It continued to be really warm yesterday evening, so it wasn’t until about 9.30 before it was cool enough to take Macc for a proper walk — during the afternoon, all the stone paving round here was too hot to walk on, so he had to be carried to the shady bits. We walked all round the basin, and there’s a nice view from the bridge towards the far end.
We came back via the other side and across the bridge in front of the boat.
Not long after we got back, our fellow pontoon moorers arrived back from an evening at London Zoo. They’re podcast listeners, which is nice to know, and we had a good chat. Their Finesse boat is only three weeks old. There was some rain in the night, but you wouldn’t really have known it by this morning, although the temperature was a lot better. I walked round to the Elsan at Little Venice, but it’s quite a long way with a yellow water bottle; I wondered whether finding the loos at Paddington Station might be quicker! For Macc’s walk, we went under the A40 and found a couple of small grassy areas, where he would have had zoomies had he not been on the lead. One of them has three statues (are they statues? They’re flat and little more than outlines really).
They are Michael Bond, complete with Paddington Bear, Alan Turing, and Mary Seacole. More info here (and I notice that this site also says the statues are very difficult to photograph, which is definitely true!). A little further on there’s St Mary’s graveyard, which apparently has some graves worth seeing and gravestones round the walls, but it’s closed at the weekend so I’ll investigate that next week.
We were supposed to have visitors including a dog today, but the heat no surprisingly put them off. So we’ve had a quiet day which has been quite nice after yesterday’s long hot journey, and we will have people to see us tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the latest issue of Waterways World is out, and includes quite a few bit by me. About half the Crick Boats coverage is mine (although they haven’t put names on any of it, which is quite nice) and there’s a piece about the Fens Arm. In addition, there’s a piece about podcasts, which includes a lovely review of The Water Road.
The piece also confirms what I’d concluded myself: that there aren’t many canal podcasts, and those there are aren’t doing what I’m doing. Hopefully it will help bring in a few more listeners.