Tuesday 17th Sept
We started at 7.15 today, more like our normal time. The weather was more decidedly overcast than previously, but not so windy. My back was rather bad today — Jenny Wren's phrase from Our Mutual Friend came to mind, 'My back's bad and my legs are queer.' For 'legs' read 'knee', and that's me at the moment. The first lock we came to on Saturday, I felt my back do something funny, and it's been rather painful at times since then. It was not too bad for most of Sunday and Monday, but this morning it felt very stiff and painful, and it took quite a while to loosen up.
We continued through a couple of locks, with enough of a space between them for me to say the morning Office. Then, at Zouch locks we met up with a boat called The Pride of Mottesfont. This caught my eye, since I've been to the famous rose gardens at Mottesfont a few times. It's close to where one of my aunts used to live, in Romsey, and not all that far from my father's house at Wimborne. On the side of the boat were paintings of the Abbey, the village church and various other places in Mottesfont, which is where the owners of the boat live. Their boat is based at Fenny Compton on the Oxford Canal, which we went through in our Northampton-Oxford-London loop four years ago.
By eleven o'clock we were through Trent Lock onto the Erewash Canal. We stopped for half an hour to water and then went on. We stopped for a pint at The Old Ale House, which wasn't quite as good as we'd hoped from the name. There was a fairly average choice of ales, and we didn't sample the food as we still had plenty of cheese and some fresh bread. I was rather taken with the following notice in the gents (photo below). Rather a strange combination, don't you think?
Ten minutes after we'd started again, we reached the Long Eaton lock, where we met up with the Solomon again. Here we discovered that the next pound had been drained by some vandals and that there was no prospect of being able to proceed for quite some time. There was nothing for it but to reverse the boat the half-mile or so to the last winding point. I was steering at the time, and I adopted the technique of alternating long spells of low-speed reverse thrust, with short bursts of forward thrust with the rudder to one side or the other, to correct the course. I don't know if the rudder has any effect at all when in reverse, but I worked on the assumption that it was, at best, insignificant. It took a long time, but we got there in the end, with the others pulling on ropes from the bank to help in the course corrections. The winding took a bit longer than it should, as the propellor had got rather weeded up again. (Alan had already removed quite a lot of weed a little earlier.) Then back through the Trent lock again and onto the Trent itself, at twenty past two.
It takes a while to adjust to a wide river like this, when you've been used to ordinary sized canals. Quite a relief to have such latitude with regard to the steering, and of course one's progress is much faster. Still, I wouldn't want them all the time, as it would get a little dull. When we'd been on the Thames four years ago, I enjoyed it at the time, but I was quite glad to get back onto the canals after a few days. After an hour and twenty minutes we were back onto a canal, as we turned onto the Beeston Cut — an alternative route to Nottingham, cutting off some wide loops of the Trent. We kept going fairly steadily and reached Nottingham to moor at five o'clock.
We were too late to look round the castle or the canal museum, but we did have a look around the castle grounds. We went for a drink at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, which claims to be the oldest ale house in the country, founded in 1189. It's certainly an interesting old place, with a fine choice of real ale. We sat in one of the little rooms upstairs, which looked as if it had been hollowed out of rock (photo below). One could imagine the local chapter of the Templars gathering there.
Today there was just a 'reading group' (as one of the staff mentioned to us) — presumably gathered to discuss some recent prize-winning novel. There was a pseudo tapestry around the wall, depicting various significant events in the history of Nottingham. Amongst various eclectic items in our own conversation, I noted Penny's complaint that she'd searched through the Web recently in search of information in 'toad summoning', and there wasn't anything at all. The only thing that might have been vaguely related was a Canadian Wycca site.
After this, we went in search of a restaurant, thinking mainly in terms of an Italian — but we stumbled across an Iranian restaurant called The Shiraz and so we thought we'd give it a try. It turned out that it had only been open for a couple of months. The waiter who served us was very welcoming and helpful — and also quite enthusiastic to explain various aspects of Iranian history as well as it's cuisine. We had plenty of starters, because there were rather more vegetarian items amongst the starters, which was important for Nick and Penny. There was a great variety and it was all very well prepared. We really enjoyed ourselves. Such a contrast after so many places that can only be described as mediocre at best.
Back to the boat fairly early — well before ten o'clock at any rate. It's just coming up to eleven as I finish this entry, since I had taken a lot of photos today and they needed to be transferred to the laptop, so that I could re-use the memory cards tomorrow. What I do is to put them all on the laptop, erase the ones I decide aren't any good, and then make copies to another directory, where I then put the photos through the automatic optimisation process on my image editing software. This doesn't take long and it's useful in correcting any slight colour imbalance and in sharpening up the images a bit, if required. Well, that's it for another day, and I'm certainly ready for bed tonight.