Little More...

Chuffin' Engine Guffin'

I just went into the One-Stop Shop in Hockley Heath, a car-fugged district in rural Warwickshire, just spitting distance from Birmingham. After wandering the aisles in careful deliberation I settled on a colourful corner shop trio of comestibles: one stalk of broccoli, a packet of McCoy's Flame Grilled Steak flavour crisps and some Utterly Butterly. Commenting on this eclectic selection of shopping to the nice check out lady, she leaned over to me and said, in only mildly hushed Brummagem tones; “It's when they come in late at night and ask for a packet of plasters, some condoms and an energy drink that I don't know where to put myself!”.

All human life is here.

Speaking of One Stop, we are bloody Thrice Stopped, aren't we? Not content with getting a pampering at a River Avon boatyard for a week this month, plus a two day stop at Bidford-on-Avon while we fiddled with her plumbing, the boat began shuddering, juddering, coughing black smoke and cutting out on us early this morning. So we have pulled it by hand to the nearest boat yard, backwards, and there is a nice man taking a look at it right now. Lets hope it is one of the lesser, not one of the graver things he has hazarded that it might be. I am going to go before I depress myself with my own black-doom-speculations.

Remember: plasters, condoms and an energy drink. You would not starve, be bored or bleed to death, would you?

Brass Monkeys

At the first grey light of dawn, we are usually snoring our heads off (well Alan is). Either that or rolling over blearily in the bed-warmth, fighting the first dawning realisation, deep in or sleep-swaddled subconscious, that we need a wee. Then, at around eight, I suppose, or just before, one or both of us will wake up. On clear mornings, the air will be crisp as a newly scrumped apple and there will be a mist curling in lazy clouds off the surface of the canal. The tips of the birches and alders will just be catching the first of the sun and moorhens will be tunefully clearing their throats. Our breaths will hang in front of us like a sleep mist. It will be fully half an hour before one of us is brave (or full-bladdered enough) to brave the “invigorating”* air on the other side of the duvet and actually get out of bed. Usually it is me.

As I believe I have mentioned previously, I favour the time-honoured “wrestle with some warm clothes under the duvet” method of arming yourself against the cold before I set even a toe into the chilled air.

Once up and divested of wee, I wobble my way uncertainly along the rocking boat on half asleep feet. I am heading straight for the little stove at the bow-end where I will sweep out last nights ashes and construct an amateurish but jolly fire out of screwed up newspaper, kindling wood and one big log sawed by Al from a larger lump of wood found somewhere on the canal in the days previously. Then I will put the kettle on. Returning to the stove, I will find that it has gone out. Or, if I have been remotely skilful, that it has burnt up all its fuel already and is spitting and smouldering at me, consedcendingly. I will take this personally, and will either feel defeated at this point or bloody stubborn, depending on how much of me has begun to shrivel up and turn blue with cold. Bunging another load of wood on and jiggling various bits of metal that look like handles, I will hear the kettle boiling and slope off sleepily to make a cup of tea or, “Life Giving Brew of the Gods” as my dad calls it.

It always works. Once a bit of the wondrous amber liquid hits my brain, my synapses giggle themselves awake and spring up out of their slumber like I never have. One message will travel slowly but determinedly to the front of my head; “air flow”, it will say. I ignore it. It is too comfy slumping against the kitchen counter, burying my face in the miasma of hot tea fumes rising from my mug and peering out at the sparkling morning through the little jewels of condensation on the window; made of all the out breaths Alan and I did in the cold night.

“Air flow”, it says again.

“Brrr” I think, and take another mouthful of tea.

It is amazing just how stupid I can be in the morning, or when I am half asleep. Last night, very late, blundering around in the bathroom I dropped my silver ring – the one Alan gave me to wear on my wedding finger seven years ago – merely in the act of taking it off. This was stupid enough. But after failing to find it on the floor, my half-asleep brain decided that I had definitely dropped it down the toilet. This was a fairly Sherlock-Holmsey conclusion to come to since it really didn't seem to be anywhere else in the tiny room. I went to bed, nightmared at the thought of donning a pair of leaky marigolds and fishing around in the brimming tank of steaming gunk for my ring. Thankfully Alan found it next morning wedged down the back of the loo. The point is, since Alan is the very worst looker-for-things in the known universe, then it follows that if he can find something that I can't, then I am a numpty.

I wasn't thinking about this as I leaned up against the kitchen counter, imbibing tea, of course, because it hadn't happened yet. But I was vaguely aware that I was missing something.

“Air flow”.

