Last night all our twelve volt systems except for the fridge and the inverter went down. That meant no lights or running water. It wasn’t anything obvious, so we summoned our engineer, Clive, who made it up from Milton Keynes about 2:30 today, having stopped off to pick up a solar panel for us on the way. He got increasingly frustrated as various bits of circuitry turned out to be still live and he could not find what was broken, until he realized that is was the ground connection that had come off the battery. It fooled me, too.

While we were waiting for Clive, I got out the Brasso and started polishing various bits of brass around the boat. It turns out that the curtains close much easier if the curtain rod is shiny, though polishing them takes a fair amount of elbow grease. It’s quite meditative, sort of like fishing, but a lot cheaper.

Fishing, or at least coarse fishing on British canals, is pretty much just meditation rebranded to require a lot of expensive gear. For all the hundreds of fishers we passed last summer on the canals, I only ever saw two of them actually catch a fish, and one of those was sitting right next to a No Fishing sign. I presume he was going after the literate fish who were looking for somewhere safe to hang out. Ha! That fooled them then, didn’t it? Perhaps the other fisherpeople could improve their chances by carrying around portable No Fishing signs, but that would be one more thing to transport, along with the rods, nets, chair, umbrella, windbreak, thermos of tea, tackle box, tent, sandwiches, and wheelbarrow.

Yes, that’s right, there’s no cooler to bring the fish home, this is coarse fishing so they throw the buggers back in. You can just imagine the goth fish saying, “Hey, there’s this really great piercing studio over on the Aire and Calder, I had my upper lip done three times. They have free snacks, too.”

Tomorrow, Leeds for sure.