us back to Bill Fen and finally saw and heard the engine in action, and stayed and chatted for a while, then Kevin and Vicky came over, and then Simon and Anne (the Moomins), and then Steve went home and we went over to Melaleuca to look at Simon's engine and couldn't drag Jim away. Then finally we came back to Warrior, sat down with a cup of tea, and I said, did we get our bits back off Steve before he went then?

Did we buggery.

Now how the hell did we manage to forget that, the entire point of the exercise? It kind of puts forgeting oner liner in the shade.

Brasso Boy

And it's raining, although it was sunny when we arrived. Quiet sounds of cheering have reached us over the course of the afternoon, from the boules tournament, and Sebastian has been over and reported that there is a marquee, with beer (and, Jim adds, cider, which Baz is quite partial to) and a large barbecue waiting to be fired up. Slightly worryingly, this was before the heavens opened so I'm not sure what the barbecue situation is now. Also, we forgot to bring Baz's sleeping bag or quilt, but he assures us that he will be all right with two blankets.

As Steve is coming to look at the engine tomorrow, the first job was to clean and polish the engine room, and the engine itself. I bravely led the way, and polished about two things, before generously allowing Baz to take over. He has done all the brass and copper and Jim is now in there doing the engine, I think. I have to do the blog now because Brasso Boy needs the laptop on so that he can charge his ipod.

Transport

Well, tomorrow we're off, for Bill Fen fun, RN open day and painting. We won't be going in the new car:

because I've just spent an hour banging my head on the keyboard failing to insure it.
Instead, we will be taking the old car:

To ensure my stress levels don't drop too low, the local evangelical church, two doors down, is hosting a discotheque, just to let us know that summer has finally arrived, and I'm knackered from shifting tons and tons of stuff/crap/heirlooms about.

I am self-medicating with chocolate.

Shame

I don't really do proud or ashamed to be British - for a start, Britishness is an artificial, political construct that it's hard to feel any affinity with (Englishness, on the other hand, with its cultural and linguistic hinterland, I'm quite fond of).

But last night I saw something that I did feel ashamed to be associated with, no matter how tenouously:That's a fifty per cent increase, overnight, on an already outrageous charge for facilities that are mediocre at best. But it gets worse. To compound the obscenity a hundredfold, there was this:

Now, when CCTV was first introduced, you might have been one of those people who thought it was a good idea; that it would catch major criminals, rescue kidnapped children, deter rapists, and all in all make your world a safer place. On the other hand, you might have been a sceptic from the start, concerned about the civil liberties implications of the growing surveillance society.

But either way, did you ever, in your wildest dreams or your worst nightmares, foresee the day when the technology would be deployed to terrify little old ladies into paying six bob to have a wee?

And it was sad and frustrating to see people practically queuing up to fed their notes into the change machine, and their change into the insatiable maw of the turnstile. Is there no human need so basic that a profit can't be turned from it? Will I have the nerve to continue sneaking in without paying (as an act of political defiance, of course, not meanness)? Well, I'm pretty sure there are no new CCTV cameras, and I never got caught before - and it would make an interesting test case (micturition martyrs, anyone?).

What everyone ought to do - male and female, young and old - is just stop outside the turnstiles and piss on the bloody concourse.

But we won't of course.
Because we're British.

Stuff

Idly rambling through the interwebs this afternoon I came across a blog describing a couple's (rather testing, as it turned out) experience of selling up and moving onto a boat. A couple of sentences leapt out at me: Years and years of rubbish which we had just collected and stored. We were paying a mortgage just so we could store our crap.

Now I know I claim to have lived on a boat, but I haven't really done so properly because I have always had somewhere where I could store my crap, do my washing. But I would like to, and I think I could. I was talking to a colleague of about the same age as me last week, and we agreed that we'd both reached the stage where we were fed up with accumulating stuff and wanted instead to start getting rid of it. I fear that this is intimations of mortality, in the form of 'you can't take it with you.'

