Back to work

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

At last, the reason why I've been here so long (kind of): work! Yes, I know I'm supposed to have given that kind of thing up for a bit, but when you get specifically asked and when it's nice people that are asking, it's hard to turn down. Besides, after replacing the water pump, buying a fridge, having lots of work done on the engine and buying a tank of diesel, I could do with the money!

It's in London—of course—but to minimise the travel expenses I've been told to get the 08:19 and my employer will meet me on it. As it happens we don't meet, although he's on the same train somewhere, and it's St Pancras before we actually catch up with each other. Then off to the new offices that they've moved to and lots of familiar faces to meet and greet.

I'd been concerned that I'd be rusty after a few months of not thinking about work or doing any programming (unless you count the programs I wrote to solve some of the problems presented during Professor Layton and the Curious Village on the Nintendo DS). I needn't have worried—it was exactly like riding a bike. Before I knew it I was firing up editors, changing bits of HTML, re-writing scripts and generally in the swing of it as though nothing had happened. It was all very gratifying. The morning went well and after a quick trip to the canteen (not as nice as the one in their old building if you ask me) I had a relatively successful afternoon. Successful, that is, until it all went a bit wrong and I couldn't figure out why. I could see that there was clearly something inconsistent, but couldn't put my finger on what. Eventually, after almost everyone had gone home, my host suggested that I'd be better off leaving it and looking at it with fresh eyes in the morning, so we left. I do hate it when you go home knowing that things are broken.

The journey home was fine. No problems with either the Underground or the train, and I had some leftovers from yesterday's Tacos for dinner. I was completely exhausted after that and barely managed listening to the BBC's Science In Action podcast special about the Large Hadron Collider before I was off to bed. I didn't stay there long though—all that tea I'd been drinking during the day meant that I was up just about every hour through the night. Still, at least it stopped me having an awful dream about my boat being stuck dangling over a weir, which I was definitely having at one point.

When there were chores to do

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Today was a big 'chore' day: I checked the water and oil levels in the engine, filled the water tank, emptied the loo, emptied the bins. I also emptied my engine bilges using a special hose thingy that they have here. They still look disgusting, but at least they're not awash with water (which had come out of the engine when we disconnected the water pump, what seems like weeks ago).

In the afternoon I wandered into town and hit Sainsbury's. I only wanted a lettuce, but I got a few other things while I was there. Next I went to Homebase to buy carpet tiles. I'm gradually replacing all of Oothoon's carpeting with tiles, which are easier to hoover and also much more practical on a boat, and Homebase have some quite nice blue ones. As I'd bought so many (or rather because they're so heavy and unwieldy), I got a taxi back to the boat with them.

Dinner was tray tacos again and I spent most of the evening reading my e-book or playing Animal Crossing: my mortgage to Tom Nook is 299,000 bells and as there's barely 100,000 bells left, I'm determined to clear it!

The National Space Centre

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Another glorious day and probably my last chance to see the Space Centre in Leicester, given that they'll be shut tomorrow as it's Monday. The X3 bus doesn't run on Sunday so I had to catch the train, but that gave me an opportunity to talk to someone about compensation for the delay on Friday and I could buy tickets for this week's trips to London.

When I got to the station the ticket office had a notice saying it was closed, so I went to use the 'FastTicket' machine. I was able to choose the ticket I wanted straightforwardly enough and I shoved my credit card in to pay. Usual rigmarole: type in PIN, wait around for it to have a think, card back, then tickets. Except that after giving me my card back, it continued to claim that it was authorising my payment. After a minute or two I knew something was up and sure enough bits of Windows started to break through the display, including the Windows control panel. Why oh why oh why won't people learn that Windows is an unreliable consumer-level desktop operating system, not a hardened robust system for building embedded applications? The number of times you see either a windows error message or Blue Screen Of Death on machines that the public need to rely on, like airport arrivals/departures screens, ATMs and, well, train ticket machines, beggars belief. Anyway, it turns out that the ticket office did have someone in it and I went over to complain. They didn't seem to think that the ticket machine crashing while it was trying to take money out of my account was much of a problem, that it didn't do it often, and that they'd had no complaints. The ticket office fella wandered over to the machine, looked at it, pressed the close box on the Windows Control Panel window, then wandered back to the ticket office as though it was no big deal. "There you go—try again," he said. I declined and asked to buy my tickets from him instead, asking also about tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday. I also made sure I picked up two compensation forms—one for Friday and one in case I'd been debited by the abominable ticket machine—then raced up to the platform with a minute to go before my train was due to depart.

