Summer's Lease

Blue skies at Goodwick yesterday

‘Someone’s going to be busy,’ says the cashier at Wilko eyeing our bucketful of cleaning goodies. Summer in west Wales, like the roses outside our kitchen window, showed early promise before being battered by strong winds and heavy rain leaving only a glimmer of hope. But today, the sun is shining so what are we doing to make the most of this rare bright day? Why, we’re scrubbing the boat, of course!

Actually, one of the aspects of sailing that I really like is the ‘playing houses’ bit, making another home from home. We’re currently working our way through washing the teal and white upholstery covers, we’ve tackled the mainsail cover – which included The Thing That Crawled Inside, Cr*pped Itself and Died (discovered when Tom shook the mainsail out over me, Rose and Si when we were eating our sandwiches) – and now, I’m cleaning the inside whilst Tom sorts out power and water to clean the outside.

For a 23ft boat, Blue Nun’s surprisingly spacious with lots of headroom, which is one of her plus points. The DVD player with drop down screen in the forecabin (to watch what? A Perfect Storm? Dead Calm? Overboard?) is a questionable asset and the Porta Potty (bleurgh!) is definitely going to be replaced by a boat loo. To be fair, my sprucing up of the interior is more of a psychological ‘out with the old, in with the new’ kind of clean, but it’s when Tom turns the power washer on the exterior that the satisfying transformation begins and Blue Nun starts to regain her sparkle. All told, it’s been a good day!

Swabbing the decks!

It was a good day, with lovely weather, three years ago when Lily and Russ got married and now, of course, they have Bee! Congratulations to them and to my parents-in-law, aka MiL and DiL, who celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary on Thursday. Given that MiL’s had to overcome serious health problems this year, we’ll be particularly pleased to raise a glass to their continued happiness when we meet for a family party later this week.

And finally, a small celebration of my own; the German edition of Only True In Fairy Tales. I studied German for part of my degree and produced a very average dissertation after struggling through original historical texts, however I’m pleased to say that reading this delightful translation is banishing painful memories of those dry old tomes and introducing me to words that are much more fun to learn. My thanks to Choc Lit and to Heidi.