Birmingham and Walsall

I'm going to try to be a little more up-to-date in my blog posts. Yesterday we drove to Birmingham to see Ally and Ben, and to do some jobs and stay overnight before today's boat meeting in Walsall. The drive yesterday was slow and tedious: not much more than 150 miles in four and a half hours. There were holdups on the A14 and M6. Next time I'll revert to our route avoiding the M6, but it's difficult not to use the A14.


My first job on reaching Birmingham was to replace the light switch in the kitchen. "Energy saving" compact fluorescent bulbs had been put on a dimmer circuit. The dimmers didn't, and a burning smell had been coming from the switch. When I took the switch off the wall one wire had come adrift. This had obviously been sparking across, and, not visible in my photo, there was a charred hole in the plastic enclosing the electronics. A straightforward non-dimming double switch went in its place.


Another job was to fill a large hole in the kitchen ceiling where a leak had been repaired some months previously. I ran out of time to finish this, but at least there isn't as much of a cold draught falling on the kitchen table now!

Jan, meanwhile, rubbed down and primed the wood-clad face of the garage at the end of the garden.

This afternoon we drove to Walsall for our Shadow syndicate meeting, our first under BCBM. We agreed on various things to do with winter maintenance, and decided that we'd move the boat to a new mooring next year: Wigram's Turn Marina at Wigram's Turn (or Napton Junction) on the South Oxford/Grand Union Canal.

I had wondered if today we might have met up with Captain Ahab, but perhaps you didn't get my e-mail, Andy. So at 1730 we set out for home, arriving four hours and forty minutes later. We stopped in Thetford for some late bargains and a newspaper.