My wandering around Leicester last week meant that I thought I had a good idea of how to get to the Space Centre from the train station, but not a good sense of how far it is. I'm not the world's fastest walker, but it took best part of an hour to thread my way into the centre of town, out the other side, along the dual carriageway of the inner ring-road, past the sad bus depot, the luxury flats of the Shoe Factory ("Open Day—flats from £125,000") and along the Soar. The Abbey Pumping Station was doing its best to attract me back there, as it was Steam Day and everything was up and working, but I was trying to be focussed and ignored its beautifully engineered charms for the stark modernity of space.

The Space Centre building is a marvel of high-tech. It's a big tall thing, as you'd expect from something that's likely to have rockets in it, but instead of building it from glass or concrete, there's a modest concrete tower to support the ventilation and emergency stairs, then the rest of the tower is made from gigantic curved air pockets, not unlike the 'trapped air' pillows that people pack things in boxes with, to stop them from getting damaged.  These have little grey spots printed on them to reflect sunlight, yet they still allow a degree of transparency to make the inside bright and airy. Inside it's like every other 'modern' museum, with lots of interactive exhibits, flashy displays, models and a cinema. I'd not been in there long before I realised that I wasn't sure what I was expecting to get out of it. I was surprised to find that I seem to know a lot about the training that astronauts undergo and how people work in space, and I'd followed the various probes that we've sent out to explore the solar system enough to have a good understanding of what they've found, so what really stood out for me were the actual bits of space hardware. I'd never seen a space suit before or 'space cutlery' (which looks like it came from Ikea). There was quite a lot of stuff that Helen Sharman (the only British astronaut to have actually been in space) brought back from her time on Mir in 1991, which although humdrum, has the glamour of having been off-world. Surprisingly, most of the stuff in the centre is from Russia rather than the USA, which perhaps reflects the less elitist attitude that the Russians seem to have about this kind of thing; or maybe the Smithsonian have first ebbs on NASA's old tat. Who knows?

The hightlights of the visit, I have to say, were the bit of actual moon rock (I really was in awe of that), the film "Stars" that is narrated by Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker out of Star Wars) and—best of all—an actual Soyuz spacecraft that we'd rescued from rotting away in a park somewhere in Russia. I hadn't appreciated until that point just how small spacecraft are. I mean, I know that hardware is expensive to get into space and that every ounce counts, but really this stuff is as small as it can be to do the job. I'm sure that when I finally get to see a Lunar Lander, it'll be the size of a 1960's Mini!

Would I recommend the Space Centre? Well, if you've got kids then the answer is a definite yes. We've got a lot of problems on this planet and we really need to get on and solve them, but I firmly believe that we have to have one eye to the future and that space is probably where that future lies. The story of space is also mainly about people who've done extraordinary things, whether to build something that can leave this world or to be a passenger on it. I think we need to remind ourselves that we can do great things if we try. No deity necessary (as Star Trek's Mr Spock once said). But otherwise...it has to be the Abbey Pumping Station on a steam day, no question.

Back to Harborough on the train and a low-rent dinner in KFC before heading to the Union Inn for the quiz. No sign of Dave and Pam, which was disappointing, so I start the quiz by myself. I'm really floundering when they turn up and it's delightful to see them again. Straight away they apply themselves to the task of answering the many questions I couldn't, but it didn't help. Once again we came 3rd last. Oh well, at least we're consistent. They're off bright and early tomorrow, so after the quiz we say our goodbyes on the wharf, but I'm sure our paths will cross again and I look forward to when that happens.

