Saturday 21st Sept
Keen to make good progress on this, our penultimate day, we made our earliest start yet — half past six. As regards our progress, we were unlucky, as we arrived at Atherstone locks to find a butty and tender ahead of us. The unpowered tender needed to be roped through the locks, which slowed things down fairly massively. Overall it was three and a half hours before we emerged from the top lock of the flight. We knew we'd have to keep going right through the day and continue as late as possible to make sure that we didn't leave ourselves with too much to do on the last day. Still, you have to take things as they come on the canals, and make the most of whatever happens. It isn't often you get a chance to meet the people who work commercial boats. One of us normally goes ahead on a flight, and we got chatting to the chap working the tender.
He certainly deserved the short break and a cup of tea which they had with the lock keeper at the top of the flight. The boats each had a load of about 19 tons — and the boats weigh almost as much themselves. Once the butty has gone through a lock, the tender needs to be roped through by hand. That's a huge load to pull. The firm who own the boats, South Midland Waterways Transport Ltd, has evidently been going for about 30 years. He said he'd grown up on a commercial canal boat, and he had a converted commercial boat for recreation. This trip they are taking coal and cobbles to Newbury and to various locks along the Thames. He wasn't too keen on the fact that their route was going to take them along the Oxford Canal, with its winding course and many shallow sections.
As they went ahead of us, the two boats made variable progress, partly depending on those who were coming the other way. Some of these seemed quite unable to make allowances for the needs of the large unpowered tender. One boat owner offered the following comment to Penny. 'Those “working boats” aren't really working. Those people are just doing it for job experience. They should give way and not hold us up like this. We've been out on the boat since July and haven't got very far. It's so frustrating. Our daughter in Warwick came by car to see us. It only took her ten minutes — it would have taken us ten days.'
Another boat coming down emerged from a lock to find the butty and tender in the short pound below. Rather than driving out and going past, which would have been quite easy, he just sat in the lock, while the two chaps on the commercial boats manoeuvred their large loads one each side of the canal, so that he could steer right down the middle of the channel. What's more, he went on to complain at considerable length about the inconvenience caused by commercial boats, etc., etc. We've come across a few people on the canals — fortunately only a few — who seem to adopt a generally grumpy and disgruntled attitude to the smallest inconveniences.
At Watford, for example, the lock keeper let us go through the bottom lock, into the first short pound before the second lock. The owner of a boat that was already in that pound made a great fuss about this, and when told that the lock keeper had let us through, went storming off to complain to him about this. It's sad, really, that some people go through life with this sort of attitude — perpetually bad tempered and angry with things. If they can never be happy unless everything goes exactly as they intended, they're doomed to be unhappy most of the time. Nothing is ever right for them; nothing can ever please them.
There was a mention of this on the radio recently, as it happens. Some social scientist has identified a proportion of the population that are most likely to exhibit this sort of irritability. He calls them 'Meldrews' after a character from the television programme, One Foot in the Grave. As Nick said when discussing this later on, 'If that's how they experience their pleasures, what must it be like when they're having a bad time?'
Once out of the Atherstone flight, it was fairly plain sailing, and a relatively uneventful afternoon for the most part. As the two chaps ahead of us stopped for a short break after the flight, we were able to carry on at our own speed. A little way along, I got off the boat and walked ahead. Nick had identified a pub about a mile ahead, which happened to be owned by Everards, a local beer we'd so far not been able to find during the holiday. I took the large stein I'd bought at the beer festival, together with a jug from the kitchen, with the idea of getting some beer to take onto the boat, as we wouldn't have time to stop at a pub today. As it turned out, only one of the three Everards beers was available at the time, but this was their 'Original' — the strongest and probably the nicest of the three. To my surprise I found that the stein was large enough to take two pints, and the jug three. We poured from the jug and drank out of the half-pint glasses we'd got at the beer festival — and it went down very well.
The weather has been sunny and warm today — the warmest it's been since we started on Friday. We got to Hawksbury Junction at a quarter past three, where Penny executed an impressively fast turn considering the tightness of the 180° bend. The northern part of the Oxford Canal was affected by duck weed, creating a vivid green cover all over the water.
We chugged along steadily through Nuneaton and various little villages. Penny said she saw 'dope plants' on one of the boats we passed during the afternoon. We stopped at Newbold-on-Avon at ten past seven, watered up and then moored for the night just a little way down from the watering point.
June was not feeling well, so she declined supper. The rest of us walked into the village, where a Balti house was indicated on the guides. We drew a blank here, though. The Balti house was obviously closed — the windows were even boarded up. Walking back we decide that the best prospect was The Boat, a Marston's pub. Here we enjoyed a radical change from most of our earlier pub food experiences this holiday — good beer, very good food, and a rather jolly waitress. The only drawback was that we didn't have any 50 pence pieces handy, and so had to give the bar football table a miss.