It has been a lovely week on the cut (canals). After last week’s heatwave it has settled down to around 21°C each day which is very pleasant. At the same time we are beginning to notice it is not fully light first thing in the morning, and it is dark when we go to bed. There have been a few mornings where it is cold enough for a mist to rise from the canal when I take the dogs out. And some leaves are just beginning to turn brown at the edges.
August is too early for autumn. It is still the school summer holidays in England and many of the crops are still growing in the fields. But it is the end of summer, and there is a flavour in the air of what is to come.
I love days like these. Warm enough for shorts but not too warm. Sunrises and sunsets. When we set off in March it seemed as if this cruise would last forever, but we are already beginning to plan how we can get in everything we want before the end of this year’s adventure – our annual visit to the boat museum in Ellesmere Port, a week sharing a holiday on the Llangollen with Mandy’s brothers and partners, one last trip on the Shroppie and Staffs & Worcester.
The important thing for me, and not my natural instinct, is to put that planning aside and enjoy every day. Being retired is like being on a narrowboat. It is not about the destination, it is about loving the journey, whether in winter, spring, summer or autumn.
This week we are back properly cruising the canals of the UK and have travelled down the beautiful Macclesfield Canal (the Macc) to rejoin the Trent and Mersey.
The Macc is quiet compared with the great canal & river thoroughfares such as the T&M, the Grand Union or the Thames. It has a reputation for being shallow, which is probably well deserved given closures in recent years, but this year we have had plenty of rain, and while some edges can be shallow, we did not find it too difficult to navigate. There is just one hire company and so most of our fellow boaters were either continuous cruisers like ourselves, or based in Lyme View marina, near Wilmslow.
After nearly six weeks with little movement it has been wonderful for us and the dogs to get back to what we love – pootling along and enjoying the journey. Sadly one of the reasons for our delay was vets tests for our dog Ziggy who it turns out has advanced cancer of the pancreas and bladder. There is nothing to be done so while as yet she is showing few symptoms, we have decided to make her last months as much fun as possible. That means cruising on the canals, cuddling and eating sausages.
We have three weeks from today to get to Ellesmere on the Llangollen canal, where we will meet up with Mandy’s two brothers and their wives who have hired a boat to share a holiday with us. We are really looking forward to that. Three weeks should be plenty of time, hopefully enough to also allow us a side trip up to Chester.
We are of course somewhat subdued with Ziggy’s news, but we are still loving the boating life, as is she.
Mandy and I have moved house twelve times since we have been together. It has become a joke amongst some of our friends who say they never know where to send the Christmas card. I often claimed that it had just become normal for us. People would ask me why I never wanted to put down roots. I would say that we are just good at setting up a new home anywhere we go.
But this time feels more stressful.
As you know we are retired and spend more than half the year on our narrowboat. That certainly feels like home when we are there. But we want to keep a house for the winter, when it is muddy. We want to keep a house for when we get bored of the boat or are too infirm to open locks. We want to keep a house so we have somewhere with a little more space for our stuff.
And this time, instead of moving for my work, we are moving closer to Mandy’s family and friends, from Scotland to Lancashire. This week we have been spending time in both as we look to sell and buy.
The sale process has been fraught. We have been “on the market” for two years and twice we have thought the sale was happening. The first time the buyer turned out not to have the money after several months. The second time, the chain of buyers fell apart at the last moment. We have waited and we hope that in two weeks we will be moved out. It has been stressful, and the solicitors are still throwing out last minute complications such as whether we can find some paperwork the council signed off when we did work on the house seven years ago. But the removal company is booked and we have begun things like cancelling utilities. We have not enjoyed selling the house at all.
We have tried to keep buying a house less stressful but we have failed. The idea was not to look at houses until we were sure the sale was happening. Our plan instead is to live on the boat while we look. But last time we were confident and found a lovely house. Of course that has gone after the failed sale, so this week we have been looking again, with our fingers crossed on the sale. This weekend we are driving round Lancashire viewing our shortlist of houses. This should be an enjoyable time. It should be exciting to find our new home. But for some reason we are not feeling excited. Perhaps it is the worry that the sale could still fail. Perhaps it is the worry that we will make a bad choice. We are not enjoying buying the house at all.
