Well, October started with miserable weather, but with much brighter news for us on the house sale front…
The sale of our house started in earnest this month with the enlisting of conveyancers, solicitors and any number of people happy to take money from you! Thankfully some costs, at least on our side, can be kept to a minimum because we haven’t had to put the house on the open market, everything is being done between us, our daughter and her fiancé.
JUNK IN YOUR TRUNK?
By far the biggest job we have to do is to clear out the house of years of accumulated junk – not all of it is junk, some stuff we’re keeping to take with us because they hold special memories for us. But, obviously we want as much space as possible on the boat in order to keep our new memories!
Tony had a life-long collection of sheet music and hand written arrangements and finding a “home” for them was a tall order! After a lot of searching and calls on social media, it was a fellow race marshal friend of Tony’s who works as a teacher at a local academy, who finally found a home for decades of music within their music department. It was such a relief that this collection could now, potentially, help new music students to further their careers.
NEVER PLAYED A 45?
Alongside boxes of sheet music, we also have a collection of vinyl records, mostly 33 ⅓ and some 12 inch singles. For those that are too young to remember them, records were the pre-cursor to tape which later went onto become CD’s.
Of course, now, music is largely consumed online via streaming services such as Spotify or iTunes, but there’s something about the “feel and the vibe” about vinyl. [that’s a line from Macka B’s song “Never Played a 45” – referring to a 45rpm vinyl single.] They are very tactile things and something you can see, as well as hear!
As kids, we used to collect them religiously. Every week, after hearing the Top 10 on the radio, armed with our pocket money, we would go out and buy our favourite singers or bands records. Singles mainly. And then, if we had saved up enough, we’d buy a whole album!
Jan’s love has always been Elton John, and she owned just about every album he had produced from 1973 onwards.
Tony? Any band with a keyboard player. Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP), Rick Wakeman and of course Earth, Wind and Fire.
But, it soon became clear that despite the odd “collectable” like Michael Jackson, our pile of records – largely easy listening, film scores (does no one collect Star Wars stuff?) and musicals, wasn’t interesting enough for local vinyl resellers and the collection went off to one of our local charity shops. Hopefully, someone will find one or two of them rewarding!
LONDON CALLING!
We had a weekend off filming and vlogging. We’ve been impressed with the number of new subscribers we’re getting on our YouTube channel. I mean, we haven’t actually got a boat yet so in a way we are playing “catch up” with the official boat-tubers and finding interesting content to upload to, it seems, an eager crowd! But we did put together a trailer for the channel, sort of “this is us” type of thing. Very much tongue-in-cheek and fun. So we uploaded that. It was done in the style of “Hart To Hart” a 70’s US detective series starting Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner. It had the tag line – “When They Met, It Was Murder!”
We have family that live in London, and due to lockdown etc., hadn’t visited for a while and decided if we were going, now would be a good time [edited to add – just as well as London went into Tier 2 a week later!]
It’s easy to forget that there are numerous canals running through London. Everyone knows about the Thames, which we went on when we had Sapphire, but tucked away, far from the hustle and bustle of City life, there is a network of canals. Thankfully, the trip boats were still operating – Covid safe of course – so we booked a trip from Little Venice to Camden.
It was a lovely day out. We wandered around Paddington Basin whilst we waited for our boat to arrive and grabbed a coffee. There are café and restaurant boats here and all looked busy considering the lock down restrictions. We even managed to grab a chat with the chef from The Prince Regent, part of the London Shellfish Company. You can see the full chat on the video of our cruise along the Regents Canal HERE.
Our trip took us to Camden and the lively market, which, as it was lunchtime, was almost as busy as ever! Staying 2m apart was tricky, if not impossible, so we and many others donned our masks. If you’ve never been, there’s over 1,000 stalls selling everything from retro clothes to jewellery and of course a smorgasbord of every cuisine from funky looking food shacks.
WE NEED A BREAK!
October also saw us take a much needed break. We had booked a narrowboat holiday back in March as part of Jan’s milestone birthday – she is a leap year baby, so technically only has a birthday every four years. Dignity (and an ear bashing) prevents me saying just exactly how old Jan is, but you can find out if you watch the first of our two part journey along the Trent and Mersey Canal.
We’ve had several holidays via Anglo Welsh, a national hire boat company and always been pleased with their service. On this occasion, as the original holiday had been booked for March, then rescheduled for May and now in October, it was comforting to know that the team in the booking office were helpful and considerate in our changing wishes. Our original holiday was just the two of us and now, here we were looking at taking our daughters – and their fiancés!
To compound things, this was the time of the year that our eldest daughter, Sian and her finance Matthew, were due to get married. As if 2020 couldn’t get any worse!
All-in-all 2020 has been a year to forget. Tony lost his mum, his sister at the end of 2019, no wedding for our eldest and no graduation for our youngest, Molly. So it was perhaps understandable that these four days for the six of us were times we could relish being together – and make some new memories!
Thankfully, the weather was kind to us and we had a really lovely time. We started our journey at Great Haywood in Staffordshire and ended up in Fradley, a place we remember from our time as part owners of Sapphire. We spent the night at The White Swan (often referred to as The Mucky Duck) and surprised it wasn’t busier. We should support our local pubs before we loose them forever. The are often the centre of a community and always a place of solace from the crazy times we find ourselves in.
We used to take the girls on an autumn holiday almost every year to coincide with school holiday and we’ve always loved this time of year. For some reason, this year, the colours of the trees and hedges looked even more verdant.
We went towards Alrewas before turning around, no mean feat in a 70 foot narrowboat(!) and headed back to our base at Great Haywood.
For our last night onboard, we managed to find a mooring spot at Tixall Wide. As the name suggests, it’s a wide section of the canal more like a lake. It was constructed like that on the wishes of the owner of nearby Tixall Hall who was concerned by the view from his home and instructed the canal builders to make it more like a lake. Oh, to have that much money and influence!
We headed back to Norfolk in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be long before we would back on the cut, but next time would be the real deal and we’d be living full time on it, not just visiting for a holiday!
Our dreams were starting to become a reality…
