Not a holiday

Today I want to catch up with myself. I have been reading too much and doing too much and now I feel unsteady, so to hold on to the railings of my life I will enumerate what I have done this week.
1. Went skiffing on Monday and Wednesday.
2. Had bonfire at allotment, 2nd April finished the digging out of the compost bin, spread about the soil from the compost heap (not rich enough to call it compost), and garnished it with manure to give it some body. The manure was still wet from the field (I had stored it in plastic bags) but quickly dried in the sun. It has been a dry, bright, breezy week. We now have a compost heap of manageable size but no fence around it. Husband is too busy to construct this out of the usual pallets.
3. Bean poles. These are up and there are beans in the ground.
4. I had planted seeds in modules of which only the tomatoes germinated. don't know why. Too hot maybe, when I left the heater on by accident? I have potted on 12 tomato seedlings, tried again with beans and mangetout. Pots all over the conservatory floor (a tiny room where I work). Courgettes next.
5. I read a very good book called Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Claire Morrall.
6. I went on to His Bloody Project which I had to read very fast, for book club.
7. Coxed Husband and Helena, Wednesday evening.
8. Went to book club last night and discussed the book. A very good discussion, although, as usual, the old people digress madly, and the most compos mentis people speak less than those without filters. We had a new member much younger than the rest of us, and not at all shy, which was lovely.
9. Spike came round for lunch yesterday (salmon salad) and we talked about the regatta software. Spike is 62, he has looked after his mum for many years and in February his mum died. He said he feels like an 18-year-old because he is free again. I think he might like a girlfriend. Jane???
10. On Tuesday husband surprised me by remembering our wedding anniversary, and we had a sudden whim to go to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, as I had never been there and he was willing to drive. There was a Vanessa Bell exhibition on. Will post pictures separately. We had a fab lunch in Rocco's Italian restaurant in Dulwich village, which is charming and really the most desirable area to live in London, I should think. Then we walked through a park to another area to see the Horniman Museum, because it was not far away and again, I had never been there. There was a huge display of musical instruments from around the world. This interested us far more than the stuffed animals, although I thought they did very well to make the stuffed animals relevant and interesting.

Skiffing up the Wey Navigation

How to have a good day. Convene at 10:00 with lots of water and a packed lunch. Skiff beyond Shepperton lock to the little travelled Wey Navigation. Go to pub, lunch, skiff back in glorious sunshine. Sadly I have now got a skiffer's suntan, which means, red knees.

Back of the hut, Thames Lock

Note the date - 1653 - without the Navigation Weybridge wouldn't exist

Thames Lock is a double - and the last manned lock

All this was underwater  in the floods last time I posted it here

I recommend the beer

Had to go under the road bridge

The Town lock - 

Ghastly crowded suburbia and blooming raining too.

This weirstream makes getting into the lock difficult for a skiff, we had to take two shots at it

I have spent a week tidying up

this half term we had to clear up the hut after the flood last winter, and due to our other commitments and the bad weather it had been damp for a long time, so this meant tearing off wall paper which had been infested with black mould. People make a lot of fuss about black mould but I'm not sure it's really so serious that you have to wear all over body protective suits and masks. We didn't anyway.  We packed up the mouldy paper, (up to about 3 feet high, the rest was fine) and washed the walls. We painted over with anti-damp paint and then painted a top coat. That's where my contributions ended though next we are onto re-covering the floor with vinyl stuff and I will try to do some of that.

One day at the hut it was very cold and so we went out for sticks and wood and got the cast iron stove going. It was going well but the room filled up with smoke, and we had to lean out of the windows to stop our eyes from smarting. When we could see we found a huge great crack in the stovepipe! So husband bandaged it with a dustsheet.

We also had to clean up the caravan and sell it to my brother-in-law, who can keep it in his field in Sussex. So that was a whole day driving in a big strong truck to get the caravan, clean the caravan, which was filthy outside, not too bad inside, have a nice dinner with H & T and family, have one last sleep in the caravan bed (which was too hard: I won't miss it) and then rush home because I had a lunch date with my friend the vet, who told me she voted for UKIP. it doesn't surprise me at all. I belong to the social group who would vote for UKIP. But most voters for UKIP are in the 70+ age group. It's the older people who still believe that voting is a duty and a privilege, so all the parties angle for the grannie vote.