I shivered with cold and took another gulp of tea. Then I realised. I went and let some air into the fire. It sprang into life.

This is the point where Alan gets up. If we are feeling very brave we will go outside for breakfast. Some of these October mornings have been clear and golden with sun which keeps you quite warm, provided that you have seven layers of wool on. If it is a fire-worthy morning though, then it is probably too cold to even put your imagination outside, so we concentrate our minds on porridge. This has the added bonus of diverting our attention from the impending torture of the shower. The October shower is capable of ruining even the sunniest morning. It is a tiny thing, more like a narrow shoe box upended and covered in tiles whose chief purpose in life is to deny the existence of warm air. Even if you ran scalding hot water into the cubicle for an hour, these tiles would not heat up one iota. I like to think of them as stubborn tiles, invested with misanthropy and spite. The problem is that once you have braved the biting air and taken your clothes off in order to stand under the shower head and present bits of your body to the dribble of piping hot water, you are very unlikely to escape the shower without having also presented at least a portion of shoulder, upper arm or arse to the stinging surface of the tiles. One particularly cold mornings I have taken care to extract my bum cheek very slowly from this wall of ice lest the skin has frozen to it.

Once I find the gumption to turn the hot tap off, I stand still for a minute or two, unable to believe how cold I am, before stepping out to dry myself in the billowing guffs of steam rising from my body and taking the last vestiges of shower-warmth with it.

It is October. Our trip has now extended into December. I will let you which bit of me drops off with cold first.

* For those seeking a full list of euphemisms for “freezing”, please refer to the blog entry “Three Swims”

Broken Boat? Never mind, have an Apple.

Bloody-broken-engine-one-week-laid-up-then-sodding-calorifier-plays-up-delayed-no-power-flipping-crappy-frustrating-tedious-shite.

Right, that's dealt with the last week or so, now onto apple-ier matters.

I bloody love apples. Can't get enough of the buggers. Red ones, green ones, even the borderline-brown ones that people try to glamorise by dubbing 'russets', I'll eat the hell out of all of them. At the height of my apple habit a couple of years ago I was on four a day. Doctor away? He was on indefinite leave. This is a brilliant time of year for the apple junkie. Especially if you happen to be travelling around rural England and have a long crooked stick and a big bag handy. Al and I have not bought a single apple since late August. And for almost two months our boat has been overtaken by a variety of apple communities which have sprung up in various receptacles all over the place: crab apples spilling out of casserole dishes, little red ones - plucked from the canal side in Kidderminster - sitting jauntily in a bowl on the table, a party of windfall Bramleys from three different villages stacked wobblingly in a salad bowl on the kitchen counter. We've made crab apple jelly, stewed apples, baked apples, apple cobblers and crumbles, and have troughed our way through scores of spicy-sweet 'eaters'. Its amazing, once you get out of the city England is one big Apple Theme Park. If Eve had lived in central England there would have been so many apples she was allowed to eat, she wouldn't have bothered with the forbidden one.

Now lets be clear, Aan and I haven't had to scrump one piece of fruit. There are plenty of wild crab trees and self-seeded domestic apple trees sprung from a discarded core, plus houses outside which sit boxes of windfalls with signs saying “Take as many as you would like” (I'd like a lot, please), so we have felt no temptation to pilfer. No countryside walk is complete, it seems, without an apple-haul of one kind or another.

The other day we went for a short walk that became both very lengthy and, frankly, apple-tastic. We were in Bidford-on-Avon. It was Sunday afternoon and I had fallen into a sticky mood. With about two and a half hours of daylight remaining we thought a short stroll would loosen the gloop in our heads. In the hazy autumn light, we left the river and set off along the blackberry and sloe bushes towards Marcliff. We trudged over wheat fields, bare of their crops now and roughly ploughed so that each looked like the top of a giant chocolate rock cake. We passed hawthorn hedges bright with flaming berries, and came to an opening in a long row of Lombardy poplars – like a gap in a row of giant green teeth – behind which nestled England's neatest graveyard. Across the road was a pub. This looked like as good a destination as any. Suddenly parched, we crossed the road and tried the door. Closed. For another two and a half hours. No bother, we thought to ourselves, we'll just walk around for a bit. On the way out I noticed that the pub had a quince bush growing outside. I have been looking for two or three years for some quince to make jam out of. I eyed them jealously, noticing a few windfalls at the bottom...

