Dear Motley Crew,
We’re coming to you today from beautiful downtown Banbury which is beginning to feel a little like 6 am in beautiful downtown Punxsutawney; but I’m imagining that many of you will be feeling the same way.
Thankfully, we are both still well and have not succumbed to The Virus – or to Cabin Fever – so feel fortunate to be in such a good position. Our days are now taken up with the mundane, but necessary routines of a life vastly simplified. Twice a week we walk about a two and a half-mile round-trip to buy our groceries; each day we make a one mile round- trip to fill water bottles that helps us eke out our water tank supply; and each afternoon we use our permitted one-hour exercise time to walk through the adjoining park. So, although our days are ordinary in nature, we have to admit that we have not become bored – or as bored/ creative? – as some.
Take the case of Dr Daniel Reardon, an astrophysicist who clearly had too much time on his hands. As your old granny will no doubt have cautioned, the devil finds work for idle hands, and so it was for young Daniel. Suffice to say it did not end well for the inventive Dr Reardon. In his defence though, I have to sheepishly admit that I might have gone down the same path, but only as far as the ears!
This seemingly aimless digression does in fact, have some relevance to our week, because we also happened upon a way to amuse ourselves – one that didn’t involve magnets.
It was water-tank-filling, toilet-cassette-emptying-and-washing day. Because our boat was moored facing upstream, and the water/toilet-emptying point was downstream, we had two courses of action. We could travel 500 metres upstream, turn at the winding hole and then travel down to the water point, OR we could reverse to the water point, thus eliminating the need to turn the boat around. Given that we had nothing else to do, and all day to do it, we chose the latter option.
Narrowboats can travel in reverse, but because steering is achieved by water passing over the rudder from the propeller – or some form of associated physics that temporarily escapes me – it will become immediately clear to you that, when reversing, you have very little control over a boat. To keep the boat tracking backwards, you often have to go forwards to straighten up – a bit like reversing a trailer – and began the reversing process again.
Now it is a well-known fact that the moment, the very moment that you begin to reverse a narrowboat, a crowd of gongoozlers will materialise out of nowhere, rather like beggars in Marrakech. Thus it was on this occasion, with several amused observers asking if were we OK and others enquiring if we needed help. Although the process wasn’t pretty to observe, we managed to arrive at our destination without misadventure or colliding with any of the other moored boats along the route. The distance from our mooring to the water point is about 500 or 600 metres, a five to ten-minute trip when travelling forwards. It took us nearly an hour in reverse but we returned to our mooring triumphant and exultant. Our next trip to the water point, however, will be forwards!
The staff from Tooley’s Boat Yard, home to the country’s oldest dry dock, had never seen anything like our reversing stunt in the their entire 200 years history!
The Fine Lady was however, most impressed, and cheered us on from the sideline.
And A Clockwork Orange..? Being an erudite lot, you will have of course, guessed this one already. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange taught at Banbury Grammar School in the 1950's.
The Captain, The Commodore and The Cat
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