We started the day with a flight of five locks. Paula was working the paddles and gates, and I just had to get the boat in and out of the locks. Working lock gates is good exercise. If anyone wants to come and visit us we can promise them a workout plan as well as three meals a day and all the non-alcoholic shandy you care to drink.

Talking of three meals a day, I fried up some black pudding (blood sausage) and eggs for breakfast. Yum. Paula took a pass on the black pudding. Maybe she was put off by the lumps of congealed fat that add so much to the flavor. Still, maybe after a few weeks in the Midlands she will be eating faggots and scratchings with the best of us. (A faggot is an offal and bacon meatball, and scratchings are fried pigskins, usually with lumps of fat and the occasional hair still attached.)

Anyway, where was I. Oh, yes, the flight of locks. Theoretically the top lock gates block the flow of water while you empty the lock through the bottom paddles, and exit through the bottom gate. However, the top lock gates always leak to some extent, and often to a large extent.

That makes it more difficult to open the lower gates, so it’s lucky that a young man from the boat behind us came along to help. He and his partner were in a bit of a hurry (which is probably a mistake on the cut) so we shared the last two locks with them, and let them get ahead of us at the bottom of the flight.

We then had several lock free miles of rural idyll, but underneath the calm appearance brutal violence is thinly masked. Note these baby battle swans practicing formation paddling.

Is that an attack flotilla, or what? They say that a blow from a swans wing can break human bones. It’s no coincidence that canal boats are made of steel plate. The swans have disposed of the fiberglass ones.

We stopped in Wolverton for a run to Tesco, where I picked up some pickled onions, and Paula stocked up on everything else. Then onwards through the track housing and parklands of Milton Keynes (pron: Mil-tun Keens). Marxist comedian Alexei Sayle has on various occasions parodied Milton Keynes (and the post WWII “New Town” movement that created it) by referring to the imaginary town of Milton Springsteen, which has the motto, “It’s quite nice really.” Now I have the song That’s Milton Springsteen from Sayle’s The Fish People Tapes. From the canal the place is not as bad as I expected. We are sharing our mooring for the night with a heron.

Paula has been hard at work, cleaning, repairing, and making the place feel like home. Yeah!