Saturday 28th April
The only word to describe today’s weather (apart from shite of course) is wet! It has been raining all day, either hard or not so hard but nevertheless, raining. At least the wind didn’t get up until this evening or it would have been total shite!
Despite the inclement conditions we have travelled a further 6 miles and 6 locks from Rickmansworth to Denham, which is just outside Uxbridge. We had to moor up using stakes and I had a couple of problems during the process. Firstly, as I was banging in my first stake the loop which you put the rope through just fell off. Now, you don’t actually need a stake with a loop to put the rope through but I like one, so I tied up temporarily with the broken stake, got another one off Ken and started again. Unfortunately my hands were wet and as I was raising the mallet to bang in the stake, I lost my grip on the handle and it flew out of my hand, straight into the canal! I had to go and ask Ken for the other mallet now and he was wondering what on earth I was doing!
About 10 minutes, a pole and 2 magnets had to be employed to locate the mallet and retrieve it from the murky depths. With that done Ken and I decided to walk in to Denham village. This is, according to the Nicholson’s, quintessential Old England, with immense charm in a very exclusive area of the Home Counties and a mile’s stroll North West of the lock, through the country park. Unfortunately we had the map the wrong way round and did a mile’s scramble South East of the lock, through the undergrowth, up to our arses in mud and grafitti, under the motorway bridge, through a housing estate and after about half an hour, ended up in Uxbridge!
Had we intended going to Uxbridge we would have gone along the towpath and as we discovered by coming back that way it would have taken about 15 minutes! But, all was not lost because we soon spotted a Wetherspoons, hurrah! While we were in there we had a discussion about what we were going to have for dinner which culminated in the need for a trip to Tesco’s (handily opposite the pub) for some Giant Yorkshire puddings.
When we left the pub we went in to Tesco’s, located said Yorkshire puddings and as we had only the one item, waited for one of the many self serve checkouts to become available. As we approached a recently vacated one a voice piped up, ‘We’re in the queue here, there is a queue!’ To be honest we had noticed a few people lurking about near the checkouts, while we were lurking about near the checkouts, but they didn’t give the impression that were actually a queue. We immediately said sorry and started to go to what we now knew was the back of this queue. The chap who had told us about the queue said for us to carry on at the checkout but I said (having a bit of bravado after a couple of Abbotts) ‘No, no, don’t let it be said that we jumped the queue, you carry on.’ and we went to the back of the queue.
Mr There’s a Queue started to scan his items and we noticed that there were suddenly more than a few people before us (where they all came from I don’t know) at the self service so we decided to go to a ‘proper’ checkout. As we walked away alarms went off and lights started flashing at his till and he had to call an assistant. When we left about 5 minutes later he was still standing there waiting for assistance and I just couldn’t resist waving goodbye to him as I went past!
Tomorrow’s forecast is absolutely dire so we will be staying here.
