CRT apologises for dozens of duplicate e-mails

A couple of days ago we were having our sandwiches in a break from painting when my phone pinged to indicate the arrival of an e-mail. Nothing unusual there. It was a standard notice alert from CRT. Again, nothing to merit comment. But my phone pinged a few seconds later with the same message, which I immediately deleted, as I had the first one. The phone then pinged again and again … and again and again and again with barely a pause. Something was clearly going wrong and there was little I could do about it. When my phone eventually stopped pinging I counted 120 duplicate e-mails (I might have missed some). Later a fresh e-mail from CRT apologised for the disruption caused to some people by a bug in the system. Let's hope it doesn't happen again.

We are now at the Black Country Boating Festival at Windmill End Junction - we could hardly be closer to the actual junction. We made an early start from Cambrian Wharf and got here at about 1000. I then spent a considerable amount of time scrubbing (notionally) white plastic tables, setting them out in the main marquee and putting chairs round them.

This evening we enjoyed an archive compilation film on boating in the midlands in the company of (among others) Andy Tidy, Barry and Sandra of the Homebrew boat, Brian and Diana of Harnser, David and Mary of Kew and Peter of Solar Kingfisher.

I expect tomorrow will see us with litter pickers in hand helping to keep the site clean.

On our way to the Black Country

Jan's using the laptop so this will be another post devoid of photos, sorry. After spending five days at a house we let in the Birmingham suburbs painting and cleaning ready for a new tenant, we have at last been boating again.

We left Yardley Wood at 1500 and arrived at central Brum at 1745. I dropped Jan off by the Mailbox so she could go to Tesco and I carried on to the services at Cambrian Wharf. There was space against the bank in the wharf so that's where we now are.

Tomorrow we'll probably make an early start as we head for Windmill End and the Black Country Boating Festival.

Fazeley to Yardley Wood in one day

It's the sort of cruising we might have done in our shared ownership days. We set off from Fazeley at 0630 and didn't stop until we reached Lyons Boatyard on the Stratford Canal, 23 miles and 38 locks later. We have a change of tenant at our house near here and wanted to check the place over. We are going to have to paint every room and organise replacing carpets. We'll be very busy for the next few days.

Again, apologies for the lack of photos. I don't think I've described our journey from Ilkeston. We did the first leg with son Andrew. He'd driven down from Sheffield; we did a car shuffle and boated to Shardlow. The next day we stopped at Barton Turn. Not the quietest of moorings, especially as there were night-time resurfacing works on the road bridge above us.

Leg 3 was Barton Turn to Fazeley. Having read Derwent6's blog we stopped at King's Orchard Marina for gas and diesel. Not far from there we encountered Del and Al in person. Del was hard at work on their battery problem but we chatted to Al for a while. Del did poke his head out of the engine room for an exchange of greetings.

And the last leg I have already summarised. We met Lisa and Dave on What a Lark near the top of the Curdworth flight - good to see you again.

Our next scheduled port of call will be the Black Country Boating Festival next weekend; we're hoping to be able to get there a day or so early in order to help set up, as in previous years. We'll see how we get on with jobs at the house.