Wednesday, 17th September 2025

One of the aspects of a broken foot is only requiring one shoe. One of the challenges,  when constantly on the move,  is finding the discarded shoe once your foot is healed. I broke my foot whilst wearing winter trainers and then the summer arrived.  By the time I required my trainers again I had no recollection of where I left the temporarily unnecessary shoe.  I still can’t find it after a thorough search of both home and boat. I did have the sense to see if it is the right of left shoe that is missing and it transpires it’s the one I continued to wear so it could be anywhere!

We returned to the boat for ten days from mid August, with it’s newly painted bottom,  which extended to the rubbing strip, running along the sides of the boat.  How smart it looked,  for about half a dozen locks! And we had rather alot of locks to do. However hard I tried to avoid any contact with the lock chamber,  it was just impossible to maintain! A thing of beauty lasts but a short while but in the heart forever! Reminds me of when we had the parquet floors of our family home sanded and within a fortnight one area was totally pock marked by a pair of stilleto heels! It’s taught me to hold on to perfection lightly.

I had a bit of bother with my left knee after my ankle repair,  probably because I walked with my body out of kilter. It swelled up and I dragged it around for a week our two,  walking at a snails pace and elevating it as much as you can on a narrowboat,  where standing at the helm is a routine occurrence.  R did his best to help but he already had the locks to battle so I didn’t want to overly exhaust him.

Returning briefly to London we helped to crew another boat from Paddington to St Pancras, resulting in me sitting at an odd angle, so on return to our boat my back seized up and I was barely able to manouvere myself to the bathroom!! A back spasm when trying to pee is not for the faint hearted!! What an old crock – a reminder that I must put weights and regular stretching on my ‘to do’ list!

Having seen so much of the network closed down this summer due to low water levels,  we were delighted to travel in the rain much of our journey from Chirk to Market Drayton. The rain came in sudden heavy downpours, but at least the air was warm and we dried off very quickly! Blue skies are wonderful, but you can have too much of a good thing and it has been heart breaking hearing of boat yards struggling to survive and holiday boat companies having no punters. Tooleys of Banbury have lost 80% of their business over the summer because they are a dry dock,  and no one has been able to reach them as both the locks above and below the boat yard had to close due to lack of water. I think they are one of the oldest boatyards on the network and it is incredibly sad. I also heard of a fleet of hire boats being taken out of the water and driven to another part of the network where there was sufficient water to enable the boats to be used.

The general lack of water also makes one feel guilty at just travelling around the network for pleasure so we have used our boat far less than planned.  These past two weekends when we have had to leave the boat,  instead of returning and using it mid week,  we just left it for ten days. Mind you,  the weather pattern isn’t just affecting the rivers and canals.  A freak localised thunderstorm in Munich a week ago led to the plane we were on being diverted because ‘we may run out of fuel if we join the other dozen planes circling Munich airport, hoping to land’! We arrived at an airport 3hrs coach journey to Munich, at midnight, with one rep trying to find coaches at that hour of night to transport 140 people back to Munich! On our return to London on the Sunday evening our plane was delayed and by the time we landed all the trains into London had stopped, and there was a tube strike! How happy am I to be back on the boat!

I’ve worked out how to find the more economical train fares, but you have to keep your wits about you because sometimes the journey is not as straight forward as it could be, with a couple of train changes that elongate the time spent travelling. We had two changes to get to Shrewsbury followed by a bus to get to the boat.  The first train was delayed by 20 minutes, which means we missed our ongoing connection.  The upside was I have just got a refund from the train company. I also managed to get an online food delivery direct to the boat, which was  very welcome, although it can be difficult gauging how much fresh food we will actually need.  Whenever we leave the boat we turn off all the batteries so the contents of the fridge/freezer have to be disposed of. Since I don’t like waste, we usually have a large bag of food, in addition to our washing etc,  that needs to come with us.  That’s OK if we are going home but not so easy if we are going straight to an airport, which very occasionally happens. There is therefore a certain amount of stress involved in actually putting the online order together.

We are due  to give a presentation this week about the work of the Canal Ministries to a church situated close to the canal. We attended a service there earlier in the summer and they asked us to come and tell them more. We’d like to partner with local churches who see the needs of those living on the canal network and are keen to support them.  Obviously  as we continually cruise, we are not able to offer long term support to someone who may be needing help,  but we feel the church communities are in a position to do this.

We went to Burnley in August as part of a week long Canal Ministries Mission, offering boat rides to families and making connections with some of the local churches.  Sadly we were unable to go by our own boat due to the low water levels affecting many of the canals, but we were warmly received and had fun on someone else’s boat. One of the local bishops came and chatted to the crowd,  standing on top of the narrowboat, precariously balanced. Burnley was an eye opener.  So much poverty and yet so much community spirit – their wealth was in love and support of one another.  In the covid pandemic,  Burnley made the headlines as being one of the most hard hit areas due to lock down, job losses and a higher than average mortality rate.  Two of the local Christian leaders came to the attention of the BBC because of the outreach work they were involved with and were interviewed.  As a result aid poured in from around the UK and both Father Alex and Pastor Nick have written  books describing Burnley through the pandemic and beyond. I think they are well worth a read. My grandfather was a priest in the Birmingham slums and only having lived in the south myself,  I have felt a nudge to go north to see what life is like further up the country.  There are differences and perhaps it is good to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes.  One of the ladies I met told me that although she has very few possessions she has a wealth of friends and family and wouldn’t change that for anything.  For someone who loves having shoes to match an outfit and any excuse to buy a new party frock, I was quite chastened.  I have come away from Burnley challenged as to what  more I should be doing to address the inequality that is so prevalent in our society.

So here we are,  back on the boat, after a very long day of travel for us.  Having assessed tomorrow’s forecast,   we decided to travel as far as possible today.  Some good friends, having travelled from the opposite direction, happen to be moored almost next to us, so we shall enjoy a chinwag and no doubt a tipple before batting down the hatches in preparation for tomorrow’s downpours.  Just hoping enough rain will fall to get the low water levels up and the canal system fully reopened.  It was this time a year ago when we had a month’s rainfall in 24hrs in Oxford and we ended up tied to a tree for ten weeks, unable to move the boat on the Thames because it was too hazardous. Boaters really are at the mercy of the weather and all plans have to be held lightly.

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