Little More...

Not Made of Sugar

Drenched? I was bloody soaked. Wringing wet like a school blazer floating in the Rochdale canal. It got to the point on Friday where, standing at the tiller steering us towards Kinver, I could actually feel my boots filling with water. If my feet could have imagined they were in a film, it would have been the Posiedon Adventure. Except they, unlike Gene Hackman in his white draylon polo-neck, were making no attempt to escape a total drowning. They just sat there – or stood rather - in my boots, taking it on the chin. As it were.

Despite, or even because of the Biblical flood happening in my footwear, I was having a magical time on this particular morning. The downpour started just as we were queueing to go into the brilliantly named Rocky Lock (I dearly hope it was named for the legendary halfwitted Apollo-Creed-mashing boxing champ rather than the fact hat it had been cut out of some big rocks). The rain was sly at first, spitting little spots when it thought you weren't looking. Then, as if realising it was not getting your attention it intensified a little, rhythmically pressing its weight behind the falling drops before going back to a nonchalant sort of spitting; the rainfall equivalent of a ne'er do well shoving his hands in his pockets and whistling up into the air just after he's scratched someone's car or thrown something at a cat. Instead of ducking inside like a sensible person, I gamely steered the boat into Rocky Lock despite the polite but clearly made protestations of Al who, like a cat, hates to get wet especially if there is a nice dry boat he can sit in. His logic became somewhat less refutable to me as the skies suddenly decided they couldn't be arsed with playing it coy and promptly opened themselves onto our heads. As I stood over the lock, laboriously winding up the paddles for the sluices it occurred to me that I might be drier if I just jumped into the canal. It was far from unpleasant, though, being rained on so hard that my head felt like a keyboard being pressed into service by a champion touch-typist in a bad mood. There was no wind to chill the bones and the water itself was not cold. I quite liked it, it felt a little like being very small again.

Alan on the other hand was not quite getting the same enjoyment from the experience. The rain had soaked his woolly hat so that the usually jaunty pom-poms on it were drooping disappointedly, making the whole hat seem to frown along with its owner. The heavy drippage from his hat, hair, beard, coat and shorts made it look as though Alan was melting like a colourful but despondent snowman. The lock navigated, we only needed one person on deck so I cheerily volunteered to stay out and steer. Alan cheerily went to sit in a nice dry boat.

Then the rain decided it was time to see just how much of itself it could throw at the ground in fifteen minutes. The answer is a shitload. The drops were so big they bounced triumphantly off everything, including the roof of the boat which they thwacked with such relentless sibilant force that they exploded into thousands of tiny droplets several inches above where they landed. The boat developed a three inch thick halo of droplet-mist that blurred its edges making it look like it was in soft focus. Visibility was bad and became decidedly worse when the cheery smoke from the fire that Al was so kindly making inside the boat emerged from the chimney and blew straight into my face. All around me trees were bowed under the weight of the downpour. The rain hit the canal hard too, pocking it with craters that were endlessly renewed before the water surface could heal itself again. I began to feel my jeans being sucked onto my legs, clinging to me, slippery and chilly. It was also about this time I began to feel my boots taking on water like a wrecked ship. No other idiot was standing about in this. Even the ducks were giving any stretch of canal without tree cover a wide berth.

I however was grinning like a happy lunatic. The weather – crappy in the extreme on the one hand – was, on the other hand making the world look gorgeous. The drenched dark green leaf canopy glossy and vibrant, the rain-mist rising around a guelder rose tree, is leaves turning an outrageous autumn red, the silvery canal surface polka dotted with raindrops, the boat looking all shiny and clean for once. It was wonderful.

I think I need to get to a city quick and get a bit of my cynicism back...

Shroppie Fly

So there I was, in the pub toilets, trying to get a bit of peace and calm inside my brain. Could I remember the tune? The words? The noise in the bar area was making it very difficult; sea shanties, jigs and reels, a song about someone's daughter getting into a car with Jimi Hendrix accompanied by one bloke on a zither and another on the spoons. My mum was beside herself. We were all a bit chuffed, actually, about what a top night it was turning out to be. We, that is me, mum, Alan and Dawn had come out to this pub, the Shroppie Fly for their weekly folk session after a lovely day spent walking around the village of Audlem on the Shropshire/Cheshire border. The sun had come out and we and my mum and dad – down for a flying visit – had partaken of the local tea-shop, the local charity shop and the local damsons. Audlem has obviously been hit in the past by some sort of damson-based cluster bomb, there are so many of these bad boys in and around the village that I soon stopped feeling guilty about cramming my bags full of them in a fit of “forager's fever”. (You always get that when you are suddenly faced with a scrumptious great glut of something...there is an odd panic that sets in about getting enough of the wild comestible in question).