There are things that I really, really coveted, and was enormously pleased to acquire, and have loved for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and still love, but I can now face the thought of giving them up with some degree of equanimity. I find myself thinking, perhaps now they could give someone else the pleasure that they gave me when I first acquired them (law of diminishing returns comes in here).

None of this, however, applies to the boat - or at least to the concept of a boat. That I will fight tooth and nail for; the house would go first. So maybe it's a change of priorities rather than a sudden epiphany. But it is still, perhaps, the letting go of one phase of one's life in order to move on to another. Life is way too short to spend all of it doing the same thing. Part of me would love to give up the predictable and the secure and plunge headlong into a new adventure. But solid suburban lower middle class conditioning is hard to shake off, and I haven't done it yet. Sometimes I'm suprised by how adventurous I apparently seem to other people; to myself, I still feel very staid and cowardly.

Anyway, we are in the process of clearing out an ENORMOUS amount of accumulated junk in order to create some living space for Number One Son to return home in a sort of semi-detached, offspring-annexe sort of way. All the jumble sales that yielded up the treasures that I've occasionally mentioned, also yielded up vast quantities of stuff - stuff that turned out to be crap; stuff we never got round to fixing; stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time; stuff that has served its purpose. Plus the stuff that we ended up storing for other people, plus all the old stuff that I thought I was sentimentally attached to but it now turns out I wasn't... chipped blue and white china, babies' shoes, chairs, dinner services, pictures, picture frames, broken glass; a canoe; cast iron bathroom scales, bookcases, clothes, clothes, clothes; things the children made and have forgotten about but will remember the instant I put them anywhere near the dustbin; three (three!) old school desks; a gentleman's travelling wardrobe, two enormous laundry hampers; a doctor's case that smells so strongly of liniment it can't come in the house... a box full of old stirrup pumps; wooden planes, a model railway layout with rusted rails and crumbling papier mache hills, a 1930s typewriter... and that's just what I can remember. We really ought to ebay some of it, but it's too much hassle, so mostly it's going on Freecycle, or to the charity shop or tip.

And it feels good, sloughing off the past like that; getting rid of the burden that possessions can all too easily become - the burden of being responsible for them, of the mental energy required to hold onto them. Just the real treasures, the most precious, most loved, most beautiful things, remain, and at last can get the attention they deserve.

And after spending the day downsizing our accumulated possessions yesterday, we went out and bought a new car.

A picture of Lewes

A couple of years ago my sister gave me a picture book for Christmas - one of the enormous number put together from the photographs of Francis Frith who, if the blurb is to be believed, was a Victorian photographic pioneer. His collection would certainly seem to be a reliable moneyspinner in the twenty first century, and his empire has clearly outlived him, as he died in 1898. This particular edition was Canals and Waterways, and it has a voucher in the back whereby you could send off for a free print of one of the pictures in the book (presumably in the hope that you would then be unable to resist ordering many more at forty four pounds a pop. I resisted).

Anyway, even though the voucher was out of date (my sister at the time worked in a remainder shop....) I sent off for, and got, this picture (albeit rendered in artificial sepia) of a sailing barge at Lewes c. 1960. The book tells me that the boat is called Federation, but nothing about what she might have been carrying. This wharf is in Lewes itself, and today there is a lone narrowboat moored at about this spot (I would love to know how it got there), which is handy for the Snowdrop pub. The pub, incidentally, is not named after a flower, but an avalanche which killed eight people in 1836 (or 1829, 0r 1830, depending on what source you believe. I'll go for the Argus's December 27th 1836, which seems to be the most popular).

We found a nice oak frame for the picture in our jumble sale collection, and have really only been waiting (ages) for me to get around to getting a nice mount cut for it. I've now ordered one from a shop in Lewes - it's nearly a tenner, so it's as well the picture was free and the frame was 20p - and it should be ready on Friday, so hopefully we will be putting it up in Warrior this weekend.

Whither Andante?

