We have tickets for the Cropredy Music Festival, too, but we needed a grocery store run first, so we set off through Cropredy to Banbury. Something of the leisurely pace of narrowboat live can be expressed by the fact that a run to the nearest Tesco Extra is a two day round trip.

It was sunny but windy today, and in spite of the canal meandering this way and that I seemed to have the wind in my face all day. At two of the locks there were two or three boats ahead of us. When that happens, you wait in line standing on the towpath holding the midline of the boat. I am working on improving this by sitting in a folding chair holding the boat and reading my kindle.

Paula was confused by the fact that the Tesco was about to close at 4pm in spite of the sign saying it was open 24 hours. In England Open 24 Hours means, “Open Monday morning till Saturday night, and a few hours on Sunday because shopping on Sunday is a SIN. We don’t want to stop you sinning entirely as we make good money from it, but we have to do something to placate the religious nutjobs on the Tory back benches.”

We hauled our provisions back from Tesco in a wheelie suitcase, and moored up for the night just short of the main Banbury wharf. I’d been hoping to pump out the holding tank, but the marina I was aiming for has an even more restrictive view of opening hours.

One day a week should be plenty, right? We are talking narrowboats here, you can just moor up and wait all week.

At the main wharf in Banbury they tore down all the canal side warehouses, and built a new shopping center that looks like canal side warehouses.

Being Sunday evening, it was all closed, though, because SIN.

Tucked away in the middle of the new development is a boatyard that has been there since the canal was built.

The dry dock there has been in continuous use since 1790, and the blacksmith’s forge is two hundred years old. However, perhaps the greatest contribution they made to the canal system was in the 1930s, when a guy called Tom Rolt brought in a boat called Cressy, which he had bought from his uncle. Cressy had originally been a horse drawn barge, and was later fitted with a steam engine, and by Rolt’s time the engine from a Model T Ford. Rolt has Tooley’s fit the boat out for long term cruising, including such unheard of luxuries as having a bath on board. In 1939 Rolt and his wife Angela Orred set off for a life on the inland waterways in the first narrowboat intended for pleasure cruising.

Their voyage was interrupted by the outbreak of WWII, but Rolt wrote a book about their adventures, Narrowboat, which was published in 1944, and is still in print seventy years later. Rolt went on to help found the Inland Waterways Association, which lobbied to keep existing canals operational and restore abandoned canals. It’s safe to say that we could not be taking this trip without Tom Rolt, and he could not have taken his trip without Tooley’s boatyard.

In case you’re wondering about the title of this post, here’s a hint.

Someone at the Canal and River Trust has a sense of humor.