Retirement with No Problem

Moored Widmead Lock, Kennet & Avon Canal

For you boaters MP Martin Vickers was asking questions yesterday to which Richard Benwyn replied..

As far as dredging is concerned there is a £40 million backlog!  As far as Pensions in concerned the actuarial valuation of the British Waterways Pension Fund pension deficit was £65.6 million, and those are figures from 2010!

And all to be sorted by the time the new Charity comes into force.. (If ever!)

And while they sort out the politics I, like all of you, sit by and wait.  Well I am used to that!  But today was so nice I decided to spend most of it out with my girls visiting yet another huge area of woodland, and taking time to go and have a look at the old Greenham Air base, now called Greenham Common.

The old airbase itself all gone now, the runways broken up and, in the main, used to make the controversial A34 Newbury bypass.

An exmoor pony.. gosh it took me ages to find them as they roam the whole area, and that is huge I’ll tell you.  Now quite a rare breed of native pony.  It is, in fact, our oldest breed of English pony.  They have a breeding program at Greenham to improve numbers.  These are perfect children’s pony and, as you can see, are really hardy.

The girls absolutely loved it over on the heathland, plenty of rabbits to sniff after in among the heather.  But there was an even higher delight today.  As I walked along a track a couple of hours earlier I noticed a calf just being born, so I stepped back for 10 minutes until Mum with calf was on her feet..

Doesn’t she look proud, it’s almost as if she want me to take a pic of her new little one.  So cold too, it was -1, you can see the frost still clinging to the vegetation.  Now then..

“Where is my first drink”.  It took ages for him to find out which end to go.  Mum shoved and jiggled and turned and mooed, but after another 10 minutes he finally found what he was looking for.. “Top right hand corner mate!”

Yeah!  And with that I left them too it hoping the farmer would notice sometime during the day and so bring them into the barn for night.  I’ll go back in a few days and see how he is getting on.  WOW made my day that!

Congrats must go to Bruce and Shelia on the first of their two books to be published on Kindle over on the Amazon site.  That must have been a lot of hard work getting the sentences right, the spelling and of course the inevitable proof reading.  No doubt an invaluable read for those just setting out on their narrowboat dreams for their retirement.  Well done you both!

And I am still feeling sad about Lynx, Sue’s wonderful greyhound who was killed over the weekend by a tumble in a back garden.  Tragic news for such a wonderful K9.. I gonna miss his jottings for sure like everybody else..

Our Maffi has been talking about the Olympics and our boats not being allowed anywhere near the scene..

“..So BW and the powers that be start talking about security. If security is a problem  a simple profiling exercise would show that boaters are are generally diamond geezers and hardly likely to lob an RPG round or SAM 7 missile into the Olympic Stadium. If boaters are a security risk then so is any one living in the vicinity. Why haven’t the powers that be started emptying the people from the local houses. You can get a better aim from an upstairs bedroom window…”

Gawd, don’t you just love him for the way he says it!?  Classic!