As Andrew’s noted, I’m the only member of Wharram Percy’s crew who’s ever been excited to cruise through Milton Keynes. This is the result of much criss-crossing of the canal here from above, as a traveller in the hyperspatial web of non-Euclidean weirdness that is the hodological manifold of MK40 (it’s no coincidence that its postcode sounds like a Messier object), thanks to the presence of the Open University campus – site, over the years, of many a conference, PhD…
As Andrew’s just noted, this is the blog’s third year at Shugborough, so I’m going to assume you’ve either done your assigned preparatory reading on the 2016 and 2017 prequels, or have decided it wouldn’t leave you any the wiser. But for Margaret & me it’s our first visit, and we get two days and nights here before we chug on to Stone tomorrow where we jump ship. We arrived shortly after midday yesterday, which was the last day of…
Day 2 back on Wharram Percy and I’m noticing things that weren’t there last year, or possibly yesterday. The shower pump goes “Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!” until it runs out of water, like the head of Orpheus floating down the river Hebrus. Also, one of the walls in the dining room/guest bedroom has a series of knotmarks in the wood that make a little repeating mural of small nervous dogs barking “No, YOU shut up!” at each other. The Trent &…
So as you’ll have gathered we did make it into Devizes after all by nightfall, and Margaret and I took shore leave to experience the bright lights and Bank Holiday nightlife in a low-budget remake of On the Town. In fact Devizes turns out to be lovely once you can tear yourself away from the Sainsbury’s, which was easy for us to do as they’d closed by the time we got there and we were freed up to be sternly…
A sunny Bank Holiday Monday’s cruise from the back end of nowhere where we were moored last night to the outskirts of the outskirts of Devizes. The original plan was to head into Devizes for a pleasant end-of-day mooching and mooring, but Andrew made the fatal mistake of letting me drive for the afternoon and Pegotty signalled her delight at this turn with a gay plume of smoke from her engine, which Andrew will tell you all about. Now we…
So Margaret and I have been migrant crew for the low-skilled jobs on Pegotty for a day and a bit now, and have been doing the induction course in instalments. Last night we learned how not to sleep on a canal boat, which is most easily achieved by (i) failing to plan for night being colder than day and (ii) ensuring that your natural edge detection is disabled by lapping the topper over the futon on the side that slopes…