We spent the half-term week not by EasyJetting down to Barcelona but by driving in the opposite direction, up the A1 to Northumberland, and spent a week in a lovely cottage in Allendale. The weather was really excellent with several days of brilliant sunshine, and I managed to fit in a decent moorland or riverside walk every day with the rest of the family doing about half of them. We also renewed acquaintance with my cousin Jeremy (and wife Edwina), who owns a large house and a grousemoor close to where we were staying, and the boys fished in his trout lake and burned heather on his moorland. In addition we met his two small daughters, my first cousins once removed. On Wednesday we went down to Durham to collect Guy's girlfriend Beth, renewed acquaintance with the cathedral which is one of the finest buildings in the world, and visited the Angel of the North. We even fitted in a trip to a leadmine at Killhope (and I walked home over the moors afterwards).
All in all an excellent holiday, and we kept in touch with the sea and boats through our reading - the excellent Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (the one about the narrowboat which crossed the English Channel with two pensioners and a whippet on board, and then headed down through the canals), and Paul Heiney's Last Man Across the Atlantic, which sounds like my kind of racing, to be honest (Sam found it a bit frustrating).
Coming back we glanced at the ybw.com discussion forums and were amazed to discover that an innocent post about doing laundry on board had become four pages of rants about whether people who worry about washing are fit to live aboard their boats at all. Oh dear. Possibly, having chosen to spend a week in English hills instead of in the Med, we are disqualified from posting to the Liveaboard Link for ever?
Kalessin of Orwell is a 33ft Westerly Storm. In 2006-8 we sailed her down to Portugal, into the Med, and home through the French canals. In 2011 we explored Baltic Germany and Denmark. After Sam's stroke we cruised gently on the East Coast, the Netherlands and Brittany, and in 2021 sailed to Cornwall and back. In 2024, following Sam's death, Camilla plans a memorial round-Britain cruise
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The sun came out just as I left I spent part of last weekend on the boat and was delighted to see that the boom, sails, halyards and sheets ...
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Video of photos made for Sam's funeral Dear friends and family As I hope you all know, this year has been a difficult one for me. On ...
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I thought it might be helpful to put details of Sam's funeral online. There will be an inquest into his death because he had a fall, but...
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Sam Brown, 28 May 1940 - 6 September 2023. On Sunday 27 August, Sam was feeling a bit under the weather and stayed in bed for most of ...
1 comment:
Yes, that stuff about laundry on YBW was very disappointing. . . . Because I'm a multi-circumnavigation ex-doctor sailor, I can treat your innocent enquiry with contempt . . . God knows what that bloke's bedside manner was like!! With a bit more modesty and fellow-feeling he'd know full well that laundry-ing in warm climes ain't that much of a bother and that the poor man would find that out pretty quickly and easily without the need for all that opprobrium. If you don't ask (maybe silly) questions, you don't find out nothing, even the stuff you don't need to find out. "Grehan" [nice Blog - how d'ye find the time?]
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