In the lock

Everyone else strode into Nantwich to look at an attractive Cheshire market town while I walked slowly to the centre, watching the ground all the way (and taking pictures of tarmac, setts, flagstones, bricks and kerbs just in case I'm ever asked to explain such things), spent ten minutes in a bookshop in the market square and hobbled slowly back.

But once we'd braved the tiny sharp crustaceans on the concrete steps down into the nearby reservoir, I was as good at swimming as everyone else and more resilient to the cold. Perhaps that appalling February swim in Thames hail was some use after all. Or, more likely, the elongated youngsters on the boat are short of a bit of insulation.

They are keen and active so it was no problem my not being quick at the locks and we all enjoyed the manoeuvring involved in getting two boats down a staircase lock (where two locks are right next to each other so have only three pairs of gates) at the same time one came up).

We had to leave the boat we were travelling with when we went into an unusual lock, made of huge slabs of iron rather than brick, as it has changed shape over the years and can no longer fit two boats together.