We carried on with our stroll, knowing that if we stayed out long enough for a pint we would be walking home in the pitch dark. Undeterred, since night-time cross-country walking has become something of a hobby of late, we crunched on through the crisp leaves and eventually came to a wathe of heavily fruiting apple trees. It looked like a sort of ramshackle orchard where the trees – all wizened and gnarled – grew in lazy lines as though they had given up standing to attention a long time ago. Amidst them were three people; a man and a woman, about my parents' age, and a small girl. The man wore friendly fading blue clothes and a broad smile on his wind polished face. His head was bald and round, and his cheeks were rosy. He looked like he could've fallen from one of the trees. Around his waist he wore a thick rope with a large wicker basket fastened to it. As we approached him, our path was blocked by a rusty trolley stacked high with pallets of delicious looking rosy apples.

Trying very hard not to leer with greed, I called over to him:

“Are these your trees?”

I mean, it was blindingly obvious these where his trees, but I was faintly optimistic that it might be an abandoned orchard and that I could therefore rush in like a rabid Supermarket Sweep contestant, shoving apples into my mouth, pockets and bag.

“Yes, they're mine. I'm just picking a few.”

A few? He had loads in the trolley and on the trees there were hundreds more. If I had this any apples, I would build a big barn and fill it with tonnes of them so that I could roll around and sleep on them.

“What variety are they?”

Variety. Hah, get me. Like I know anything about apples, except that I like to eat shitloads of them.

“Oh Blenheims, Cox, a few Bramleys. Pick one if you want.”

Instantly, and with some passion, I realised that I loved this man. I sauntered over, trying to control my mouth which was practically swimming in drool.

He asked what my favourite apple type was. “Crisp and crunchy” I told him, “sweet but with a tart undercurrent that makes your face go like this - ”. I made a face like someone being told they have to lick their gym teacher's ear.

“You'll like these then”

He took me over to a Blenheim tree. Clambering high up a thin ladder placed at what I would call a suicidal angle against the springy outermost branches, he picked me one. I bit into it immediately. It was perfect, sweet and sharp with a strange but lovely after-taste of custard (I am the Jilly Goulden of apples, me).

“This one wants chucking though. Look. Bit of apple scab.”

He passed me one with a small furry cut in an X shape on its side. I pocketed it. I couldn't throw it away. There was more delicious apple than there was scab. It turned out his grandfather had planted the orchard 120 years before. Lucky for him. Why didn't my grandfather plant an orchard for me? Granted, he was probably rather busy having his 11 kids and it can't be easy for a JCB driver in central Birmingham to acquire a bit of land for an orchard but nevertheless...

Eventually, bidding our lucky man goodbye, we continued our long walk through the Warwickshire countryside, munching apples and waiting for the pub to open. We loaded up our pockets on the way from two boxes of unwanted windfall Bramleys in Marcliff and walked back on ourselves along a three mile bridleway as darkness fell.

Once inside the pub I grinned winningly at the landlord.

“I like your quince bush outside.”

I adjusted my jacket guiltily – among the Bramleys there were five or six quince I had picked up off the floor around the bush.

“They're quince are they? Take as many as you want, I don't like 'em.”

Glory be. I ordered a cider and toasted the generous fruit tree owners of this land. Later, I happily wobbled my way home with Alan in the eerie dark.

My boat stinks of apples now.

Bit of a Fiddle Near Tiddle Widdle

Dry land, ah, dry land. 'Tis a strange and wondrous thing; it's solid, predictable, unflinching, it doesn't lurch under you like a pair of rheumatic knees. After three solid months of living with the kind of floor you might, if you were Enid Blyton, describe as “jaunty”, dry land is a novel experience; when I stand in the shower, eyes closed against the shampoo suds, I sway like a melancholy guest at a wedding disco.

The particular bit of dry land I am currently wobbling on happens to be in London, where I am waiting out the repair of my damaged boat. It all began last Tuesday when our old friend Alec (or “Mr. Jinxed” as we prefer now to call him) came aboard for a couple of days' cruising and fishing on the Avon. Leaving Pershore on a warm, sluggishly misty morning, we wound our contented way upriver through the village of Wyre Piddle, to which I might have awarded the Avon leg's title of Most Ridiculously Named Place were it not for the fact that there happens to be somewhere called Tiddle Widdle Island nearby. We made a leisurely chug past both these daftly named places, gliding between sturdy alders and crack willows festooned with debris from the floods of a couple of months before: Straw and weeds, the odd ripped shirt, even a wooden pelmet with curtains still attached dangled gaily from the high branches to which the swelling waters had lifted them, like the remnants of some giant party that had got out of hand. All was quiet now though; it was dry, with no breath of wind to be felt and the sky, gunmetal grey and austere, belied the relaxed, muggy warmth of the late morning. One or two dragonflies danced lazily to and fro, dipping in and out of the thermals. High in an old, gnarled alder two cormorants kept silent watch over the clear, slow moving river.

