Mixed feelings

Today, I've been putting together maps and cruising routes from Crick in readiness for Herbie's move of base next spring.  There are some truly mouthwatering prospects.  I hadn't realised The Leicester arm is so high up.  All routes from there go downhill for quite some way, in fact it's not until you get to Warwick  on the GU or Napton on the South Oxford canal that you get any uphill locks.  I think it might augur well for TV reception!  Going anticlockwise round the Leicester ring it would be a week or more at our pace before we faced an uphill lock.

Exciting though the move is, we will have mixed feelings.  Staying aboard Herbie (although not moving) last weekend, we were reminded again how pleasant our moorings on the Slough arm can be.  Not only the view out of the window - trees and fields one side and a pathside garden and hedgerow the other, and shoals of rudd and perch clearly visible in the canal - but also the people we are getting to know.  On Friday we decided to eat out at the Red Lion in Iver and Glyn from our neighbouring boat joined us for what turned out to be a good evening.  We're just getting to know people really well and now were planning to move away and have to start all over again.

Saturday night reminded me why I like just staying on the boat, whether we are cruising or not..  We had a good dinner, and under our new cabin lights which have improved the ambience no end, settled down far from family pressures and chilled out.  A warm flickering glow from the stove, a Rumpole book in one hand, a glass of Jim MacBeam in the other and a good programme about A Wainwright on radio 4.  Simple pleasures.

I could also tell you the detail of how I replaced the rubber seal in a toilet cassette, but to use a currently popular phrase, you might regard that as too much information.