Something of the same fever had hit me earlier in the local charity shop. It was a tiny building, all higgledy-piggledy as though a giant baby had constructed it whilst playing stacking with crumbly white play-blocks. It was called “Audlem for Cancer Relief” I think. It was obviously independent but displayed in its window a giant cheque for £20,000; last year's contribution to Cancer Research by the people of this tiny village. This is an incredible sum considering not only the size of Audlem but also the fact that in this miniature Aladdin's cave of trinkets, jam kettles, crockery, clothes and kindly, wizened old ladies (the staff), the judicious punter could walk into the shop as I did, rummage around for a bit and walk out wearing a silk polka-dotted cravat and carrying a set of 6 solid silver soup spoons, a tin opener and a set of camping cutlery all for the princely sum of £1.70. My mum bought two lovely woolly cardigans and a giant suitcase and struggled to break the £3 barrier. One particular Yoda-like lady minding the shop (“Got a good few bits there, you have”) shuffled out from the shadows just as we were leaving and beamed “Come back tomorrow, we are having a sale!”. We did and they were, unbelievably. I couldn't find anything on sale that I needed as badly as a cravat and soup spoons though, but I did manage to walk off with two old mirrors and a 1970s pillar box red sun lounger for free when I passed by later after they were closed and saw them propped up by the bins. I really should go back and make a donation...

So back to the pub. I was a little oiled up on whiskey that night. I'd only had three but that's all it takes to make everything go pleasantly wonky (like the little charity shop!). The warm amber buzz in my veins was mingling nicely with the gentle joie de vivre that a day spent in the sun with loved ones in a small village whose buildings waddle their way round windy streets and damson trees to the water can bring. It was lovely. And then there was the music. Most of it was good, some brilliant. At the beginning of the evening there were five or six musicians sat around the central table playing, then gradually more and more players and singers drifted in with their instruments and their beers. Every song begun was joined by a dozen instruments as soon as the chords became clear and was lifted by a myriad voices at every chorus or refrain. It was wonderful. Not showy, not ponderous, just a lovely easy collaboration. The four of us would drift in and out of conversation as the music dictated; sometimes we'd be silent, lost in a mini-reverie. It was a fantastically relaxing evening. Imagine my irritation, then, when a renegade bit of my brain – a troublemaker from one of the less lazy, bumbly corners of my cranium pipes up and says:

“You going to sing, then?”.

I ignored it. Sometimes the best thing to do if you want a quiet life is ignore the annoying stuff and hope it goes away. It didn't.

“Come on, your mum'd love it. She said as much.”

“Shut up. I am listening to this man singing about his big sailing ship.”

“I know you want to”

“Nope”

“You do. You do, you do, you do,do,do.”

“I do not. Piss off.”

“Come on, you lazy tart, why don't you just do it? S'easy. Do Chastity Belt, they'd love a bit of it.”

“No, I am enjoying myself. I don't need to be involved to have a lovely time (this was true). I don't need the hassle.”

“You're scared, aren't you?”

“Nooooo, (this was untrue) I just don't want the hassle.”

“You should be bloody scared.” Chimed in another bit of my brain, this bit probably lives on its own under a dripping concrete bridge lit by a single street lamp somewhere, “These people are all a lot older than you, they probably know loads of stuff about folk, loads of songs, they'd probably sneer at you, listen to you for half a verse, then judge your voice, choice of song and general cheek to be beyond tolerance and go out and build a big Cheshire-style Wicker Man to burn you and your entire family in”.

“Ha! Ha!” put in the renegade “NOW you're scared!”.

“I am not bloody scared. Shut it both of you. I am going for a slash.”

“We're coming with you”.