It was at this point that I noticed the smoke.

It seemed innocuous enough; all exhausts belch a bit of smoke – it's their raison d'etre isn't it? This was a little blue-er than normal, yes, and it was accompanied by a slightly acrid smell, granted, but the odour teased rather than assaulted the nostrils and I was feeling so relaxed as I sat on the roof with a mug of tea, I though it hardly worth mentioning.

“Bit o'smoke” I pointed out, helpfully.

“Mmm”.

Clearly, Al was unworried or else as lulled by the warm, close morning as I was. All tranquillity evaporated, however, when the floor started smoking as well. It rose from beneath Al and Alec's feet in a thick, white cloud, like a bilious belch from Beelzebub.

“Floor's smoking” I pointed out, accurately.

“Shit” agreed Al.

We cut the engine. This puts you in a tricky position on a river since it doesn't mean you are ever going to actually stop. The three of us grinned idiotically at each other in an effort to keep one another calm as we began to drift slowly, but inexorably, backwards and sidewards whilst our home continued to guff out white smoke in great clouds which hung almost sarcastically over the water in the still air. A quick and none-too-confident peek under the floor panels confirmed; via smell, sight and the wall of hot air that hit the face like a slab when the panels were lifted; that we had overheated. There was nowhere to moor even if we could have moved, this being a river with no towpath. The sole choice we had - since we were too skint to have the option of panicking and calling out a recovery service - was to sit on the river and wait for some kind soul to chug along and agree to tow us and our flatulent boat to safety.

Luckily it wasn't long before someone did and we found ourselves below Fladbury Locks wondering where the nearest shop was – we knew this might be a long stoppage and we were perilously low on tea bags. Al cycled off to the shops, Alec did a bit of fishing and I sat down to fret. Try as I might though, I couldn't. It was too lovely; the river burst down past the lock over a weir, babbling with effervescence past a beautiful old mill. Fishermen waded out to try for perch and eels in the fast water. The sun came out and warmed the concrete siding we were sitting on and it struck me that this was not such a bad place to be stuck really.

Bloody good job then because 24 hours later we were still there. We had pulled the boat through the locks on ropes and moored up on a pontoon facing some impossibly posh houses whose back gardens sidled nonchalantly (and a little smugly, I thought) down to the river. The sun had come out again and the view from above the lock brought the first real sight of autumn leaf colours in the woods just distant. After a good brekkie and the obligatory two cuppas, we felt a little devil-may-care and decided to try strike out for Sankey Marine Boatyard, a not unambitious four miles away. The plan was to take it very slowly and cut the engine if it got overheated; we had some water at hand to pour over it if it got too hot. It might not work but, hell, the sun was out, we were young and thrusting, the whole world looked shiny as a newly Brasso'd tiller and we had plenty of teabags. We set off, morale and optimism soaring high.

It was with some deflation of spirits then that, less than 300 metres later, we realised that if the top of your engine can boil cold water on contact, you were buggered. There was no going anywhere for the forseeable and we knew we would have to moor up gracelessly on the nearest bit of bank we could reach. However we were damned if we were going to do that before lunch. Thus, in what I like to think was an act of gentle defiance in the face of our ridiculous predicament, we had a very civilised floating picnic lunch on the roof of our stricken boat in full view of the slightly puzzled golfers on Fladbury Golf Course. It was a bit like that string quartet playing on the deck of the Titanic as it sank. But with nice cheese.

Eventually we made our ungainly approach to the bank and tied up around a crack willow. It was only another 24 hours before we got a tow to the boatyard at Evesham from a jolly septuagenarian couple with a tiny (and very cute) aluminium boat called Dulcibella. It could have been a drag, but it wasn't. Boaters are very nice on the whole, you see. And the sun was still shining.

Up Creek, No Paddle

It comes to something when you are being overtaken by a floating leaf. It is a tad more galling than that even, if both you and the leaf are going backwards. Such was our predicament today when, shortly after the white smoke guffed out of our exhaust, we looked down at the water we'd poured onto the overheated engine, saw that it was indeed boiling and decided to stop. We are, in common parlance, stuck as a truck up a duck. I must go as the electric is, consequently, low. Fortunately the teabags aren't...

