In the foreign

I’ve just been visiting the Billy Bubbles website for a catch-up. If you’re not familiar with it, this is the home of the online chronicles of Bill Davies, charting his Odyssean wanderings across the canals of the continent. It’s an excellent read and will take you a while if you’re a new visitor as his regular reports stretch back to 2001. But Bill repays the effort with some great narrative and travelogue detail and collectively it’s a very useful account of boating in the foreign. I’m undecided at this stage whether we’d ever take our boat over to Fance but as my mum lives quite close to the Canal du Midi, I’ve seen enough to make me think seriously about hiring one day. The basin at Castelnaudary is absolutely charming and my dogs are just champing at the bit to get into the Cat Museum there.

Talking of my mother (vis a vis an incident many years ago), how can anyone leave their own hire boat, come over to the pub for a drink with her husband and daughter and go back and get onto someone else’s boat instead? She said it was the gathering gloom that foxed her but you would have thought the German voices coming from within would have been a big clue....