That is how I ended up in the toilets of the Shroppie Fly trying to exercise a bit of mental control. By this time, several other bits of my brain had come to join in the debate – like a run on the soap box at Speaker's Corner. The annoying thing was: I knew I would do it. Even though the very thought of going in there, sitting back down at my drink, waiting for a lull between offered songs and then having to gather up all my anxieties, fear and self-consciousness into one bundle, shove it kicking and screaming under the bed in my head, take a deep breath and start singing in front of a room full of strangers, all locals, all of whom had been coming to this folk session for years and who might already have a Wicker Man handily stowed in the boot of the car made me feel sick. But this is the curse of the performer. 49% of your brain votes against doing stuff like this for all of the reasons above (and more). But they are narrowly outvoted by the 51% who love the challenge. Who will do anything for a dare. There is really only a tiny bit of egotism in there really if the truth be told. Most of it is being unable to walk away from the challenge once you've put it in front of yourself. Stage fright is basically the manic, outraged screaming of the 49% who are convinced it would be a Bad Idea. They will stop at nothing to get you not to do it; they will make you sick to your stomach, make you forget the words or the tune of what you were going to do in order to scare you into chickening out, they will convince you of 1001 things that will go wrong, not can, WILL.

But that just makes the 51% even more pig-headed and stubborn.

Defeated by the 51%, me and the 49% trudged back to my seat and took a big w=swig of my whiskey. Then, in the very next lull between tunes, before I had mentioned anything to my companions to warn them, and certainly before the 49% could do anything about it, the 51% opened my mouth and made a loud sound come out. The room turned to watch me in surprise – but it looked like pleased surprise. I found that I was singing a song called “My Grandma Lives on Winson Green”, a Brummie folk song about going out with boys in them days. When I got to the chorus, twenty or more voices joined in; it was like being thrown high in the air from a blanket held by twenty pairs of hands. I finished to loads of applause and cheering, the 51% beaming smugly at the 49% with an “I told you so”. I felt everso chuffed inside. I had another gulp of the amber stuff. It did nothing to calm the burning in my cheeks, ears and tummy even though I was, according to a group of boaters who stopped me outside the paper shop next day to talk to me about it, apparently very calm and professional-looking.

You see, I am no Great Singer. This much is true. But I love giving people a story – to a tune or not – and I am a stubborn cow.

Later that evening they asked for another song from me. I did Chastity Belt. They loved a bit of it.

Three Swims

Last week, moored in Llangollen, I managed to do a bit of wild swimming. I often do a bit of that – some would say ill advisedly – in the ponds on Hampstead Heath and it is the closest thing to having my crumpled brain ironed smooth that I can possibly get. Horseshoe falls in Llangollen is basically a massive weir formed of a great semi-circular pool some 100 meters long and 20 meters in width. It was built, fact fans, by Thomas Telford (the industrial revolution's version of Bob the Builder) in 18-oh-something to keep water from the river Dee flowing into the newly dug Llangollen Canal. We had stopped in a beautiful cutting, framed by rolling meadows with oaks and horse chestnut trees all overlooked by a huge brooding hill, its red stone showing like a fresh cut in its lush green skin. The wounds were in fact 100 years old, made by quarry men plundering this rise and countless others in the area for slate. Heather and gorse coloured the neighbouring hills purple and yellow and the sheep grazed in impossibly green meadows that fell right down to the canal edge. On this dank grey typical summer morning we cycled the two miles from this spot over arse-bruisingly bumpy towpath to the very source of this canal; the River Dee and Horseshoe Falls.

I had gone there intending to swim, but I was in no hurry about it. As Alan got out his book, I sat next to him on a rock as dog-walkers and joggers passed us, not really to take anything in or get a feel of the place – although it was dramatic and beautiful, a deep round valley edged by soft green hills and woodland, the water like a bowl of liquid silver under the grey sky – but because I had that morning noticed that all the Lycra in my costume was shot to buggery and it hung around my bottom like a turkey's neck. I did not particularly wish to share this with the people of North Wales. So I waited for a bit and once the coast was clear I slipped into the water off a huge flat slate rock, smoothed by the thousands of bums that had sat on it over the years.

