Another Reunion! Sunday 14th August - Perronnes - Antoing

It seems of late that whenever we mention someone while reminiscing of our journeys in years gone by they simply bob up at the next port to say “Hi!”.

Therefore we shouldn’t have been surprised when Ros stuck her head in our window yesterday evening to say exactly that.  Not that we had been thinking of her particularly, rather her sister Tuppence, who was one of those unforgettable characters that crosses one’s path from time to time.  

Tuppence was gifted with that sort of eccentricity that seems to be reserved for a particular part of the English gene pool and travelled for years solo in a six metre sailing boat, de-rigged and encrusted with an ever growing collection of other people’s cast offs and lost fenders which “might come in handy one day”.  She had  In her latter years been barely able to move from her tiny cockpit, with failing eyesight and fading health generally she travelling alone indefatigably, having adventures of the sort that they make moving picture shows out of.     We copied some charts of hers once, wondrously annotated in beautifully clear script which read things like:- “the mayor was very rude”, or “look out for noisy children throwing sticks”.

Ros and her little dog Sparkle, would join her from time to time, which we always thought was an attempt to bring some semblance of conventional order to her life.   When last our paths crossed it was a decade ago, Tuppence was in hospital in the UK, more seriously ill than anyone had suspected, and Ros was taking the opportunity of her absence to substantially reduce the payload of the little boat  by making repeated trips with a very large trolley to a rubbish skip. 

Sadly, Tuppence never left the hospital, but Ros decided to clean up the boat and keep cruising in her memory.  Sparkle is no longer with her either but her new little companion is a dead ringer, and the boat barely recognisable in its new ship-shape state.  

How can it be that after a night spent remembering the most absurdly insignificant conversations of a decade and a half ago, that one could forgot to take a photograph?  Thanks to the miracle of the modern bicycle it wasn’t too difficult to catch her entourage to make a suitable aide-mémoire of yet another delightful reunion!