Don't Feed Me To No Swans, Lord...

The swans are coming. It is 9.30 and despite the autumnal chill Kate, who stayed with us last night, has opened the bow doors to the morning. This seems to be something of a universal swan-summoning signal. In much the same way as my dad lighting a fag at a bus stop causes three buses immediately to arrive, so opening a door on any floating craft magnetizes nearby swans and makes them stick to the side of it. What do they want? Food? I have heard that a swan's beak could break a man's arm, so I bloody hope they aren't partial to humans. They are leering at me and making an ominous grunting noise and seem happy to have a nibble at virtually anything: the other morning a group of swans actually tried to eat the side of my boat, their beaks making a disturbingly plasticky sound as they attempted to peck a nice morsel of metal out of the hull.

We are on the river Avon now, having just tooled down about twenty five miles worth of river Severn. River travelling is quite different from being on the canal. For a start, you can go a lot faster if you're travelling downstream; Alan and I were nudging 7mph on the Severn, just for the thrills. It was a bit scary, actually, especially when we wanted the boat to stop and the river didn't. We had to sort that one out between us; it was messy, but the river lost - eventually. When you moor up on a river - assuming you manage to execute a stop without executing yourself – you can only do it at a designated mooring, unlike on a canal where you can go pretty much anywhere. Sometimes there are bits of bank helpfully concreted over for extra boat-scratchiness to moor at, or failing that there are pontoons, which are bits of B&Q decking loosely anchored to the sandy river bed with lengths of dental floss. On a windy night these give you all the reassurance of a piggy back from a pissed-up uncle.

A few days ago – our last day on the Severn – we went walking up the Malvern Hills. This is the latest in a string of Midlands landmarks, fixed in my childhood memory like map pins, that we have travelled past in the last month. They are a ridge of very high hills that look like the lumpy spine of some dinosaur sleeping in the bed of the Worcestershire valley. My family and I would go there for the odd day out in the summer holidays. Like all of the West Midlands, the soil is red and sandy, falling away from your feet in loose, grainy swathes as you walk. Pretty tricky if you are climbing uphill. It was fortunate, then, that Al and I had a massive forest of ferns to hike through on our way to finding the actual walking path because when you are lost on a precipitous incline it is useful to have something to hold the soil together a bit. Luckily the path found us and we made it to the top. On the ridge you can walk over the peaks of the literally several hills that constitute the dinosaur's great hide and gaze Westward over the valley over to Wales and the Black Mountains. Or, if you are a romantic like me, East towards Birmingham.

After a lunch-pudding of stale banana loaf soaked in hot custard from an aged Thermos and a long smug look at the mad para gliders leaping off the hill, we set off downhill without bothering to look at the map. Now this last point is essential to any water gypsy wanting to Find Interesting Things. The para gliders might have been throwing themselves off a cliff with only a giant kite for company, but we were throwing ourselves bodily into the arms of Providence. Luckily, Providence was in a good mood and caught us, depositing us by way of a wooded descent next to a cluster of houses that looked like they had been a bit ramshackle before posh people put uPVC porches on them. One of the buildings was a bit shabbier than the others so Al and I ambled over to that one. It looked like a large and once sumptuous public loo form the 1920s, thanks in part to the red tiled floor and the sound of running water echoing from within it. With a knowing wink at Providence, who sloped off to decide how to deal with the mad para gliders, we went inside for a look-ie. It wasn't a loo, but neither was it immediately apparent what it was. The entrance was large and cold, and a plastic pipe extruded from the far wall gushing water into the sort of old chipped crock basin that would fetch a tidy sum on Cash in the Attic.* A few old plastic cups with fading jaunty prints stood in the niche in the wall next to the pipe. It was a spring, and by the looks of it, this building had housed it for quite a long time.

Next to this little hall, there was an equally tiny room with a small window and a fireplace which had clearly not seen a fire in decades but was nevertheless aflame with a giant bunch of red and yellow flowers; chrysanthemums and gladioli; sitting in a vase on the hearth. All around it were placed notes, flowers, icons, stones, pine cones, shells, glass beads. Fixed to the wall above the mantelpiece were four laminated poems written by a woman for her brother. He had evidently died suddenly some years ago, but had loved to visit the spring with his sister. On the windowsill amidst a pageant of trinkets, one square of white card urged people to drink the water and to have a nice life. Another simply said “Barbara, words cannot express how I am feeling today. Love, Your Mom”. There was something so simple and human about that that I stood quietly for a long time after reading it. This room was tiny and hummed with stillness, the unsaid thoughts of the people who had left offerings and words seemed to hang in the air like a scent. It was in stark contrast to the lively, energetic bubbling of the spring next door, and it seemed that the room was almost protective of its offerings; still, peaceful. Back in the hallway, Al and I filled our water bottle at the spring and drank deeply. It felt like an acknowledgement of sorts.