The river water was cold but invigorating. Now, I know that “invigorating” is one of Those Adjectives. You know the ones, words like “Interesting” or “Informative” that people use instead of saying “more boring than John Major's pants-drawer” or “shite”. However, I must explain that to an outdoor swimmer “Freezing” is of course a given. “Freezing” is what water generally feels like when it has been carelessly left outside somewhere, anywhere, in Britain. But, much as the Eskimos have exactly 91 different words for snow, a wild swimmer (as I rather racily enjoy being called) has approximately 19 different words for freezing*. “Invigorating” is the kind of freezing that puts you on the delicious borderline between surprise and pain. It feels almost unbearably cold for approximately seven and a half seconds and then, just before you give up and get out, your body is flooded with pain killing endorphins in a scrumptious tingly wave that starts at the centre of your body and glows outwards like an explosion of hot chocolate. Most unfortunately, it never quite glows outwards far enough to reach your extremities, and that is why you eventually blunder out of the water, as I did. But not before I had spent 20 minutes or so sending giant bow waves sweeping out and away from my slow breast stroke. The water felt smooth and it lapped languidly against the shores either side of me as I swam. Halfway through the swim, wanting to feel the heady almost-warm sensation of skin that is so much colder than the air, I emerged from the water to explore other areas of entry to the falls. I toddled around bare footed and saggy swimsuited to three other little doorways to the water all beside alder trees, those great water lovers that, like me, see a bit of water and have to put their feet in and have a paddle. I felt like a six year old, inwardly giggling with delight as I managed to clamber down over the giant vein like roots of one alder, some 200 years older than me, into a sandy bottomed hollow filled with tiny fish. Once my hands were yellowed with numbness I climbed out, my whole body feeling like a giant menthol sweet - all tingly and numb - and cycled into Llangollen to reward and rewarm myself with a hot chocolate in the overpriced tea rooms.

The following morning brought summer along with it and my second swim was in the golden heat of the day. The sunlight showed the water to be clear and deep, the colour of black tea and full – so the local fishing-mad teens told me – of trout and chub. I went in by the 200 year old alder, wading first to enjoy the silky river sand between my toes and then, once I had done enough gasping and fannying about in the excitement and dread of the shoulders going in and being glooped over with icy water, I dived in. I swam across the weir this time to a little island in its cente and waded out onto it in the shade of a massive old oak. The land was planted with crops – brassicas I think, cabbagey anyway – and the summery sounds of distant voices and running water were punctuated at times by the hoot of the old steam engine taking people to and fro in the woodlands beyond the falls. The water looked too delicious on this hot day to stay out of it for long so I ran for it and whooshed and whooped my way back in. The sun exploded off the water in hundreds of tiny diamonds as I disturbed the surface and it moved beneath me, slowly but with considerable force towards the edge of the weir. It was like swimming in a brimming teacup. Since this tea was pretty damn far from piping hot however, I got out and had to have my useless hands warmed by Alan. It was 20 minutes before they got their colour back. I then put them to good use shoving cake and pork pie into my mouth as a reward for my hard-as-nails-ness.

The next day – our last in Llangollen – and I was in a stinking mood. The weather had gone totally shite again after getting us all excited the day before, and we had been in the valley long enough for the hills which once had rolled passed jollily to begin seriously now to loom. The sky was grey as week-old porridge and the wind was brutal. Alan got it into his head that what I really needed to cheer me up was to strip down to a wrinkly cossie in these Arctic conditions and go for a dip in cold water. Outside. Now of course I know this is exactly what I had done on the previous two days, and I have sat here describing it to you in all nice flowery language. And of course I knew that once I was in it would be more like a bracing experience than a deeply unpleasant one. So of course, I know – and knew at the time – that Alan was in fact right. But I had a cob on, so was buggered if I was going to admit it. So I moaned and moped about until eventually he did something which I suspect he began immediately to regret. He said “I'll come in with you”.

