When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? #narrowboat #boating

Well, anytime today would be fine then, since we have thunder, lightning and rain. We also have brilliant sunshine and twittering birds in the hedgerows.

This is England, in high summer.

Five minutes later…

…and then a massed splash-landing of Canada (Dis)Mounties…

No rainbows though. Presumably, pots of gold are in short supply so they couldn’t manage the rainbow-ends. I like rainsbows, they’re such utterly ridiculous features of a planetary atmospheric system. It’s as though everyone was deadly serious when the mix of oxygen, nitrogen and aerogen was being considered, someone declared the meeting closed and as everyone left the room the team lunatic (there’s always one) picked up a brush and twelve pots of assorted paint and went “wheeeeeeeeee” across the blue before they could stop him.

Look for the ginger-haired team member wearing a button-up denim bib-overall arrangement, sandals and a toothy grin. They’re also responsible for the zebra, the panda and other silly animals.

Boats have been thrashing about all day in both directions. A fair number of them are probably refugees from the Middlewich “Folk and Boat” (-ing?) Festival which, I believe, ends about now.

The Cardinal has been assaulted to the rear once today, with his rear button pushed to one side and a “clonk” that always sounds worse inside than it does out. I suspect that the other boat suffered the greater portion of actual pain though, since – cunningly – the Cardinal has a chuffing-great lump of steelwork that extends out to within a few inches of the end of the button.

Mayhap a previous keeper was a bicyclist or something equally peculiar, and had some sort of rack mounted there? Perhaps they rode horses, and kept a fresh pony mounted on the Cardinal’s stern at all times? The possibilities are manifold.

Note to self – come up with some modification to same that will make it more cill-friendly but retain all of the “hands off my rudder” benefits. 😉 A couple of variegated pansies in a nice terracotta pot, perhaps, and a small but perfectly-formed Raytheon Phalanx CIWS installation primed and ready and set to “automatic”.

Messrs Chandlery & Co had a splendid packet of crumpets on the shelf today, so tiffin will be, like as not, toasted crumpets with MardyMite. I must entertain a modicum of self-control and retain three for brekkers tomorrow. Gawd knows how I’ll achieve that, I have all of the self-control of a poorly-maintained nuclear power station. It’s a pack of nine, so maybe three for tiffin, three with my bedtime Horlicks at 20:30hrs and three for the morning when the sun rises with me.

The wind is up again now. I don’t mean that I’m burping or any such thing, just that there is a very energetic breeze chucking things around. We don’t really have a “climate” as such, here in Ing-er-lund, we just enjoy a buffet each day of the scrag-ends and left-overs of weather that no-one else on the planet wants. It’s all really rather jolly. If you poke a head outside (your own is best for this purpose) and find that you don’t like the weather then just blink a couple of times, it’ll be entirely different.

So far so good with this blog reverting to the “freebie” version, fingers crossed that it stays that way. I haven’t had any more rude emails from Messrs WordSquish, anyway, and as far as I can tell tis all working much as before.

I can’t decide whether that is encouraging, or just depressing for my readers.

Oh well.

Chin-chin for the mo, Muskies.

Ian H., and Cardinal W.