Tip from the top: M&S Percy Pigs are No. 10 on Vogue magazine's "Do not miss" list, which is the exactly the excuse we've needed to justify buying them. And I've just realised that I've started calling this place "Harborough" the way the natives do. Time I left!

Arts Fresco!

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

I was feeling a bit blue this morning, but the weather was glorious and just for a change I'm in the right place: today is Market Harborough's Arts Fresco festival, where they close off the streets and give the whole town over to art and entertainment. It was packed, with loads of things going on all over the place, including a beach where the adults could supervise the kids' sandcastle making from the comfort of deck chairs, comedians, statues that came to life, a camera obscura, a séance, Punch and Judy, various weird street performers including a fantastic 8ft high waitress pushing an afternoon tea trolley, a bizarre 'underwater' dance thing that took place in a gigantic inflatable sea shell, brass band bell boys, some troublesome waiters who seemed mainly to insult people, and Transformers! (Well, maybe just huge robots—I'm not that well up on Transformers these days.) It was wonderful.

Things came to an end about 5pm and a little while later I found myself having a pint in the Red Cow, which is a very nice 'proper' pub right in the centre of town. When I'd finished, it was just after 6pm and everyone had gone. It was such a surprise. After the hustle and bustle of the day and all those people, it felt like I was completely alone. I wandered around for a bit, thinking that I might have dinner somewhere because I was famished, but nothing really caught my eye. Eventually I decided that I'd go back to the boat and get my e-book, then come back into town and have pizza. As it happened, the Union Inn were still serving food so I ended up in there, having sirloin steak with mushrooms, paté and cheddar cheese. It was delicious and I'm pleased I went there, but I was still home by 8:30pm and once again feeling flat. I don't know whether it's seeing my neighbours yesterday that's making me 'homesick' or whether it's just that there are some things that are better done with friends and today would have been one of them. Either way, it seems like the 'real world' is a long way away tonight.

The Big Smoke

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Off to London to see the Queenophthalmologist. I'd been referred after my optician, using a completely unreliable 'blow air in his eyes' test, decided that the pressure in my eyeballs was too high and that I might have glaucoma. Apparently this is easy to treat if caught early and better safe than sorry. The optician passes the buck to your GP, who gives you a choice of four ophthalmic hospitals you can go to. Living in London, one of my choices was Moorfields—as my GP puts it "the best eye hospital in Europe"—so hardly a difficult choice, although the wait to see them was quite long. Today was the day.

20 mins to Market Harborough station, a 5 minute wait, then one hour ten to St Pancras. Pretty good going really. From St Pancras there's a 10 minute walk to...St Pancras Underground station (well it feels like 10 minutes anyway) followed by a couple of stops on the Northern line to Old Street. Moorfields is out exit 8 and follow the green line. Dead easy.

Moorfields are very professional and I'd barely had time to sit down before they were running tests on me. There's the inevitable wall chart, followed by a 'click the button when you see a flashing light' test where they cover one eye with a pirate patch while you do it. It's really hard work, especially as it lasts for several minutes per eye, and you start seeing things and your eyes start wandering. Once all that's done, it's time for the eye drops: first you get the anaesthetic ones, so they can poke your eye with a pointed stick (in reality it's some kind of pressure probe), then you get the yellow ones which allow them to do a digital 3D scan using what looks like a laser—all very impressive, especially when they show you the terrain map of your eyeball and rotate it so you can see the start of the optic nerve—finally you get the stingy drops that dilate your pupils, so they can look at the back of the eyeball.

After that it goes a bit downhill as you join the huge queue waiting to see one of the four consultants who are on duty. After the express handling I'd had so far, sitting like this seems a little old fashioned and there are people in the queue ranging from liggers like me to others who must nearly be blind. Eventually I'm called and after reviewing the data, the consultant wants a look for himself. More drops and a 15 minute wait later, he has a good look inside my eyeballs using a very bright light and decides that my eyes are absolutely fine and I can be completely discharged.