Outside, a notice was tied to a lamp post announcing that planning permission had been sought to re-instate the water bottling plant on the site. If you fancy some Malvern Spring water, though, I recommend coming to the spring itself. It's further than the supermarket, but the view is nicer.

*(We had one when I was a kid – a cracked off-white thing that was deep and thick, and it took all the heat out of the water my mum would boil for my morning swill. Me and my sis were so excited when we got our posh new stainless steel one...innocent days, eh?)

Two Hours in Kidderminster

I am sitting underneath a pair of knickers. We have just done our washing at the local launderette in Kidderminster and hung it up to dry in the boat. Now before you get carried away imagining a neatly stacked clothes horse rising elegantly from the floor in all its concertina glory, I am going to have to disappoint. Wash day on Little More is about as tidy and elegant as a drunkard on a bouncy castle. You don't get two duvet covers, assorted towels and sheets, T-shirts and jeans and the aforementioned pants dry on a single clothes horse. Nah, you're going to want some string: tie it to the hand rails outside and run it longways along the inside of the boat, securing it on the handrails right out at the other end. Zig zag it through windows so it cuts across the kitchen and living room. Keep going until you run out either of space, string or the will to live, leaving the boat looking a little like seven balls of string are in the throes of a particularly intense and satisfying string-orgy. Then hang stuff off it (it likes that, the kinky string) and sit outside for two days and wait for it to dry. Or, if it is raining, crumple yourself up tiny and sit inside underneath something small that your head won't keep bashing. Like a pair of knickers.

Some would say that this sounds a bit more trouble than its worth. I say to them: you haven't sniffed us after three weeks without a launderette, mate.

Anyway, we're off; Kidderminster is a town ruined by roads. It looks like a large animal with its entrails hanging out. The people all sound like me and are very friendly – especially the lady in the “Forest Wash” laundrette, an establishment jauntily hung with all manner of plastic vegetation, principally ivy. I half expected the band Tight Fit to burst out of the staff room to sing The Lion Sleeps Tonight as our socks rotated in rhythm. I was very tempted to wait it out and see if they did; I have a bit of a thing about launderettes that I may or may not write about sometime. It's not a problem or anything.

Loads of beards here too...

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...

Any Country Lane

Walking along a country lane in north Staffordshire yesterday morning, I was confronted with a shocking sight. It was a bright, shiny morning with a glimmering promise of afternoon heat in the September sky and the smell of newly cut hedgerow tickled our nostrils awake. We were on our way, on foot, to the town of Newport in Shropshire about 5 miles away to get a new handlebar stem for Alan's bicycle. The old one had met is end in a lock gate out of Audlem a few days earlier: I had been bleary eyed and at the tiller when, uncharacteristically, I had failed to pull off one of my legendarily smooth virtuoso-lock-entrances and clipped the side of the boat just enough to cause the bikes to grind across the roof. Their groans sounded like a metallic cry of “Oh no, not again”, briskly ended by a nice clean “snap” as Alan's handlebars were unfussily decapitated from their frame.

