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.
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