Juggle

I'm not sure we've ever done a shorter distance from one mooring to the next, except when we've tootled round to Tixall Wide from the marina for the night – perhaps not even then. We needed to do some stuff in Great Haywood but didn't want to have to go back to our own marina berth, so we came up Haywood Lock and found a good space in the sun between the lock and the junction.

It was all about various jobs – pick up a package from the Post Office, get some 2032 batteries for the kitchen scales and some more kindling. Drying clothes – washing them is easy courtesy of our little Candy, but drying them isn't straightforward in this weather. And then, when I was checking some storage, I noticed we'd shipped an inch of water in the chain locker at the front, what with all the rain. So I wanted to clear that out and dry it, which meant leaving things open and therefore not unattended.

In the end, I got the package and the batteries from the Post Office, and the kindling from the farm shop, while my best beloved stayed on sentry duty. Then she put the washed clothes in the shopping trolley and pulled it down to the marina's laundry room to put through the dryer, while I was extremely busy doing things on Erin Mae. Unfortunately, there was a queue of people for the dryer, so she came back with the washing still damp. That merited a restorative cuppa, while I rigged one of our drying frames and pegged out the wet stuff. Who knows what an evening of the Squirrel pumping out dry heat will do?

Juggling, as everybody knows, is an extremely demanding and clever activity.