A visit to Bankside

Bankside is the 54ft narrowboat on which our son Richard lives, and we've just been visiting (sadly, by road). His engine was overdue a service and his fridge had packed up so I offered to pop up and see what could be done.

We're very envious of Richard's moorings at Hartford marina near Huntingdon. A beautiful spot.

Quite handy for fishing too as Jacob discovered.

Bankside has a huge rear deck, and access to the engine bay is perfect - bags of room - so the service was easy. I also took the chance to look at his electrics which are far less complex than ours on Herbie. Now I've decided to have a go at simplifying the system on Herbie, I'm sure there is a lot of redundant wiring.

Richard was all set to buy a new 12v fridge, which at £400 is not cheap. However, we discovered that the fault with the old one is just a bad connection, so we got it going again.

On the way home we met up with our other son Peter in Cambridge for a pint and a pub meal. If you ever go to Cambridge, try the Castle pub in Castle Street. Excellent. Peter is doing a post doctorate project writing a sort of chemical search engine which can read natural language. He's excited because in a couple of weeks he's off for a sort of brainshare do at Google HQ in California.