Back to Ice Wharf, where I've missed the opportunity to look around King's Place. Fortunately my neighbour Cliff has been on the tour and offers to tell me what happened over dinner. After he grabs a bottle of red wine, we go to Paulinos—a little Thai place he knows on King's Cross Road. I'm sure he's mentioned it before, although I've never been, and when we get there I realise why: it's a tiny little yellow-fronted cafe, barely large enough to hold two standing customers let alone the staff. Once inside you go through an arch and there's a small restaurant out back, able to hold maybe 20 people. Cliff says that it's not much to look at, but the food is wonderful and you can BYOB. Of course, he's absolutely right. I let him do the ordering and the food that arrives is great, the waiting staff are also very friendly and helpful, and Cliff is clearly a regular (in fact it was his third time there that week). Over dinner he explains about how the terrace at the back of King's Place, that we're so worried about, is actually a public right-of-way. This clearly complicates things and with the terrace being covered and having such a nice view, there's a possibility it'll attract a little homeless community. I got to know quite a few homeless guys last year when I was stuck on the Thames—the bench on the shore next to my boat was their regular afternoon meeting place—and they're not all druggies and drunks, but along with the concert-goers popping out onto the terrace with their G&T's and the smokers popping out to feed their addiction, they're just more people I'd rather not have within bottle-throwing distance of my bedroom.

After dinner we went back to Cliff's boat and were joined by Dinah next door. It was all very comforting and familiar, sitting there drinking and catching up with the latest gossip on the mooring and who's staying on which boat and why. I was clearly going to miss the 21:30 train back but was determined to make the 22:00, so I said my goodbyes and headed for St Pancras. Although Battlebridge Basin, where Ice Wharf Marina is, isn't very far from King's Cross (which is next door to St Pancras) it might as well be half a mile away if you run slap bang into the middle of passengers who've just got off a train. There's a quickie route, taking the bridge from Platform 1 across to platform 8, but that's shut for the rebuilding that is going on in King's Cross at the moment, so there was nothing to do but mill along the platform with everyone else. That delayed me so much that it was 21:57 when I got on the train, only to find that it was pretty much full. I resolved to stand until Luton—the first stop—where I figured a lot of people would get off. They did and I was able to secure two seats in a group of four round a table. On the other side of the table was a man travelling to Nottingham, who had headphones on and was listening to music from his laptop.

Just south of Wellingborough the brakes suddenly went on. I grabbed the table and wondered whether the train would de-rail and I'd end up being a statistic, but after going 'thump thump thump' over something, it eventually came to a halt. We all sat there and looked at each other, wondering what had happened. After a few minutes, the train manager spoke over the intercom to explain that we'd hit "an obstruction on the line", that instructions had been radio'd for and he would let us know once they'd been received. Thinking that the instructions might be a long time coming, I popped to the buffet car, only to find that the buffet was closed, so it was back to my seat and wait. After quite a while, the train manager spoke again, saying that the police had been called and that people would be coming to check the train. At the mention of the police there was a ripple round the carriage, and the word 'suicide' cropped up a few times. A chap behind me complained that if it was a suicide, it'd be the 2nd tonight, as the Underground had been delayed by a 'person under the train'. There was nothing to do but wait and eventually police officers carrying torches walked past the train and along the tracks. A little while before the train started to move again, a passenger—who had gone forward to talk to the train manager—re-entered our carriage and said that the 'obstruction' was a man carrying a can. This, to me, put paid to the idea of a suicide, but the chap opposite said that it had to be a suicide because you'd be able to hear the train coming and be able to get out of the way. I pointed out that you'd only hear the train if the wind was in the right direction and with trains travelling at 125mph or more, they can come from no-where in the time it takes you to even notice they're there. Someone would only need to choose the wrong time to take a 'shortcut' over tracks near a bend, to find a train had run them over before they knew what had hit them. I can see now why, if your car conks on a level crossing, the advice is get out the car NOW and don't even try to start the car or push it off the track.

Eventually we continued on to Kettering, where we were all asked to leave the train. Due to a bit of re-routing, the train behind ours was already waiting on another platform and we were hurried over there so we could get on. When that train got to Harborough a little while later, it was 01:20—a far cry from the 11:10 I'd expected to arrive.