Off we cycled, then. On the bank as we gingerly peeled back layers of protective woolly clothing (August – I mean, really!) and squinted against the wind, I had a sudden image of the sign pinned to the noticeboard at Hampstead Ladies' Pond; a sign that you read diligently the first time you go and then nonchalantly ignore completely on subsequent visits. The sign says “Warning! Cold water immersion shock can KILL!!!!” The exclamation marks and capitals are probably mine, but that is basically what the sign says. It goes on to explain that if you have not done a bit of gradual acclimatisation, the shock of really cold water can send you into spontaneous cardiac arrest. As Alan got down to his trunks it struck me that although he is a strong man and no way weedy, I have in fact seen more fat on a chip. There would be no subcutaneous blanket-layer protecting him from the ill effects of the “invigorating” water. He had done no acclimatisation as I had in my two previous swims at the Falls and plenty of others this year in ponds and on beaches in all weathers. Jesus Christ, he was shivering in the wind already and he was bone dry. I suddenly began to get the fear that he would be “invigorated” to death. Valiantly he pinned his long dark hair up into a top knot that made him look like a samurai warrior in Bermuda trunks and grinned not all convincingly. I couldn't watch. I went in off the slate rock and made encouraging noises as he began to stride into the cold black iced-tea doing a passable impression of a rabbit staring confidently into a set of headlights. The fact that he, in his words “allowed myself to fall in” probably saved him a great deal of prolonged discomfort in the long run and he instead went straight into the watery world of pain that accompanies an incredibly, unbearably cold swim. Gamely he swam out from the bank, but his lips had turned blue by about two minutes in. We swam to the island of cabbages and squatted in the silty mud, still in the water, while Alan's conscious mind caught lazily up with his outraged body across the water. “You alright?” I asked, pointlessly. “Yeah” came the vague reply. This was total bollocks. The man was in pain, clearly. But was he in “Cold water immersion shock can KILL!!!!” pain? He had certainly gone white. And his breath was laboured after a bit of exertion that would not usually tax him, he is pretty fit. I decided I might have had a hand in killing my boyfriend just because I had woken up with a it of a mardy arse that morning. “Think I'm gonna swim back and get out” he said, although from his cold-benumbed lips it came out more like “Finb iyb unna swimmack an geddowd”. OK matey, I thought, I am not going to leave your side just in case you spontaneously carp it. I had done my Lifesaver badge at Guides, so I was pretty sure I could make an attempt at pulling him out with only a moderate risk of drowning us both. Alan climbed out of the water and stayed motionless, wrapped in a towel for some time; a postiton he would mimic throughout the rest of the day wrapped in various thick garments as his body warmed and is brain very slowly thawed. I stayed in for a bit, at eye level with the ducks and damselflies, marvelling with them at what a difference a little cold water acclimatisation and a subcutaneous layer of pork pies can make to a wild swim.

*Actually, there are 20 Wild Swimmer terms for “Freezing” . Here they are:

Invigorating

Bracing

Tingly

Brisk

Luke-cold

Warm (i.e. only cold-ish)

Icy

Cold as the bloody tomb

Arse-burningly cold

Numb-lestiltskin

Frigging Arctic

Spiny

Spirit crushingly cold

Hypothermic

Suicidally cold

Nippy (what a swimmer will say about “Suicidally cold” water to someone watching from land)

Scrotum-tightening (ladies are also permitted to use this term)

Eyeball shattering

Not too bad ('aaargh, this hurts so much!')

Ooh! (actually almost warm)

Hairy Shower (and Post Tunnel Stress Disorder)

Alan is busy cleaning the hairs out of our shower pump.  Apparently it is a “Man's Job” (his words, not mine), so I thought I would use the time to tell you all about our brush with Post Tunnel Stress Disorder. This is where we went all clumsy and giddy after having a near miss in a one mile long tunnel and I ended up in the minor injuries unit of Northwich Hospital.

I'd better let you know in advance that we are both alright. Not even a bruise to the upper arm sustained between us.

We have 'done' three tunnels; the Preston Brook Tunnel, Saltersford and Barnton Tunnels, all of which are in Cheshire, which is a gorgeous county, heretofore unknown to me. (I love the word 'heretofore', it makes you sound like a twitarse but it tumbles around in the mouth deliciously like a just-bitten-into chocolate digestive). These tunnels are long and narrow and pitch black and after 25 minutes splishing about in one, the Freudian connotations were not lost on me, no. It was in the second of these tunnels that the bikes on our boat's roof got caught up in what can only be described as the ceiling undulations. Quick-thinking Al slammed the boat into reverse as the bikes crunched their way between the stone ceiling and the roof of our boat. After a sickening wait, they finally ended up teetering over the edge of the handrails like two lemmings that had suddenly thought “We don't have to do this, do we?”. I walked down the side of the boat (only two inches wide, thrills-and-spills-fans) in the dark with the boat now free to float the half metre towards the side wall and crush me. Al's arms were acting as a strut. After close inspection I decided that we might well be fucked. There was no way we could reverse out of the tunnel. We were stuck. So Alan went down the side while I took over strut-responsibilities and after much faffing and fiddling managed to get his bike off the top and here's the impressive bit: one hand holding him onto the side of the boat, the other hand dangling his bike free of the boat and over the canal-water he walks backwards on a two inch wide rail and hands me the bicycle. I thought: Things might be looking up. Unfortunately, just as I thought that, my own bike groaned and unceremoniously plopped into the black waters of the canal. “Shit. Shit”. These last expletives from Alan who never usually swears.

