We stayed in the camper van last night, as a special happy end to Mark’s birthday, and on our way to collect Lucy for her exeat this weekend.
We parked by the side of the canal which runs between Liverpool and Leeds, and woke up to sunshine, and the scent of roses from the lock-keeper’s cottage garden, and ambling activity around the little village.
We took the dogs for a long stroll along the tow path, and watched people struggling incompetently along the canal in their hired holiday barges.
Every time we pass a canal we wonder about buying, and rebuilding, a barge, and we wondered about it a bit more this morning, but we are not going to do it. We liked the idea of living on a boat, but thought that probably we would get bored quite quickly. Also you could get stuck having to share a lock with the same tiresome people for days on end, because all the barges go at the same speed, and it is not really possible just to accelerate off into the distance making taxi-driver hand signals and leaving a foamy wake behind you.
Once we had decided this we just ambled along and looked at the scenery. We saw a weary-looking heron with a nest of chicks, and a noisy family of geese, and an awful lot of people on boats wearing Mountain Warehouse shorts. We knew that we would not like them because one self-importantly rotund lady asked us where the dog leads were.
There was no need for this because for once the dogs were being rather well behaved, but it completely convinced me that a life on a canal barge would not suit me in the least. I think it might have been better when there were horses, and barges carried coal instead of pot plants, and fat ladies with stupid dogs were busy scrubbing steps and cooking dinner for their husbands and not being allowed to have opinions.
When we got back to the camper van we were starving, because we had forgotten breakfast. We ate huge quantities of muesli with yoghurt and cream, if I am not careful I am going to have to purchase some Mountain Warehouse shorts, but I didn’t care today because of being on holiday.
We arrived at Lucy’s school early, and Mark fitted some more of the carpet in the cab whilst I cooked dinner.
We have been using the camper van for almost a year now and still have not quite fitted the carpet in the front. Some of it is there, but the difficult bits, that go around corners and over bendy bits, are not, because of it being complicated and too much trouble.
The underlay was there, but we needed to put some carpet over it quite soon, because Roger Poopy has taken to eating it in anxious moments. He does not seem actually to swallow it, just to tear strips off it and chew it into thousands of tiny, irritating pieces. Also as regular readers will perhaps recall, I had accidentally discovered that we had got some spray on carpet glue, handily in the wardrobe, and did not even need to buy any more.
Hence I cooked chicken curry and buttery rice, and Mark fitted carpet. After dinner we were longing for a little snooze, but could not do, because of there not being enough time before collecting Lucy from school, so I washed up and Mark fitted a bit more awkward carpet.
We found Lucy sloping off hastily down the school drive, and scooped her up happily to join us in the camper van, and set off home.
We have left her there asleep, she is exhausted, and we are on the taxi rank.
I took a picture of the heron, but when I looked at it it turned out that since I did not have my glasses on and couldn’t see the tiny phone screen, I had completely missed the heron and got a picture of a rather decrepit fence.
I have attached the one of the geese instead.