So we were bikeless this particular morning, and padding along a country lane, eating damsons off the trees, feeling a bit like two of the Famous Five in an Enid Blyton book. Then suddenly up ahead I see what I take, naturally, to be a small bear trying to nose its way into a hedgerow. I put on my glasses. It still looked like a small bear; big, broad furry arse, stocky legs and blunt ended paws with generously sized claws. And it still looked as though it were trying to force its way into the ground below the hedgerow. This is a strange thing for any bear to be doing, granted, especially since this particular bear seemed to have temporarily forgotten that its best burrowing tools were its flat, clawed paws and seemed instead to be attempting to dig using the top of its head. The bear appeared to be somehow levitating its hind legs above the ground, and was holding this unlikely position with such poise and skill that I could see no movement coming from it at all, not even breathing. The bear was dead. No wonder it hadn't scuttled off in fright as Alan and I crunched our was down the gravelled road towards it. Two more steps and I could see that it wasn't a bear at all. Of course, all along I had known that it wasn't a bear, but seeing the white and black stripes on the head of this thickly furred, stocky, dark brown creature made what I was seeing become suddenly real, like that feeling just at the top of a roller-coaster: All the way up the slow track to the summit you know that what you will be looking at is a very big drop that may not, but probably will reunite you with the ice cream, blue candy-floss and jar of unidentifiable “pebble” sweets you ate earlier. Nevertheless, you make animated conversation with your mum or sister or friend all the way up because you don't really want to give thought to what is going to happen. As I approached the badger, this remarkably large and luxuriant creature lying unceremoniously dead in a hedge by a roadside, its hind legs stiff with rigor mortis and sticking up in the air like an obscenity, the sight sent me over the summit, leaving my tummy behind. Though stiffened and awkward, the badger lay there with no lack of grace. Its fur was sleek and shone in the morning sun, its sheer physical bulk imposing, surprising, marking the space the creature once occupied in the everyday of this world. The sun-bleached seedheads of the grass bobbed playfully on its head as if just coaxing it would wake it up again. The body was still intact so death must have occurred the night before. The shock of seeing a dead animal has not diminished these last two months, although I have seen amongst others, an owl, squirrel, mole, water vole, rabbit, cat, sheep, pheasant and hare, countless other small birds, all dead. But this creature, so whole, so beautiful on such a perfect, golden-warm day seemed like an outrage.

I had been waiting as darkness fell on many nights to see a badger in the next field. Earlier this week Alan and I found a network of sets - the large, round holes in the ground with entrances scored by large claws could only have been badger residences. Finally I had seen one. And even though it was no longer alive, it had a majesty and beauty that somehow meant I was not sorry to have encountered it.

Spooky Cutting, Rock and Cobblers

Imagine a massive block of cheese.  Now imagine a massive block of cheese the colour and texture of a Cadbury's Flake bar.  Only, imagine it is purpley-brown rather than the more standard chocolatey brown of a Flake.  This purpley brown Flake-cheese you are imagining makes up the ground in this bit of Shropshire.  It goes on for miles; the crumbliest, flakiest ground cover in the land. Over a hundred years ago some bright spark decided to ignite a load of dynamite and blast a channel through a particularly annoying lumpy bit of the Flake-cheese.  It was annoying chiefly because the bright spark in question wanted to build a canal, and the lumpy bit (geologists call them 'hills' I believe) was squarely in the way.  Now if this person was such a bright spark, suggests Alan, then they would have just bunged a couple of locks in their canal and gone over the hill instead of exploding their way through it.  Good point.  Perhaps they'd sold out of locks down the shops. Or perhaps they were just living up to their nickname.  Whatever the reason, I am rather chuffed they decided to cut this two mile long, 15ft wide swathe through this lump of crumbly, cheesy-chocolate earth, because it is one of the spookiest paces I have ever been on any form of transport. 

Al and I entered Woodseaves Cutting, as this channel is known, at about 7 o'clock on Monday evening.  The spuds were in the oven baking away and the damson cobbler I'd knocked up last night was sitting on the stove.  The blobs of pastry had sunk pinkly into the blood red stew of damsons and sugar making it look like casseroled murder evidence.  We had left Market Drayton earlier in the day after stocking up at Netto on loo paper and chocolate digestives, two vital pieces of kit for any water-gypsy.  We had been loitering in the area for a while; on Friday we spoke to our old mates Andy and Chelle, and planned for them to pop down the following afternoon for a visit.  Chelle, for her part, is about as pregnant as you can get (her baby was due the next day) so some flexibility had to be built into this plan.  Andy worked out that he could get from us to the birthing pool at their house in an hour and a half, so the little blighter would have to be quicker than Zola Budd to beat them to it if Chelle's waters broke.  He signed off from the phone call with a priceless one: "So, tomorrow it's either canal or birth canal".  I laughed for a long time.

Saturday dawned and no baby so our visitors duly arrived with their three year old daughter Freya who, perhaps on finding the boat somewhat more to her scale, began immediately and very cutely to play house, promptly curling up in our bed whenever the excitement got too much for her.  It put me in mind of how my sister had reacted to the boat when she first saw it, exclaiming "It's like a Sindy-House!".  Now that is not exactly true.  As anyone whose Sindy owned a Town House in the mid-eighties will doubtless remember, the Town House had an exterior mock-wrought-iron lift (or "elevator" as the box exotically described it) between the three floors of her Luxurious Sindy Residence.  Little More has no such elevator, unfortunately.  But, like a doll's house it does have a minuscule shower.  Drop the soap and you will never retrieve it unless you happen to be one of those Yogis who can bend over and fold yourself neatly in three. 

