Have been enjoying Andrew’s blog posts but thought it time to add my tuppence. (See what I did there?) Life on Pegotty has affected my quotidian endeavors. Much less time on line, basically no option to stream any videos, haven’t dealt with my phone in two weeks. Not a big phone fan, it interesting that I even miss it a bit! What I do focus on: where to get groceries, helping with mooring, dealing with the locks, trying to put…
This morning we headed back to Braunston to drop Mary and Chris back to their car. Some of the fields we went by still show the remnants of mediaeval farming. Look how the buttercups are growing better on the ridges of slightly higher ground in this meadow. Those are the strips that would have been farmed by different families. One family might have several strips over several different fields. Over several hundred years, the lands that were held in common…
The game of rugby was invented at Rugby School in the town of Rugby, when a member of the privileged class decide that he shouldn’t have to kick the football like everyone else, so he picked it up and carried it. After all, it’s not as if the game had been called FOOTball since the Fifteenth Century. Well, it had, actually, but that wasn’t important to someone who went to to right school. Rather than admit that he had committed…
We started the day with a flight of seven locks, including the one that had been out of action for four days. We paired up with another boat to go through the locks, and the skipper reminisced about the time they had waited sixteen days for a lock repair on the Kennet and Avon Canal. Locks involve a fair amount of physical labor hoisting paddles up and down and opening and closing gates. Paula does all of this. I just…
Our Internet connection consists of a pay-as-you-go SIM chip in my phone with tethered WiFi from that. I’ve worked out what the little letters next to the signal strength indicator mean: H: slow as Hell E: takes for Ever LTE: Less Than Expected 4G: For God’s sake this is slow We are out in the country at the moment, so have zero bars of H. That and the fact that it was cold this morning mean fewer pictures today. The…
Today was cold, overcast, and drizzly when we got up. The winter in San Francisco is pretty much like the worst parts of summer in England, while the summer in San Francisco is like the best parts of the summer in England. Undaunted, we continued north, back to Stoke Breurne and its flight of seven locks. Here a volunteer lock keeper called Leo helped us up the flight while coaching us on our lock technique and sharing details of canal…
It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, so we decided to stay put today and explore the local countryside. I checked in with Clive, who said he could be up around three in the afternoon to fix the leaking sink, so we set off down the towpath. There are a number of geocaches in the vicinity, but I haven’t found any yet, mostly due to my unwillingness to go poking around in hedges full of hawthorn, brambles, and stinging…
We continued to head North along the Grand Union today, with a break not just for tea, but also for Paula to visit a thrift store. The goal for today was to escape Milton Keynes. Oh, I know, it presents a leafy enough face to the canal, but rising above the tree there are occasional glimpses of architectural atrocities make Barad-Dur look like an amusement park. Why does a factor need a fifty foot tall guard tower? Why is that…
After Alan Turing designed a machine to break the Enigma code, the staff at Bletchley Park had around three thousand intercepted German messages a day to deal with. To catalog and organize them in order to extract useful intelligence, they recruited librarians (generally female, as was most of the Bletchley Park staff) from all over the country. That’s right, bitches, WWII was won by a gay guy and a bunch of librarians. OK, there were other people involved, but historians…
The weather was not very good today, but we picked a gap in the drizzle to get down to the point just past the bridge nearest Bletchley Park where we could turn around. The was one lock, with a swing bridge across the middle of it, and a rise of only one foot, which Paula made short work of. There are not many places in the canal wide enough to turn a narrow boat around, and the one we were…