A Wonderful Day at the Canals

While the ”news channel of the year” (SKY) is on full blast here showing pictures from an old storm (it must be, they showed the same sequence over and over yesterday and then this storm, Johanna, hadn’t reached the UK yet) I keep thinking of the one day of canal boating which everybody in my family remembers.

It was on our third day canal boating ever. Before that we had felt like idiots in side winds on the Severn, behaved like idiots in Shroudport, but as we went slowly north towards Kidderminster the weather cleared up and everything seemed so much brighter. We found a pub which we decided would be the place where we would see the Eurovision Song Contest (because Denmark had a really good song that year and we hoped that they would win, which they also did). After having checked out the pub, however, we decided it was of such a character that we didn’t want to moor the boat outside it, so we took the boat up about 500 meters, to what looked like an opening in the forest. By then it was time for dinner, and since it had started to drizzle and get dark, we didn’t get a proper view of what it looked like outside then.

Next morning I woke up about 6 to bird song. And it was hot. I made myself coffee and went outside while the rest of the family was still sleeping and when I opened the door to the front deck I could hardly believe my own eyes.

The place we had found was just beautiful. The forest floor was blue with Bluebells, along the water’s edge grew Primroses. The forest was old oaks and other leafy trees and what they lacked in fully grown foliage was compensated by the Ivy and other climbers growing on the trees. Nearest to the canals grew Spireas as tall as trees (here they get to maximum one meter) and in full bloom. On my right side a mare and a foal were grassing and on the other side a doe and a bambi were drinking water. Further up in the hills I could see sheep with lambs, there were ducks with babies and a swan mother and her two children also. And as I sat there, a rabbit with her baby came out, a heron and her baby, it was like everything was in bloom and everything had babies. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky and it was about 20 degrees early in the morning. It was like somebody had dropped me in a Beatrix Potter picture book.

As the family woke up, they all came out and I think we sat there for one hour all very quiet not to disturb anything. The kids were 12 and 13 then and even they were amazed at the extreme beauty of that place. It was like we were the first people who ever had been there, yet when we moved further up, we realised that what we thought of as forest, probably only was about 50 meters wide and the world’s first industrial area was right behind it. Which makes the experience even more amazing, come to think of it.