Voyage of the Spurvehog, 2024

We found that as expected the Thames was on red alert for high stream flow, and so it would not be possible to access it today.  We are beginning to think that this might be the situation for the week to come, as more rain is forecast for Thursday and Friday which will raise the levels in the Thames again.  Today the water level at Reading was only 24 cms lower than the acceptable high, so we think the possibilities of being able to get to the Kennet and Avon are quite small.  So what we might do is spend a few more days in Oxford and then begin the journey back to Gayton!  Not quite the trip we had planned, but we are having fun, if not as much boating as we might have expected. It was a lovely sunny day today, and so Belinda and I walked quite a lot of the way between locks, certainly from the 2nd lock on the trip down into the centre of Oxford - about 5 miles or so I guess. There is something really calming and lovely about travelling through green trees, green wa...

 So about 9.30am, I walked the couple of hundred yards to Isis lock to set it ready to go down onto the Thames, and had let the water into the lock and suddenly realised the the lights were flashing red on the sign that explained what the navigability of the Thames was like.  Red means that you cannot join the river.  So back the boat went to our mooring, and we all looked at the website which tells you about the safety of navigation on the river and it had not been updated since yesterday. Updating should happen by 11.00am.  I had a zoom call with the college in Ghana at 10.30am, so the rest of the team went off to the nearest lock on the Thames to find out what the situation was.  They came back as I finished my zoom call having visited the lock and discovered that we might not be able to get onto the Thames until Thursday which was not quite what we wanted to hear.   We were also concerned about the levels of diesel we had and the need for a pump ou...

 After our family left last evening, it rained from about 20 minutes after they had left until about 10.00am this morning.  Then it stopped for a while and then started again! We wanted some stationery, so we braved the drizzle and set off in search of a stationery shop, which we successfully found, and then decided to stop at one of the many little cafes in Jericho to have some lunch.  We found a lovely and very busy cafe called the Opera Cafe and as you can see Chris had almost enough hollandaise sauce on his Eggs Benedict!  James and Belinda were joining us today after lunch, and so we needed to be back at the boat to make sure we were there in time for them, which we were, and magically the rain stopped allowing us to help them bring their stuff from their car to the boat in the dry - definitely a win.  They then drove off to take their car to a place called Kintbury where they have some friends and planned to leave their car there so that it will be close t...

 Jonathan and Amelia had decided to undertake a journey to Oxford for a different day out and hadn't told the children we were going to be there.  They were very suitably amused and pleased when we joined them for coffee in the cafe at the Ashmolean.  Mary(8) and James (6) were both involved with topics on the Egyptians and the Greeks at school, so that was a useful focus for the visit. We spotted the necessary Grecian Urns and Egyptian Mummies and enjoyed the discussion about the purposes of canopic jars.  The kids were good including Tim who thought we ought to be looking for rabbits.  They were in rather short supply, but we did do a good line in finding sheep, fruit, lutes and horses in 15th Century art!  This jar has an image of Heracles fighting the lion - objects were not lit well I would say and unhelpful reflections often spoiled their viewing, not just the taking of pictures. There were a number of vases depicting sporting activity, but this seeme...

We left Thrupp to an altogether sunnier and nicer morning, though the wind from the north was cold.  Most of the way it was blowing on our backs so was not as chilling as it might have been. This was where we moored last night - a canal community with a row of cottages ending in the pub (with the blue car outside).  It is unlike most of the communities that we've passed on the canal in that it was specifically built to support the canal and to profit from the canal trade. As before, we came upon three locks which were all quite rural and spread out on our journey - we only had 6 miles to get to the centre of Oxford. There were several lift bridges too, and sometimes the next lock came upon us at an inappropriate time in the coffee making process!!  It was my turn to wind this one, so I took the coffee with me! The stretch of canal that goes into Oxford has a lot of boats on it moored as part of the city's Agenda 21 initiative which allows people to moor long term as resid...

This was another day when the weatherman failed to warn us that there would be rain.  Mostly it was drizzly sort of dampness rather than driving rain, but nevertheless we had certainly not ordered it! Where we had moored at Lower Heyford was about 8 hours boating from Oxford, so we decided that we would make two shorter boating days out of it, so that we could arrive in Oxford lunchtime on Friday or thereabouts rather than at 6.00pm when such moorings as there are might not be available.  So that left us with a leisurely motor down the canal to a place called Thrupp where we were aware that there were moorings, somewhere to fill the boat up with water and a tea room which sold cakes! When we got out of the cutting that we had been moored in we passed very close to Lower Heyford Station.  It's extremely weird to hear the platform announcement through the gap in the hedge as you are passing on the canal.  What was immediately clear was that the livestock had changed....

Attentive readers will remember that we visited Banbury last year, and explored Tooley's Yard, the oldest service yard for canal boats still operating on the system. It does all sorts of repair work and has a dry dock where it can work on boats for extensive periods.  In terms of ordered workshops it probably scores pretty lowly, but it almost certainly will have the tool somewhere that does turn the left hand widget on the gizmo.  We didn't go around the yard again, but it clearly is a special place for boat nerds to visit.  The two boats in the foreground here are part of Tootley's yard, but in it you can see how much has been done to gentrify the canal side as it goes through Banbury, and how narrow it is for boats to get through, especially if there are boats moored on the right.  The bridge you can see links the museum on the right to the shopping centre on the left.  I went into the museum (we had visited last year) and had a chat with the man on the entry...