See? Water!

Just not sea water.

The point of our sailing expedition this weekend was to teach the Boy the basics about sailing holidays. In this we were 100% successful, as the first lesson of any sailing holiday must be that plans concerning sailing holidays very rarely turn out as planned.

His injury reported on earlier - and thanks to those enquiring after his health; he's fine, with a nice scar that should impress any girl who doesn't actually ask how he got it - disqualified him from the sailing anyway. Then our skipper read the weather forecast and decided we would have no difficulty at all in having a great time on Saturday, but would find it impossible to return to port on Sunday. And it would be cold and wet.

So, sailing cancelled, time for Plan B. Boy stays with his grandmother; we take my father's canoe (a 10 feet long aluminium kayak) out on a canal somewhere and introduce Best Beloved to the delights of being paddled by two strong men Cleopatra experience:

"the barge she sat in like a burnish'd throne
burn'd on the water"

and so on.

Leading to Plan C - find a marine engineer who can fix an outboard that has been in storage and unused for two years. Which we eventually did, in the town of Saltford, on the Avon between Bath and Bristol. The area around Bath is invariably quite beautiful, as if someone pinched all the local geography together and let ago again, leaving an astonishing network of steep and forested valleys. The engine was dropped off and we took the opportunity to explore, wander up and down the towpath and enjoy bucolic little scenes like this. It wasn't tacking up and down in the English Channel outside Dartmouth; on the other hand, it was warm and dry and just as quintessentially English.

Another aspect of sailing holidays is that you can very easily get down to Plan C and beyond, and still enjoy yourself. Which is a good lesson for life generally. A sailing holiday that never goes anywhere near salt water is well within the usual parameters.