I am naturally a very positive person. I am confident it will all work out for the best. But I don’t this stress. Maybe it is because I no longer have the stress of work, so this seems like a bigger deal. Maybes it is because it is summer, and we would rather be back on the canals. But we just want to hide in our narrowboat.
This milestone is next to Marple locks on the Peak Forest Canal. I like it because it represents much of our life on a narrowboat. We travel. We see places. We plan our routes. But ultimately we have no destination. It is the journey we enjoy. That is so different to travelling in a car, where the destination is everything, and the journey is just about getting there.
And by enjoying the journey, we discover more. This week we have found wonderful moorings, just avoided big delays from closures, and been on adventures.
Starting with the adventures, I walked along a long old tramway that used to carry limestone from the Peak District down to the canal. I had a day out in Buxton, the highest town in England with history back to the Romans. And I walked to the foot of the Marple Aqueduct, the highest stone aqueduct in the UK.
The canal stoppages included a whole stretch of the Macclesfield canal which is currently closed due to the canal leaking. This is extremely serious because not only could it cause flooding of nearby land, but it could also lead to the whole of the canal draining and leaving us boaters marooned. We also found ourselves stopped halfway up the Marple lock flight, when a “pound” between two locks had drained due to a paddle being left up. And when the lock keepers let more water down to help us, the water flooded a brand new house that has been built next to the flight while it has been closed for the past ten months. Someone will need a word with that surveyor!
And we stayed at two of my most favourite moorings on the whole canal network. Bugsworth basin is like a dock at the end of the Peak Forest Canal, near Whaley Bridge, with space for up to forty narrowboats. Originally it would have been used to transship the limestone from the tramway onto boats to carry around the country. These days it is full of wild flowers and geese. So it has a dramatic mixture of old ruins and nature. Also a very good pub.
My other favourite mooring is further up that canal on an isolated stretch, with an incredible view down into the valley at a village called Strines. Apart from the occasional hiker or cyclist we have the place to ourselves, and it is just so very chilled. A beautiful midpoint on our journey to nowhere.
On a canal, the length of water between two locks is called a “pound”. On a lock flight this might be three or four boat lengths long. Sometimes it might be shorter. There is a pound on the Staffs & Worcester canal that is just a few feet long (there is a side pound where all the water goes when you empty the top lock). There are “long pounds” on canals that are very flat. For instance last week we had a forty mile pound on the Bridgewater.
Once or twice a year we find a pound is empty. Last year there was a mile long empty pound near Gloucester after a hire boater went through the bottom lock one evening and left all the paddles up. The year before we grounded in a pound overnight on the Aylesbury canal because of leaky lock gates. This week we have faced three separate empty pounds. The first was about a mile long in Wigan, caused by vandals. The second was about half a mile on the Rufford arm, caused by a lazy boater leaving paddles up. The third was a short planned “dewatering” by the Canal & River Trust (CRT) in order to inspect blocked culverts.
So what do you need when faced by an empty pound? The first and most obvious thing is a lot of water. Somehow you need to fill the canal back up to at least four feet in depth. If you think the canal is maybe twenty feet wide, and the pound is maybe half a mile long, that is an awful lot of water. You have to bring that water down from higher in the canal, maybe using bywaters that go around some locks, and sometimes by opening paddles on the locks themselves.
The second thing you need is time. You need to fill that water without draining the pounds higher up. For this reason, CRT prefer the work to be done by their staff rather than boaters. A short pound may take just an hour or two to fill, but the Wigan and Rufford problems this week took a day each.
The third thing you may need is special equipment. On our boat we carry a windlass to open lock paddles, a CRT key to open water points and swing bridges, and an anti-vandal key to open the handcuff locks used to prevent bad people causing trouble. CRT staff can remove other padlocks and open special paddles to let in water from other sources such as rivers and reservoirs. Again this has to be done very carefully to prevent flooding.