But I digress.  After a lovely afternoon and the hugest pub lunch I have ever put away, we waved the Beacock family off; Andy in his funky leather jacket, Freya in her "Big Girl's Car Seat" and Chelle in her 40th week of pregnancy. (I still cannot believe she was so hardcore - I mean it was due the next day...the next day!)*  Alan and I then chugged back to Audlem to go to a gig in the village Scout and Guide Hall.  Rock, yes, and indeed roll.  French rolls actually, nice soft ones which were served with a lovely bowl of chilli at the gig for the bargainous price of £1.  As we ate, we and around fifty people from the village watched a series of local young bands have a pretty impressive go.  The gig was organised by a local thesp called Peter Marshall, a compact and bumptious man who had lived in Audlem for over two decades.  Straw mopped, clad in a purple tie-dye t-shirt with craggy blue eyes that brimmed with confidence and goodwill, Peter and his missus Jane had founded a theatre company based on a canal boat twenty years ago.  I had heard that they were based in Audlem and, in the spirit of trying to meet as many people as possible on this trip, I found their number on the web and decided I would phone them up at their house.  Luckily for me Peter Marshall was totally unflummoxed to have a total stranger ring him up at home to ask if he fancied a pint and a chinwag.  He didn't tell me to bugger off.  He didn't even say he had a lot to do in the next week which is the Almost-Polite way of saying bugger off.  He didn't hang up either, cutting out the middle man and just buggering off himself.  Instead he invited Alan and myself to his Chilli-Evening, which was conceived to give young bands in this impossibly out of the way rural area a bit of a bump-start.  Villagers of all ages, heights and widths milled around us, eating chilli and drinking booze brought from the local Co-op while bands containing their neighbours or children (some from the local Co-op – we were served by one the next day) played through proper amps on a little makeshift stage with proper disco lights.  It was a little like turning up at the wedding reception of someone you don't know but would probably like if you did.   The goodwill towards the players was palpable;  the door man kept coming over the tannoy urging us to eat more chilli, and to make sure we drop something into the collection bucket to go towards the bands.  It was a community not being cynical about its young people, and it was brilliant.

We had a long walk back along the towpath to our boat afterwards.  We are getting rather bold these days, walking confidently in the sort of darkness that would've made various parts of our anatomy contract tightly with fear before coming on this trip.  After being inspired by our friend Polly we are even eschewing the use of a torch on the long walks in the lampless darkness that you get on the towpath these days.  Perhaps this is why we were initially unperturbed when entering the narrow tree-enclosed channel of Woodseaves Cutting on our boat, just as the light was fading on Monday.  We were travelling East, into the dusk and as the Ash trees loomed we steered the boat into the shadows with the blasé attitude that only comes with forgetting how quickly dusk can turn into darkness.  The cutting was two and a half miles long, and at three miles an hour, that is a fair amount of driving time in the gathering gloom.  Problem was, we could not go at three miles an hour; the entrance to the cutting bore a sign with the very encouraging image of rocks tumbling down a slope into water and urged boaters, for their safety, to go at 2mph.  That'll be an hour in the cutting, then.  Til' 8 o'clock and near-twilight conditions in fact.  Add to that the gloaming presence of huge mature Ash trees and oaks and you are pretty much looking at travelling in darkness with the possibility of rocks falling on you.  But you don't go on an adventure if you are not adventurous, so in we chugged. 

Now, I am not going to try and create a false sense of suspense here; nothing remotely dramatic happened to us in Woodseaves Cutting.  But it was spooky.  And beautiful, too, the canal snaking out into the west behind us like a gold thread reflecting a sunset we could no longer see.  As we travelled further in, the sides of the cutting rose higher until our narrow 10 foot channel was framed by thirty feet rises on either side; huge trees holding onto the crumbly purple earth with all their might.  Sometimes, to our fascinated discomfort we would see a tree that had failed to hold on tightly enough to the yielding soil and had careened over, taking a myriad of smaller shrubs with it, its massive roots sticking incongruously up into the night air like a protest.  Huge birds whose silhouettes I could only just decipher flew out of this battlefield of trees across the water occasionally, heightening the illusion that we could be moving through a prehistoric landscape that was not the domain of humans, let alone their silly boats.  Occasionally we would meet a bridge, high and angular and purple-red like the earth they rose out of that stood out like a sign that humans had been here before, but otherwise Alan and I moved slowly and as quietly as our boat ever does through a strange,unpopulated and unstable bit of the canal where the trees and the earth and the birds are in charge.

* Far as I know it hasn't come yet.