Let it rain.

Hi Folks.

Oh what a night......... No not the song by The Four Seasons. I believe the song was December 1963. My night was somewhat disturbed by the substantial amount of rain we had. The rain began pouring at 10.15pm and was still coming down as I took Paddy out for his morning constitutional. At 3.15am I woke up with a start as I thought I could hear dripping within the back cabin. I put the light on and jumped out of bed to investigate the source of this dripping. Unfortunately in doing so I had to climb over Keith, so I had woken him up. Having felt around all the places I thought the water maybe coming in, I could find nothing. However I did find water running down the chimney stack on to the stove, which had stained the embroidered cloth which is under the kettle and teapot. This was due to the fact that I had not put the saucepan back on the chimney after cleaning it all out yesterday. There was nothing for it, I had to brave the weather and go out and put the saucepan on the chimney. As you can imagine, I was soaked when I got back into the cabin, but the rain stopped running down the stack. I soaked the embroidered cloth in the galley sink and made us both a cup of tea. I realised the source of the dripping, was rain dripping off of the trees on to the slide. We sat drinking our tea and listened to the music of the rain on the roof of the boat, before settling down to try and get some kip. The rain has certainly not freshened the air, because we were both so hot that no duvet was required. I could say I was hot due to the Menopause or because of my personal Summer as Whoopi Goldberg put it on the One Show the other day. I think I am going to adopt her saying as it sounds so much nicer than Menopause ;0)
We did eventually get up at 8.45am and had decided to stay put because it was still raining. But like with most things we changed our minds when the sun came out.So at 10.55 we left our weekend mooring near The Globe Inn and set off with the view to get to Stoke Hammond. The canal was down a few inches, so it made for a fun journey. On arriving at the Soulbury 3 locks, we were listing as we approached the top lock due to a low pound. The locks were against us, as a pair of boats had gone down before us. So I set the top lock and then went and set the second lock. The pound was extremely low going to the third lock, but Keith managed to crawl into the lock. We had a quiet jaunt with very little moving. At bridge 109 British Waterways were repairing one of the bridges. It is a never ending job for them, as the bridges suffer a lot of damage, due to boats hitting them and heavy loads driving over them. We arrived at Stoke Hammond and moored up behind other boats. I made us some lunch and we then took a stroll into Stoke Hammond Village.The village sign reads A Thankful Village. Your now thinking why a Thankful Village? Of the 16,000 villages in England and Wales only 41 are called ‘A Thankful Village’. This refers to the fact that there is no First World War memorial in the village because fortunately all the men resident in the village who went to fight in the war returned home safely at its end. Stoke Hammond is mainly made up of houses. Unfortunately it looks like the village store and post office recently closed down and today the Dolphin Inn was also closed. Maybe it does not open on a Monday, or perhaps it only opens in the evening. There was nothing on the door to give us a clue to its opening hours.We walked up to the church St. Lukes for a look around. The Church was rebuilt in the 17th. century and is one of only three cruciform churches in the county. There is a single manual pipe organ inside. We did not hang around because there is a lot of building working taking place to restore the stone work. On our way back, we could not help but notice the very dark clouds looming towards us over the harvested fields and it was not long after getting back on the boat, the heavens once again opened. On the plus side we have a good TV signal, and can even get Film 4, so we are not going to be bothered by what the weather can throw at us for the rest of today.