I was back at sea. Ok, at canal. The Boatman had made it all the way to Leighton Buzzard in the two weeks since we went to Milton Keynes. That’s four motorway junctions in two weeks. But you don’t buy a boat for speed. Not that boat. You buy it because its by far the easiest way to start fights with stroppy canal bastards who don’t like their boats being banged. Tossers. Shouting, screaming, moaning, horrible tossers. We left loads in our wake on Thursday as we sailed peacefully through the countryside.

Mel stayed home. Not for her the life of a sea-farer, even for a day. It’s a man’s world. Other than the women who do it. But most of them are passengers. On little boats. And I encountered a new thing. Locks. Those funny, quirky things without which boats would have to be sailing downhill. Or possibly uphill. Which the laws of physics prevent, even though it might be quicker to change those laws than to ‘do a lock’. There again, everything on the water happens at ‘boat speed’. So no-one’s in a hurry. Only the ones coming to start a fight.

You arrive at the lock and moor up. (10 minutes). Then you check out to see if the lock is currently high or low. The rule being: whatever you want it to be, it ain’t. So you wait a bit for a boat to come the other way, because that’s protocol. Locks waste water and two boats, like two heads, are better than one. (20 minutes). Then you give up and go fill the lock. Or empty the lock, depending which way you’re going. (Another 10 minutes). Then you open the gates and pull the boat in. (10 minutes because although its floating, its still 38 tonnes of floating). The the lock fills/empties again (10 more minutes), then you open the gates and you’re away!!! Wow! In a flash. A 2 hour, 46-minute flash. There’s lots of knobs to pull on and levers to operate and winding up (not other boaters, that’s too easy) but I don’t think you’re ready for the technical stuff yet.

And then we moored up so The Boatman had a nice slot for the night and I just had to get back to the Tesco car park where I’d left the car. Which was about 3 miles upstream. Oh. and there were no roads in sight, just fields. Uber had ‘no cars available’ because Prius don’t make tractors. So we deployed the electric scooters from the hold (like a loft, but lower, and on a boat) and rode along the tow path to arrive back to the car. With 2 electric scooters. And a very small car.

Ironically, electric scooters are illegal on the roads (other than rental ones) and on pavements. Both of which are kind of flat and smooth and straight and nice. Riding them on tow paths is probably less illegal but they’re bumpy, bendy, lumpy and you have a canal about 3 feet away.

Happy Saturday. You landlubber.

A xxxx