In this moment, I was reminded of how in the previous tunnel I had handed steering duties over to Al when we were ¾ of the way through so that I could look back at where we came in. Everything was black save a little bright green arch gleaming like an emerald ¾ of a mile back and I was busy imagining an out of body experience (“Come to the Light, come to the light” and all that) when I looked round and saw Al's face reflected in the green light of the leisure battery charger. The black waters, the green face, the light ever receding and the ominous swirly watery sound made me suddenly feel like that bloke Orpheus who gets taken by the devil's boatman over the river Styx to the bloody Undeworld. Spooked myself, didn't I?

So when I saw my knackered but beloved bike of 12 years sinking into the black waters of doom I was not only a bit miffed but filled with dread. This was quite bad. We could now not move at all since the bike would damage our propeller and that of anyone who came through behind us. I was beginning to not like this tunnel. But I was beginning to appreciate my boyfriend in a not wholly new, but nevertheless highly pleasing way when he then said “I'll just pole it out”. Steady now. What he did was get the boat hook and, with my verbal guidance (a bit like the Crystal Maze but more dangerous) found the bike in the Death-Black-Hades-Water, hooked it and lifted it - one handed remember, he was holding himself up with the other – dripping like a new born er, bike out of the canal. What a hero. Then he went all funny with the stress and that, so I had do navigate us through that and a third narrow, dark, dread-tunnel.

It was when we got out of the third tunnel that the stress of concentration pulled the plug on my sensibleness and I hit my ankle bone on the cog of Alan's bike. This would've been OK had I not hit a vein – a non-major one thankfully but still with the force of my heart behind it. It was a tiny cut but it spurted claret like a wine taster enjoying a very funny but ill timed joke. It then immediately clotted and the vein began to swell like it was pooling blood. It got to the size of a gobby* before I had to sit down. Then it began seriously to hurt. So that is how we ended up at the Minor Injuries unit. No harm done, I was checked over and told it would really hurt for a bit. It does.   But that cannot dull my enjoyment of Cheshire and the intermittent but happily throbbing sunshine as we chug off the Trent and Mersey canal and onto the Shropshire Union in our pursuit of a Welsh August.

I haven't told you about dalmatian man, have I.....?

* for those as bemused as the nurse at NHS Direct, it is a large marble.  Not as big as a Queenie, but bigger than an ordinary one.

Where Have All the Cardboard Boxes Gone?

They used to be all over the floor by the tills of the local Co-op when I was little.  You can't get 'em for love nor money now.  Well, I tell a lie actually, Argos are selling them would you believe so you can get them for money.  I only want them for packing though.

Here's a fact: I know bugger all about boats.  Al and me have decided to move onto one anyway, though.  Little More is the 38 foot long, 6 foot 10 wide result of a half forgotten conversation in 2006.  We weren't drunk.  We said something about how we'd love to spend a summer and autumn travelling round the UK but that by the Autumn it might get a bit too nippy for that sort of malarkey.  We didn't want to use road transport, what with it being evil and that, so assumed we'd be walking and using the train, then camping to save cash.  But the thing about Britain is, it ain't southern Europe is it?  Too chilly come late September to be leaning out of the awning of a tiny lightweight tent in the brass-monkey-bluster to heat up a tin of beans.  Bloody miserable, in fact.  Hence the genius idea to bugger the tent and get another form of accommodation that you take with you - a narrowboat.  They're economical to run and there's no danger of taking a wrong turning and ending up on some godforsaken A road (hopefully).  I won't bore you with the fretful financial considerations because frankly they are none of your business but suffice to say, after a lot of stress and faff, on Monday (4 days from now) we move out of our flat, somebody else moves in and we take a small amount of stuff up to the Calder and Hebble navigation in West Yorkshire to move on to our boat for a bit.

The bit is anything from 4 days (if it keeps raining like it has been) to 4 months.

If you want to know how it's going, come back and I'll be telling you...