By far the most important thing you need is patience. There is no point getting cross about what has happened. It won’t help. There is no point trying to get through before the water has fully filled, because you will get stuck. Instead, we just wait it out, and look for the best. In Wigan I found a nice local butcher that I would have missed. In Rufford we just moored up and watched a couple of films.
If you are in a hurry on a narrowboat, you have chosen the wrong lifestyle. We are lucky enough to be retired. For us, narrowboating is not just about the wonderful places we go. It is about the journey to get there – however long that takes.
And we’re off! We have made several short trips already this year, but this week we set off on our narrowboat for the next six months. This is our fourth year since retirement and our fourth year of boating all summer. The first year was in the North of England, the second in the South. Last year we travelled the westerly canals and rivers – Shropshire Union, Llangollen, Montgomery, Trent and Mersey, Macclesfield, Peak Forest, Staffordshire and Worcester, River Severn, Gloucester and Sharpness, River Avon, Stratford, Birmingham and Fazeley, Coventry and Ashby canals.
The obvious thing would be to head east this year, but the canal network is not so good on that side of the country so we have decided to complete a few more of the canals we have not travelled before, while picking up some of our “greatest hits”.
This week we journeyed up from our winter base in Stone, through the very long Harecastle Tunnel, and down 25 locks of heartbreak hill in a day. We are now travelling through the very flat and very beautiful Cheshire Plain. Over the next six months we plan to moor in Liverpool docks, cross the Pennines on the curly wurlys, travel through the Happy Valley, revisit the history of Bugsworth Basin and maybe go on a steam train next to the Caldon Canal. From there our plans are more fluid and that is part of the adventure.
People often ask us how we cope living in such a confined space for six months. Sometimes we see hire boaters having massive rows as they are not used to being on top of each other even for a week. But Mandy, the dogs and I have found our happy rhythm. We don’t try to go too far each day. We empathise when someone makes a mistake driving the boat – we all do it. I am happy for Mandy to sit in a quiet corner doing her cross stitch. She is happy for me to dash off to find a stately home or a roman fort.
I think we are very privileged to enjoy this life and am really looking forward to the next six months. I love retirement.
We stayed this week at Tixall Wide. This is one of the loveliest moorings on the British canal network. Most canals are just wide enough for two boats to pass. Digging more would have been a waste of money. But when the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal was built, a rich landowner, Thomas Clifford, would only let the canal cross his land if it was dug to look like a lake, fitting in with his gardens that had recently been developed by famous gardener Capability Brown.
Narrowboat Thuis moored in Tixall Wide this week
Tixall Wide is really very beautiful and because of that gets very full. During peak season you need to arrive in the morning or you stand little chance of getting a space to moor. Even in the winter it is pretty full because it is a good place to wait out the cold weather, in walking distance of Great Haywood junction where you can get water and a bit of shopping.
But this time of year is the best to get a great mooring. Most of the winter moorers have moved on or are in marinas, and the hire boat season has not yet started. We were extra lucky this year because Tixall Wide had work done on a drainage culvert over winter, and so was not open to anyone. So this week we were moored with just three other boats. It was wonderfully quiet, and properly dark at night, with no light pollution. The moon and stars seemed so bright.
It is the earliest in the year that we have been travelling on the narrowboat since I retired and in all honesty, it is a little too cold and wet when steering the boat. In a few weeks it will be warmer and more civilised. But the big benefit is the peace. And when we are sitting in the boat with the stove keeping us toasty warm, it is a lovely place to be.
We had a catch up meeting with our financial adviser this week. In preparation we had to fill in risk questionnaires to see if our view of financial risk had changed, and so whether our pension savings were invested appropriately. The result was that I am on the 51st percentile, or to put it another way, boringly average.
I was disappointed with this result. Not because I am disappointed with how risk averse I am. I would not to want to be gambling with my money at a stage when I am retired and no new money is coming in. Nor because I am disappointed with how much I like to take risk. I worked in financial services for most of my career and understand that an element of risk comes with the returns that I think we should be getting from our savings.