Before I went to see Mike yesterday, I got an email from him drawing my attention to this. Thanks also to Michelle, who emailed me about it from North Carolina. Andante is for sale again - apparently already under offer. So when Mike saw her go through Newbury the other week, it looks as if she was on her way to Whilton.

What a bastard, my first thought was, changing her bloody name - then getting rid of her! The chances of a new purchaser realising her real name and changing it back are pretty slim, but I hope that might happen. There's nothing wrong with Saxon as a name, but it's not Andante's name.

I grudgingly concede that he's tidied the engine room up quite nicely. Very impressive actually. And the ad gave Mike his first opportunity to see the changes I'd made - most of which are completely unaltered, down to the china duck, and he thought they looked nice (I think).

I hope she finds someone who'll keep her this time. Keep an eye out for her everyone....

Mind you, Sebastian was always pointing out that those quavers ought to be tied.

Visiting Zulu Warrior

I've had a lovely afternoon today. I went to Winkwell to visit Mike (ex of Andante) and see his latest purchase, Zulu Warrior. See the interesting link there? It's funny, I've met Mike about twice now since he sold me Andante - last time was two years ago when he saved my life by showing me where to find the decent pubs in Reading (and there are some) but he feels like an old friend. We keep in touch by occasional email, but often not for months at a time.

Zulu Warrior has an interesting history; as I understand it (and Mike will correct me if I've got this wrong), it was one of two narrowboats owned by the Navy and made available to Navy personnel for holidays and adventure-type activities. The other one was Viking Warrior. The Warrior connection is that the Navy had (and may still have; my in house Naval consultant is not quite up to date) a stone frigate (i.e. a building) called HMS Warrior, named after the original warship HMS Warrior, after which our Warrior is also named (do keep up!). Zulu Warrior is a 1973 Harborough boat, and possibly started life as an early Anglo Welsh hire boat - Mike's still investigating that bit of her history along with a friend whose family were closely involved with the company.

So realising I had a free afternoon today, I emailed Mike and asked if he was at home to visitors, and was made most welcome. I got the train from Euston to Hemel Hempsted, crossed a park and joined the towpath at the Fishery Inn, and had a very pleasant walk in the newly emerging sun up to Winkwell, where Zulu Warrior is currently on the bank having some welding/replating to the hull. I did think the yard was a bit glitzy - they had concrete hardstanding and all, and hard hats... and a big crane with a very big spreader... Which we got to see in action as they were about to move Mike's boat about. So we retired to the Three Horseshoes for a nice al fresco pint of Black Sheep, and watched from the towpath while the boat was moved a few yards.

Then I could finally go on board. The interior of the boat has been done really nicely, and recently - amazing really, when the exterior and the hull were crying out for attention. But they're getting the attention they deserve now from Mike and I'm sure this lovely - and historically interesting - boat is in very safe hands. I look forward to hearing from Mike again once it's back in the water and going for a run. It looks like a lovely stretch of canal. Thanks Mike, for a really enjoyable afternoon, and very best of luck with your fantastic project.

Holiday excitement begins

Two things have happened to tell us that the summer is going to come and Warrior will leave the marina this year: firstly our tickets for Cropredy have arrived. There's still something very exciting about having proper paper tickets (with a nice design printed on them) in your hand. Secondly we have held the traditional temporary licence telephone conversations with navigation authorities various.

Yes, I know we were going to get a gold licence, but we didn't, and it's not worth it now whichever way you slice it. Apparently. I didn't do the sums, but then I'm not very good at sums anyway. This is how it adds up: Nene, three days; canals, about five days; Thames, about a week; canals, as long as we can get away with..... Nene again to get home. Eventually. So, what's the most cost effective way of doing that then, given that we currently don't have any licence at all?

New knees

Hang on a minute, those aren't Jim's...

