A sore head!

I should warn you that this blog is hardly going to be very exciting before I untie the ropes and depart from Stourport basin...read on and I will prove my point.

Along with my father, I spent Christmas with Mally and Richard. I still had a few bottles of booze to get rid of whilst emptying the house, so took a few including a bottle of Cointreau to give them. Unfortunately I forgot that Mally can not eat or drink anything with oranges, so they gave it to Dad, I believe it’s one of his favourite drinks, so it wouldn’t go to waste. What I didn’t expect was for him to give it to Cathy when she visited him at New Year, so imagine my surprise when Cathy turned up with the bloody thing when I moved onto the boat. I did drink some of it on the first night, but there was no way the bottle would be left on the boat, so thankfully Cathy took it away again. I deliberately didn’t give any bottles to Cathy as I gave her a few when I left on my around the world trip, only for her to give them back again on my return. The idea was for her to drink them, not just look after them.

You could well be mistaken for thinking a few drinks is the reason for a sore head. Not at all. Being a slow learner is the reason for a sore head as I keep whacking my head on the door frame as I enter the boat. To make matters worse it is always exactly the same point on my head...ouch! If that isn’t bad enough, sometimes I forget that I have shut the hatch to keep the rain out, so when I duck through the door on the way out I am looking downwards, forgetting about the closed hatch, then stand up and give my head another whack, typically in exactly the same place. Even when I remember to take care, I still hit my head. I must be taller than I thought!

Ducking is not the only thing to remember, twisting the upper half of the body whilst walking the along the length of the bo

at is something else that has to be done. Through the kitchen the corridors switches to the other side, so through the chicane you have to switch the upper body twist to the other way. If you walk fast it feels rather like a dance.

The basin is still covered in ice, so there is no chance of going anywhere, though this gives me time to adjust to my new way

of life and become familiar with the boat and its workings without having to worry about going anywhere. The first thing to do was replace the empty gas cylinder at the front. Removing the empty was easy enough, but balancing with the full cylinder as I swung it around the cratch was nerve wracking, especially in the snow. Rick told me later that there is 20ft of water off the front. If I had known that earlier I probably would have been a wimp and asked somebody else to do it for me, being as I can’t swim. Next up was the water, an easier task that involves the unravelling of hope pipes to reach along the length of the boat to the nearby tap. Then there was refuelling which has to be done with large plastic containers as the boat is going nowhere. It is important to keep the tank over 3/4 full during the winter to minimise the condensation in the tank which could potentially cause a problem to the engine if too much water is mixed in with the diesel. Then there was the diesel stove to clean out, something that has to be carried out every 3 to 4 days to stop the build up of carbon at the bottom which would clog the thing up.

Last, but by no means least is the emptying of the loo. There are two types of loos on narrowboats which is often the cause of debate amongst boat owners. Some have a large holding tank that needs pumping out which a) costs and b) causes a problem when you are iced in. Mine has a cassette which needs to be emptied out every few days or more often depending on how much you drink and how much curry you eat. It’s clean and easy to do and not unusual to see people wandering around the basin carrying a plastic tank full of poo with them, I assume they aren’t going to the pub. All this makes one very aware of exactly what resources you are using and just how much water is used each day by a household just from flushing the loo.

I would like my time on the boat to be sociable with plenty of visitors, so I have come up with the idea of having a fluid set of mugs. Each time somebody stays overnight they will be requested to bring a mug, not a new one, just one they already own, then take one of mine away with them. Mally and Richard were the first to swap mugs (see mugs shot) giving me a basket making mug (Mally is a basket maker) and taking away a Stoke Bruerne canal mug that was given to me years ago by our neighbours when they returned from a holiday.

That’s about it for this week. See, I told there was nothing exciting to report.