But I am disappointed that it is bang in the middle because doesn’t that just make me very boring? I think now that I am retired that is my biggest dread. That I have become a boring old man. As an old work colleague once told me about retirement – my biggest adventure each day would be deciding whether to buy white or brown rolls for my lunch. I don’t think I am quite there yet. For me, my narrowboat life and long vacations are fascinating and I learn new things every day.
But I can see for others that my life must seem really unimportant and boring.
I am naturally positive. My instinct is always to see the best out of everything and to look for opportunities in adversity. Indeed, when I was working I would sometimes be criticised because I would not spend enough time on “what went wrong?” because I was always looking for “what can we do now?”.
But even positive people occasionally have bad days, and Wednesday was one of them for me.
Two things went badly wrong. The first was the dentist. I had an appointment for a crown replacement, but my new dentist took one look and told me I have bigger problems. Apparently I grind my teeth at night and they have worn down to a level where the back teeth are rubbing against each other and putting pressure on the side of the crown which was why it had split off. Fixing could cost thousands of pounds which I don’t have. In the meantime he put in a temporary crown and left me in a lot of pain as the anaesthetic wore off.
Then just as I was feeling down, my phone rang. It was the couple who are buying our house. At least they were. Their buyer had just fallen through so while they still want our house, our planned date of March 22nd is now impossible, which means the house we were buying in Lancashire is also off.
So no house and in pain. Not my best day. Mandy also understandably angry and upset. So what to do?
Normally my response would be to switch on my positive energy and find five great reasons to be happy about the day. It would probably have irritated all those around me but it would have made me feel good. But for once it was not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to wallow in my miserableness. I found a quite corner and read a book.
So now it is two days later and and I am very much back to myself. There are lots of good things that will come out of this. My teeth are fine – for now at least. We get to stay in Scotland longer. I will even get my 60th birthday Scottish bus pass. And if the Lancashire house falls through, there will be another one, Fate is our friend.
I have also decided – sometimes even the most positive of people is allowed a bad day.
My last day at work was Christmas Eve 2020. In the months before I left, I spoke to a number of people who were already retired and a common theme was that it takes years to learn how to be properly retired. When I was at work I was very used to change. It was one of the things I was particularly good at and so I doubted their words. For me, it would take maybe three months. Certainly no longer…
It will not surprise you to hear that they were right and I was wrong. That is not to say that it was not immediately enjoyable. The first few months in retrospect I treated like being at work. I had lists of jobs to do and an urgency that was just like work. I got a lot done and it was fun. I was a total irritant to my wife because I wanted to organise everything.
After that, the first year was more like a very long holiday. We had the narrowboat and were off on our first long trip, across the north of England. I wanted to make the most of every day and despite best intentions I still had a tendency to rush at everything. I did not like “days off”. If we did stop in a location I would find five or six things that absolutely needed doing and would take up my time.
The second year was better. I still had a pretty detailed plan of how we would spend the year – where we should get to by when. But I was a bit more chilled about plans changing and relaxing into each day. It was the first year after the pandemic and we made the most of it to see old friends as we boated around the south of England.
This third year has been the best yet. We have still travelled a long way, from Chester to Bristol and back. We have had real adventures and Mandy, the dogs and I have made a great team. But I have also enjoyed the days when we did not travel. I still find it hard just to read a book or do a jigsaw, and I have tended to go off and find a stately home or a new town to see. But I am getting there.
For next year’s narrowboat trip we have so far just planned the first canal – Liverpool to Leeds. It makes me uncomfortable not to have more of a plan, but I am trying to learn to be a better retiree.
When I first left work I was determined to have something to aim towards, not just to stop. I had seen too many people stop work, do nothing and get ill. And I think in that I have succeeded. We are so lucky to be able to do what we do, whether on the boat, or on our trips away. It is a wonderful life.
And after three years I feel like I am still only beginning to make the most of that life. After three years I am probably still not properly retired. But I am getting better at it!
Pete's Blog 