January

......... moves on apace! In fact the year is passing so quickly that the month is positively running away with itself.

Not a lot has happened here at Kate Boats since we arrived and yet I seem to have been very busy in the meantime, though there’s not a lot to show for it. In as much as I have been assured that a new one is on order, my old calorifier is still leaking, filling the bilge slowly with water and the Engine Room Deckhead is as yet unsheathed from its ordeal at Stretton Wharf.

But the quiet sojourn has enabled me to get away frequently to visit friends and family that sadly have become neglected since the last time I was here. Warwick Railway Station is only ten minutes’ walk away and already I have saved on numerous journeys, the price of my annual Senior Railcard.

Even when I have been aboard, the days have passed so rapidly and I have found myself busy doing something; on this ship jobs are always there to be performed and whenever I have found the motivation to write, some task has monotonously made itself more important. But I have to be careful to make certain my priorities are correct as lethargy can, easily in my case, be the enemy that will rapidly take over if allowed.

It is so easy just to spend all day just reading a good book or listening to the radio, though this in itself doesn’t sound too evil I know. I could be spending all my hours down the way at the ‘Railway Tavern’, which seems to be a very popular pastime around here, watching ‘LIVE FOOTBALL’ on a 42” screen between two teams I can’t even spell let alone know where they come from!

Though I enjoy the writing enormously, sometimes when the spirit is willing but the motivation weak, I think it would be so wonderful to have a secretary at hand; somebody whom I could rely on to write, with loving care and sensitivity, exactly  what I was wanting to convey without me having to even switch the computer on ..... But now I’m really being silly aren’t I?

But what I have been very positive about while waiting here for things to happen, is planning where this year’s cruise will take me.

Originally I had planned that we should travel south this year but owing to the fact that ‘Futurest’ and I had managed only a fraction of our arranged itinery last year, and also that this year could be far too busy down south because of the Olympics, I have decided to journey to the north again in order to see some of the places we should have seen last year.

Also my new friend Janis is taking a year’s sabbatical from work in order to do some travelling. During the northern winter she plans to return to New Zealand to visit her family and friends that she hasn’t seen for many years but during our summer months she plans to travel the waterways over here in her boat ‘Roots and Wings’.

We both decided that it might be pleasant to travel together ‘in tandem’ so to speak during this time. It would mean that we could be companions without living on the same boat. We would be able to divide the work of voyaging together, share the pleasures and yet still maintain our status as ‘single handers’, free to go our own way at a moment’s notice if we wanted to.

We’ve decided to give it a go anyway, so let’s see what happens. Janis’ year begins at the end of April so I said I would travel round and meet her at Newark for then.

So if we can manage to get underway from here by the end of next month I thought, in the meantime it would be a brilliant opportunity to return to my beloved South Oxford once more to revisit old friends in that direction.