A day when not much happened

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Having woken up with good intentions of going back to Leicester and seeing the Space Centre, I didn't. What I actually did was mope around the boat for a while tussling with the Internet, playing Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS and gassing on the phone. In the end I decided that I had to do something to get me out of the boat, especially as the weather was good, so I went into town to buy train tickets for my trip to London tomorrow. I'm quite pleased that I did—turns out that the station is a lot further away than I thought, although in practice it's only a 20 minute walk from the boat and that's at the speed I walk! The ticket was £35.50 return, but that includes an all-zones travelcard, which must be worth quite a few quid in itself, so not bad.

Not far from the station is Sainsbury's and the duelling German behemoths of Lidl and Aldi. In the end, Aldi's seductive advertising of a 2.8Kw petrol generator for £180 won me over, even though it isn't going to be available until next Thursday, and in I went. The lovely American soup that I'd enjoyed when I got to Foxton locks in the rain last week seem to have vanished, although I did find a single stray packet hidden amongst some packets of Gyros mix (Gyros seems to be Greek for Kebabs). Not a very interesting shopping journey, but I bought enough food to keep body and soul together for a few more days. Over in the booze section, which I don't normally go in, except this one was particularly well stocked with ales, was a real find: wheat beer flavoured with grapefruit! I'm quite partial to Belgian fruit beers but I'd not seen grapefruit before and a six-pack wasn't very expensive, so I splurged. It's actually very nice; especially when really cold.

Back on Oothoon I had a simple dinner of corn on the cob, followed by Aldi's lightly battered lemon sole served with home-made mash. After pottering around for a while, it was off to bed with my new e-book: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. I was curious to read this after it was the answer to a question in last week's pub quiz. So far it's quite good, with nicely drawn characters and language that isn't too antiquated. I'll let you know what I think.

Leicester!

Market Harborough, 0 miles, 0 locks

Sunny today, so I was up early and on the bus to Leicester. My plan was to see the National Space Centre and if there was time I'd heard that the next door Abbey Pumping Station was equally worth a visit.

I got to Leicester a little after 12 and got off in Charles Street, by all the shops. From here it's a short walk to the clock tower which is the centre of the city. I don't know Leicester at all, having been only twice before (and one of those was at nearly midnight for a curry) and I'd stupidly not taken my Nicholson's, but I figured that there would probably be tourist information. Apparently there is because I kept seeing signs for it, but I completely failed to find it. I couldn't find any boards with maps either, so in the end I resorted to Google Maps on my phone. While it can give you directions, it assumes that you're travelling by car and it wasn't until I'd walked a goodly distance in what turned out to be the wrong direction (because I was being directed to the inner ring road) that I realised. The other feature of my phone that would have been useful—the built in GPS—followed that fine tradition of phone GPS' and was completely useless.

Having walked around much of the city centre by now, I was starting to get the hang of where everything was, although this wasn't getting me to the Space Centre. Like Birmingham, Leicester is encased in a dual-carriageway inner ring road and although this was the best route to get to where I wanted to be, it's not the nicest. In the end, knowing that the Space Centre is next to the canal, I headed for that and walked along the towpath. It's okay I suppose. Not actually unpleasant, but not lovely either. There are lots of derelict factories by the canal and you get the feeling that if you were mugged down there, no-one would find you for days. At a couple of the locks there were heavily graffitti'd boards telling you that you were fine if the indicator boards were green and not to proceed if they were red, but I couldn't see anything that vaguely resembled what I'd call an indicator board.

