Ellsmere was once a major center of canal operations, even today it is a popular stop for canal users mostly because of the Tesco right next to a branch of the canal, where you can take your shopping cart all the way to the boat. A mere is a lake, and there are several of them in the neighborhood…. including one that makes an attractive training ground for battle swans. This is a junior battle swan, disguised as an iceberg….
The Welsh Marches: border country, the edge of civilization and the start of Wales. From where we are moored tonight you could fire a longbow across the border, which probably explains why there is no frigging mobile service for the second night in a row. The locals are too busy baking soda bread and molesting sheep to care about decent 4G service. It’s not that I hate the Welsh, I’m just bitter. They used to have a town named after…
It’s a thrill-a-minute life on the cut, if by thrill-a-minute you mean that something out of the ordinary happens every few days. This morning’s excitement was a blocked lock gate, the second in a flight of fifteen. By the time we got to the top of the flight, the Canal and River Trust had been summoned, and their man in a van set to work with a giant extendible rake, closely monitored by the skippers of the three or four…
Ah, the jokes of my youth… Q: What’s black and white and red all over? A: A newspaper Tell that to kids today and they just don’t understand. Happily, Q: What’s black and white and red all over? A: A nun in a blender still works. Printed newspapers are almost gone, and those that remain are a shadow of their former selves. While this has saved a lot of trees, there were so many useful things you could do with…
Today we went past a wharf with a roof over it, and an interesting history. The roof was to prevent goods from getting rained on while being loaded and unloaded. What precious commodities, you ask, could not stand a drop of rain? Sugar! Cocoa! Chocolate! This was the wharf for a Cadbury’s factory, where milk from local dairy farms was collected by canal boat, and processed with sugar and cocoa into raw chocolate which was then shipped by canal boat…
It was not actually raining when we set out this morning, but after an hour or so it was coming down heavily enough that we moored the boat to sit it out. About five hours later it was still raining, but the sky was brightening up, and it was down to a light drizzle so we set off again, through the only lock in twenty five miles of canal. We stopped at a watering point to fill the tank with…
A brief update today, as Internet connectivity is weak here. We bid a fond farewell to the Staffs and Worcester today and turned onto the Shropshire Union. This is a apparently a euphemism for mating shopping carts. That’s where wire shopping baskets come from. I think we ran over a shopping cart in the canal in Kidderminster a couple of days ago. The boat won, but we had a scratchy, crunchy time of it for a few moments. All sorts…
It has to be said, the one emotion that the Pre-Raphaelite painters were capable of capturing was boredom. It’s pretty sad when the most exciting thing about a picture is the frame. I wonder what this model is thinking? “Just two more hours of this pose and then I can go to the loo.” You may notice that many Pre-Raphaelite women look similar. That’s because they only had a few models and they traded them around. I suppose it takes…
You might think that Botterham Bottom Lock is some sort of anal chastity belt, but in fact is it stage one of a two stage “staircase” lock, where the water from the top lock fills the bottom lock, and you are faced with double high gates in the middle. That was our final lock for the day, which was spent heading north on the Staffs and Worcester, back the way we had come a week ago, and then past the…
When I go into a public toilet, which I do frequently on this trip so we don’t have to pump out the holding tank as often, I expect to find soap. I’m an old fashioned bar soap kind of a guy, but I’m willing to put up with liquid soap from a dispenser, or even a quick squirt of foam. What I got today was a Lemon & Black Pepper Fragrance Explosion Hand Wash. Seriously? I have some fish in…