The Search For Enlightenment

So that’s that, the holiday has been and gone. After all the planning, all the talking, packing, organising and travelling. After a really wonderful week afloat, during which we all got on like a house on fire, as expected. After all those fun times, going through locks, under lifting bridges, dodging all the other narrowboats and picking beautiful places for the evening mooring up. Even after all the sunshine and rain, it’s over.

I’ve always been of the opinion that it should be obligatory to have a week off after each holiday, just to give you time to get back into the swing of things. Sadly I doubt that any political party will ever table such a motion, even though it would be a great vote winner.

For me, the day started very slowly. Bumble managed to sneak out of bed without waking me, which is quite a feat as I am rather a light sleeper. By the time I got downstairs, she had already had her breakfast, started the washing and was cleaning and tidying, I felt rather ashamed that she was doing it all on her own.

I was keen to help, and did so by cracking on with the gardening jobs. The wet weather had done a great job of watering the runner beans and Steve and Andrew, the next door neighbours, had done the same with the tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Sadly, as I’m sure a few of you have also found, all these wet conditions have been perfect for our little slug and snail friends and they had munched a number of plants. The peas in the trough next to the front door hadn’t escaped attention, so I replaced the victims with the spares still growing in the greenhouse.

I also retrieved the hanging baskets from next door. They had been moved so that the boys could water them more easily, but with the weather being the way it has been, they admitted that the baskets hadn’t need watering at all.

Bumble’s bike needs some TLC after her son Sam had borrowed it recently. The crank bearings need replacing, but despite administering some gentle violence in trying to remove the pedals, I was unable to get to the guilty parts, so it will need a visit to the bike doctor to get repaired.

B had also been running out of steam early in the evenings last week, and we had discussed the possibility that she has an iron deficiency. So with time running out, we set off to the farm shop, to buy some liver, and see if that might help. En route we stopped off to buy some brioche which we had eaten toasted with paté at the Dusty Miller.

In all the rush, Bumble forgot to buy the liver, but we did have a lovely meal of toasted brioche and paté, with the obligatory salad, for dinner. After clearing up and taking a quick look through the photos on the PC, we decided that we were both pretty pooped so opted for an early night, after all, Monday mornings start pretty early when I have to drive back to Ringwood.

So a slightly sad Sunday, with both of us suffering a little from land-sickness after being on a moving boat for a week, and missing the tranquillity of canal life. But it’s nice to be home again, and as we all know, nothing lasts forever, does it?

I do have it in mind to buy our own narrowboat at some point and sail off into the sunset. So some sweet dreams to end the holiday, and a nice target to aim for in the future, now all we need to do is make the causes for the effects we want to see.