A couple of weeks after I mentioned to Jerome that I thought he might be a figment of my imagination, he vanished. Gunship Nutmeg appeared on eBay and was sold, within days, without the purchaser even asking for a viewing. Probably the only way that a thirty-year-old boat sounding like a coal scuttle on spin cycle, could have been sold for 14.5K.

Back when we were in Bath, Jerome once told me he’d read that the average Continuous Cruiser lasts for less than eighteen months. He didn’t realise then that he was foretelling his own fate. To be fair, Jerome seemed unperturbed at the prospect of another Winter of ash-pan-emptying and frozen Elsans. The literary parallel to explain his departure is more “Mills and Boon” than “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.

An old flame reappeared in his life and, in two warbles of a didgeridoo, Curvie was whisked away, in her travel-basket, to the London flat of his new squeeze. I doubt that any Barbara Cartland novel ever included the appearance of a mouse in the bed but the genre could do with a refresh.

So, no longer will a cheery visage appear at my bows of an evening, trying to cadge a beer, clothes-pegs, coal, or kindling. A new Jerome-free-phase of my journey has begun. I’ll miss him of course, but he is already talking about paying a visit, so this blog may not have seen the last of him.

The new era began with a passage through the Braunston Tunnel. I was in there for three quarters of an hour, progressing at a steady 1.5mph. Three minutes in to it, my headlamp started flickering, and threatened to die completely. Thankfully, the Blue-Tack with which I’d secured the bulb in place must have melted sufficiently for the circuit to be restored. Passing a boat coming in the opposite direction is a rather surreal experience.

Shortly afterwards, I shared seven locks with a gent of a military bearing called Steve. With his generous moustache, bullet-shaped head, and steely gaze, he would be a shoe-in for the role of Lord Cardigan in a remake of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Not a man to whom, on the eve of battle, you’d want to say “I’ve a bit of an iffy tummy, mind if I sit this one out?”.

At our second lock, I asked what line of business he was in. The reply was “I’ve recently retired as a Military Planner for the M.O.D. Chemical factories, now you see ‘em, now you don’t”. We gelled into a rather efficient lock-operating-team. Perhaps some of his military efficiency rubbed off on me. While I strained at a winch to raise a lock paddle, I thanked fate for directing me into a career in which the most awkward moral question I have to contend with is: “Do I bend this cataloguing rule, while inserting metadata into that database field?”.

Boat-life has posed a tricky question of late though, which is: “Do I head off onto the River Nene and Great Ouse in Winter, or play it safe, and loaf around on the Grand Union Canal until Spring?”.

Doing the former runs the risk of the boat rising in flood water and being deposited, high and dry on land, when the waters recede. In such a scenario, one would have to arrange for a crane (see below) to be lifted onto the back of a lorry and transported to the vicinity of the vessel. This assumes that the boat has not come to rest on an island, or a steep slope. If the boat can be returned to the water, one wouldn’t see much change out of ten thousand pounds.

I’ve decided that I shall not be doing the marine equivalent of waving a sabre while charging my steed at the Russian guns. Instead, I’ll be loafing around on the Grand Union Canal, consuming the sausage rolls served up at Daisy’s Bakin’ Butty.