Pat’s back... Hurray

After 10 days of a bachelor existence I thought I had the boat more or less sorted out. That was until Pat returned on Wednesday. After picking her up from Heathrow and doing some chores in and around Welwyn Garden City we got back to Trent Lock around 7.30pm that evening and she proceeded to rip the place apart, despite just getting off a 24-hour flight. That’s my gal!

Yesterday (Thursday) was much of the same and basically everything has moved somewhere else. I never realised we had so much storage space under our bed, so we have been able to utilise that for larger stuff, that I was struggling with. The result is more room and the boat feels more homely. I finally worked out how to turn the immersion on (Mick at the boatyard said he had told me twice how to do it) so we now have lashings of hot water. Despite some cold nights the central heating is off and will remain off. Our friends on Jandai, Kingfisher’s last bespoke build, told me that a 13kg gas bottle lasts them around 10 weeks. Mine lasted barely 7 days, so we have been discovering the joys of lighting and running our multi-fuel stove and feeding it copious amounts of wood (that I had been storing for a year) topped up with coal. We keep setting off our smoke alarm, but I guess that’s par for the course.

Eileen from "Free Spirit" and TCW share Long Eaton Lock

With just a day to go now until the big launch, when our friends and family come up we are taking her back into the dock this morning. The boys still have a few small jobs to finish off. John has some shelves to add, a shoe rack to put in one of the wardrobes and I need to touch up the scrapes I have had over the last two weeks. All the boaters using the dock at the moment have laughed at my paranoid behaviour in this department but once we have got this weekend out of the way, I will go with the flow, and not let them bother me so much.

Will blog again on Sunday with the launch pictures. Don’t forget to tune in to Radio 2 at midday on Saturday to hear Roger on Graham Norton’s Saturday show, live from Trent Lock.

Toodaloo