I may have mentioned in passing that Jim had a bad knee (he's been telling everyone down the supermarket about it, so I'm sure he won't mind me telling the world); it was a very longstanding thing, caused in part by rather foolhardily making a habit of jumping out of aeroplanes many years ago, but it started to get a lot worse last summer, to the point that it was proving a significant hindrance to working and, more importantly, boating.

So, to cut a long story short, and certainly to skip the details, he has had it 'done', last Thursday, and (touch wood) it appears to have been very successful. In vain do I implore him to sit down with his leg up; he is already leaping about like the proverbial gazelle. This means that barring any other unforeseen events, we WILL be painting the week after next.

But there's more. Over the May Bank Holiday weekend, Bill Fen host a weekend of fun and frolics for the Peterborough IWA, with games, music, barbecues and beer, so we (including Sebastian) will definitely be up for that. And on the Sunday, Russell Newbery have their 'Open Day' (I put that in quotes, as an examination of the small print reveals that this 'day' runs from 12 noon to three p.m.) and we are going to go to that. 3D Steve will be there, and hopefully Allister, David, and above all Compo. Jim tells me he has lots of questions to ask them. I have one: why didn't you tell us our skin tank was too small?

Sadly, after the fun and frolics finish, and before the work starts, Sebastian and I shall have to return home - he to college and me to work. But we will go back the following weekend to do our bit. So we're all very impressed with Jim's new knees... (You can see where this is leading, can't you) ... Do you think I should have had him rebottomed?

We've had our chips

Funny things, chips. They've got to be right or they're wrong (just like that other English institution, the cup of tea). Chip shop chips are often something of a leap in the dark - although this is nonetheless preferable to the guaranteed, homogenised, quality-controlled-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives chain fries. Will they be soggy or dry (they shouldn't really be crisp, well, only the little bits); will they be frozen or made from real potatoes? One would hope the latter in Ramsey, at the heart of potato-producing country. That, of course, is before you even got on to the fish.

I used to live in the flat over a fish and chip shop (the Newhaven Fish Bar, it's imaginatively called). They were - and still are - pretty good. At the time the fact that all my clothes and furniture smelt of chips was a small price to pay for post-marital independence. Go in there and there is quite a long price list, detailing the cost of, say, cod, haddock, plaice, skate, huss and so on. Most of the fish is fresh, as it should be, given that this is a fishing port and the fish are landed a few hundred yards down the road.

When we were in Brighouse, once, unexpectedly (this is when the prop bolt first sheared on Andante and we didn't carry a spare), we ended up in a chip shop. The price list said:
Fish - £1.95
Special - £3.95

That was it. After waiting for the chap in front (who was bemoaning the fact that he'd been down south, in Sheffield) to be served with chips and mushy peas in a bap, Jim asked, what are those nice big portions of fish there? Oh, said the lad behind the counter, that's the Special. So we had two of them. I think it was cod. The chips were awful. We were very depressed. But all was well in the morning because we got some nice new bolts from the lovely people at Sagar Marine. And Brighouse Basin was very nice. As another aside, I mentioned this to someone at work in London a while back and they said, oh, is Brighouse a real place then?

Anyway, I sometimes have what is here called huss, and which must be the most multiply-named fish in the country. It's often also called rock salmon. (And is it possibly the same thing as hake?) And apparently, in the Fens, rock eel, because that's what I had from the Madeira Fish Bar on Great Whyte the Friday before last. I was hoping for real eel, as it happened, on the grounds that it might be local, but no luck. I am happy to report, however, that the Madeira's chips were very good, and the Moomins think so too.

Jim came back from his hunting expedition with the thought that the proprietors of the Madeira Fish Bar might be Portugese, on account of they weren't speaking English and appeared to be Benfica supporters. Oh yes, I said, and the name might be a bit of a clue...

Talking of football, which I wasn't, Lewes have today assured their promotion to the Conference, and finally, after years of frustration because their ground, the splendidly named Dripping Pan, didn't meet the required standard, can now take their place in the national league. So three cheers, and raise your pint of Harveys to the Rooks, and now let's hear no more about it.