Getting blown away.

This is my bird of the day. The Long Tailed Tit. It is such a beautiful little bird and I was fortunate enough to get a few nice photographs of one yesterday, when I went out with my camera and tripod.

So here we are on another Monday and it is blowing a gale still, with no let up in sight it seems if the weather forecast for the area is to be believed. The wind has been blowing so much that we have taken to letting the back stove out at night, which means I have been re-lighting it in the mornings. This morning I also chose to give the chimney a quick clean before lighting the fire. Once that was all done, I stripped down the Pheasant carcass and put the meat to one side. The stock went back into the pan, along with Carrots, Onions, Swede and Potatoes and is cooking in the back cabin oven. I will add the Pheasant and Mushrooms later on.

After I had put the casserole in the oven, we thought we should attempt to move off even though it was blowing up a storm outside, so we untied the ropes and off we chugged. I stepped off of the boat at Foxton Bridge to walk to the swingbridge, hoping beyond hope that it would be working ok. As I was about to unlock the padlocks and close the barriers, I let a car pass over the bridge only for it to park up on the other side. It turned out to be a British Waterway's man, who had come to check on how the bridge was working. He stood and watched as I struggled to open the flippen thing, and then asked me "How was it then". I felt like saying to him "How did it look". I politely explained to him that it was very hard to move and he agreed that it was causing some issues, which they are trying to fix. Making it work properly cannot come quick enough for me, because at this rate it is going to give me a hernia.

All the way to Market Harborough we were fighting with the wind. The boat at times was moving sideways along the cut. I was keeping a very close eye on the trees, which were bowing their heads very deeply as we passed beneath them. I had visions of one coming down in front of us, or even worse on top of us. But as they say 'The show must go on'. We got to bridge 14, the Union Canal Society moorings and dropped off Four bags of coal to a customer, I then walked to the 48 hour moorings near the basin, to see if there were any moorings and low and behold there was one big enough for us to get into.

We are now safely all moored up and lunch has been eaten. I have been and collected our post and Keith has gone down the town to collect his laptop, which has been repaired. We will be here for a couple of days, because we have customers to deliver coal to and jobs to sort out. I am now about to venture out to put the TV ariel up. This should be fun.

Have a great Monday everyone.

Chat soon xx