I have also tidied away piles of paper that were in the study, but I also have a bit more to do. I do feel that I can now see the wood of my desk again, which makes me feel as though I can think more clearly, but I am now re-writing a lesson plan, which makes me think I am more muddled than ever.

Today I went to help Helena, our friend who lives in Geneva and the man from the World Service, who were skiffing up the cut to clear up the rubbish - Helena's idea. We were pulling into the trees to pull off bits of plastic bag and other horrors. Very tricky skiffing, but just the sort of thing a skiff is good for. We got a huge blue tarpaulin out of the water that had been niggling Helena for weeks. So we actually tried to tidy up the Great Outdoors as well.

I also tidied up the garden today which was great. Very tired now.

More about the Lechlade trip

Helena, who rowed at stroke in the crew that I coxed, wrote a blog about the Lechlade trip, and it is very good. She is a talented writer who absolutely loves doing this sort of thing (physical challenge, small boats) which comes across quite clearly, and I just sat and steered, somewhat against my will as I would have liked to have done some skiffing too! She put everything into it but she has rowed across the Atlantic with her husband and I suppose rowing down the Thames is a breeze compared to that. She is a small but fit woman in terrific shape. I come into this blog only as a bit of a know-all who has all the low-down on William Morris. I just couldn't do justice to William Morris!

Helena's blog how-thames-grows-up-from.html?spref=fb

Notice also that the Thames was a "total mess". The effects of the flood need serious effort to remedy, and this will take some time, for example, collecting rubbish from weirs. We were out on the river yesterday and floating islands of organic matter were still coming down, at quite a pace. Also, in the case of boats that have floated away onto land and become marooned, or have sunk at their moorings, the owners need to be interested enough in them to retrieve them, and in many cases they are not.

The Lechlade trip

The Valley calls it the Lechlade trip, other skiff clubs call it the Meander, and we have different ideas about how long it should take and whether it should be a serious challenge. We take it fairly seriously but we do it over 4 days, whereas it used to be only for the young and fit and it took 3 days. Also, we used to camp! in one tent for the girls and one for the boys, but now we sleep on the floors of other rowing clubs which is much, much nicer, and usually there are hot showers at least. One lady who took part this year is 61. In years past we thought anyone over 40 who tried it was a nutcase.

3 years ago I rowed two thirds of it, swapping with the cox, and this year they were short of coxes so I coxed, and the weather, which started very nice, turned very nasty so I got cold and wet. The boats are double sculling skiffs. They look old but we get new ones made for us from time to time. They are racing skiffs.

my crew

Helena and Alex must be the smallest, lightest crew to ever row all the way from Lechlade to Teddington in 4 days. Here they are. They are lovely and were entertained by, amongst other things, the story of Gilgamesh, from first to last, re-told by me - only I missed the bit about the flood.

One of the strange and rather unhealthy things about the Valley is that a lot of us are related to each other, and even if we are not, we have known each other for a long time, and we have also married people we met at the Valley when we were young, so for new members it must be a nightmare. "Who's this lady?" "John's aunt Mary. Sarah's mum."  Alex is my niece, the archaeologist.

Went skiffing - first time for 6 months

It was a lovely day - it was very like this, but more Springlike

We were able to see the damage done by the floods to the other bank. One landing stage was a ruin as the footings had been washed away. But there were euphorbia and alyssum in the gardens, and the weeping willows  were very bright. I felt much better after coming quite quickly downstream. aha, coming downstream was easy!

Home is the river, first, where one is not
anyone in particular, but part of the
whole picture, the nature of things. I am like
a duck, doing my thing, as they do theirs.
I’m at home in a boat, with a pair of oars, rhythmically
chonking my blades in the water, effortfully
pulling through and stretching forward, carefully
taking the catch and thinking about the skill;
pulling through evenly, using the feet to press
harder again through the stroke. Suddenly goes
the green flash of a parakeet, or the grey
angled outline of a heron, then I fail to think.
When the light falls on the water in the spring,
I hear my boatman voice, and the song that I can sing.