The Space Centre is actually next to the River Soar, not the canal, and I remembered this when I got to the junction between them at Swan's Nest bridge. From here you get a great view over both Belgrave Lock and the huge Swan's Nest Weir. Although the Soar itself didn't look too high, you could see that there was a lot of water from the way it surged and foamed over the weir. Walking back along the banks of the Soar, I thought there might be a bridge over to the Space Centre, but there isn't until you get to Abbey Park Road. All of the industry that was on the island bordered by the Soar and the canal is being erased. The Wolsey factory (textiles, not cars) is in the throes of being flattened and the old shoe factory next to it has been turned into luxury 'riverside apartments'. Next to the shoe factory is the rotting carcass of the bus depot, which was once the proud home of Leicester's tram fleet back in the 1920's. This is next for the demolition ball, to make way for some glass blobs that are trumpeted on the billboards as 'Eco Homes'. Might it not be more 'eco' to restore the tram sheds to their former glory and reintroduce trams, as Manchester, Sheffield and Croydon have done? Turn Swan's Nest into a hydro-electric plant and they'd even run on renewable energy.

When I eventually got to the Space Centre it was 3pm. This is an awkward kind of time as you don't know whether there'll be long enough to see everything, and there definitely wouldn't be time to see the pumping station as well. The pumping station was only open until 4:30, but was free; the Space Centre was open until 5, but was £12. I figured that I should look at the pumping station first—given that it was free, I could have a quick look then head to the Space Centre. What a good thing that I did.

First of all, let me say that the Abbey Pumping Station is wonderful in every respect. It's set in nice grounds, there are exhibits with interpretation boards as soon as you walk through the gates, including a huge steam excavator operated by no less than three steam engines—only one of three left in the world—and that far from being a mere pumping station, it's also Leicester's museum of technology. If you like mechanical things (and I do!) then it's a joy. There are narrow gauge railways, electric cranes, steam turbine generators, a police box—and that's before you've gone in. Once inside, there are several steam engines, including an A-frame beam engine, a wall-mounted engine (to save space), a horozontal engine, a Lancashire Boiler (the Foxton Inclined Plane also used these), lots of motorcycles, a section on the Leicester tramways (including a picture of those moribund sheds back in their heyday), an area devoted to cinema, and a very large section about water purification and sanitation. This emphasis on water is because the pumping station was originally built to move sewage from Leicester's newly built sewers up to the filtration site at Beaumont Leys and the highlight of the whole museum is through a small door at the back, which takes you into the hall containing the four magnificent beam engines that did the pumping (if you look at the picture above, the hall is the entire front of the building and there are two beam engines behind each of the bay windows). Almost all of the engines in the museum still work and there are special 'steam days' from time to time, when they're all set in motion (the next one is this Sunday—14th September 2008, from 1pm until 5pm). I was having a rare old time looking around at everything, when I noticed that there was a loud roar starting to fill the air. I wandered over to find the cause of it, to see that the engineer had started their steam boiler (a modern one that runs on gas, rather than the Cochrane boiler they used to use, which is now outside). Asking about this, it was explained that a film crew were here doing a documentary and that some of the engines were to be fired up so they could take pictures. I was thrilled! Although the big beam engines weren't going to be started, the small A-frame engine, the wall engine and the horizontal engine were. It was wonderful. Of course, it isn't until you're standing watching these in full steam that you really appreciate how quiet they are. Other than the hiss of steam from the boiler, the engines themselves make almost no noise. You can see how when steam was introduced, it must have seemed very natural, since like the horses it replaced it was practically silent. It's only in our modern world, powered by petrol and diesel engines that rely on thousands of little explosions per second, that we accept the noise levels we do as being 'normal'. 

After leaving the pumping station, I popped into the space centre to make use of their café before they closed. I was quite surprised to find that after having such a marvellous afternoon, I was quite disinterested in seeing the centre itself.  Maybe tomorrow.

Had a quiet walk back into Leicester and found myself a restaurant where I could have a vegetarian thali. I like Indian food a lot, although I rarely make it at home, and there's something very homely and comforting about lots of little dishes filled with lovely tasty goo, served with bread and rice. The next bus home wasn't until 9pm so I had plenty of time to enjoy it.

I'd taken my e-book reader with me to Leicester and ended up reading Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 Days. I've seen the film several times and David Niven, for me, is Phileas Fogg, but it's interesting to go back to the original book, which is a rip-roading read and one I thoroughly recommend. It's also pleasantly short and can easily be finished in a day.