The Mill, Brimscombe Port, Stroud

What a glorious day! The hairdresser turned up this morning and I had the salon-at-home experience, which included a lot of vacuuming afterwards. It's great to have had my lockdown locks shorn.

After hanging up a load of washing, I headed down to the canal at Bowbridge to meet a friend AP for a walk. We went east along the canal route, past the Stroud Brewery and the canal trust bookshop, which has moved premises and will reopen in ten days' time. I saw pair of swans, with the female sitting on the nest. Good sign! Also a moorhen, but only one.

At Brimscombe Port I took this picture-postcard view of Port Mill, which is now available to let, should anyone be interested...
https://www.brutonknowles.co.uk/property-search/office-property/property/2508-the-mill-brimscombe-port-business-park
I imagine more people are WFH now. Brimscombe Port is an inland port on the Thames and Severn Canal, it even had a Customs Office at one stage. Now it's an industrial estate with one magnificent building and several more ordinary ones.

We continued past the port to Bourne Mill, where the beautiful Felt Cafe is situated, with seating adjacent to the river Frome. We were allowed to sit in the cafe garden and have drinks served to us at outdoor tables: what luxury is this small freedom! I couldn't go in because I'd forgotten a mask, but AP bought me a chocolate cake, GF. It was gorgeous, very fudge-like. I shall return.

On the way back, AP wanted to stop at the Stroud Brewery pub garden (another new freedom) so we found a table and sat to enjoy the bliss. I don't drink alcohol these days so I ordered a ginger beer. I couldn't think of anything else to ask for. Our rural idyll was shattered by a canal workboat using its engine to power a crane on its deck, that was being used to lift some heavy sacks of aggregate or similar material to the opposite bank, where some restoration work is being done.

I pointed out that canals have always been the focus of industry and that restoration is A Good Thing, but My Goodness, it was noisy!

By the time we'd walked home, parting ways at Bowbridge, I found I'd done over 11,000 steps. I rustled up a fritatta for lunch today and market lunches, then Steve came back and had some fritatta, and I made tapenade, because I was on a roll!

I sat in the cabin in glorious sunshine and listened to more of my wonderful new find: the Shedunnit podcasts, which deal with the Golden Age of British detective novels, the 1920s and 1930s (available from any podcast provider). By an awful coincidence, I listened to the true case of Nurse Daniels, a British nurse who vanished from a public toilet in Boulogne. A corpse was discovered five months later, more than a mile away, with a syringe of morphia and a broken umbrella lying nearby. Despite intensive investigations at the time, the presumed murderer has never been identified. Now I'm watching (on ITV) Accused of Murdering our Son: the Steven Clark story, about a 23-year-old who vanished from a public toilet in the UK, 28 years ago, and whose parents were accused just LAST YEAR of murdering him. They are in their 80s. Thankfully, they've now been ruled out as suspects. What an absolute nightmare this must have been for them, to relive the memories of his disappearance and to be framed for the murder, 28 years later

Tomorrow is another market day, so I've set up my stall in the hall. The internet is back on again, and apparently we will eventually get our PRS licence back, now that the church has accepted our offer to pay half of it. We will have music again, sooner or later. If the estate of Gerry Rafferty got just 1p for every time we played Baker Street, they'd be rolling in it!