INFORMATION OVERLOAD - SUNDAY 13TH JULY - BRUGES

Yesterday, through experimentation we reached an antenna conclusion that perhaps didn’t align with all or even any of the published pseudo science we’d read.  Not wishing to add anything else to the already muddied water that comprises the compendium of online knowledge of the subject, we fiddled a bit more to make where we got to yesterday look as though it will still be there tomorrow.

The world of VHF antenna is, like the world of everything else, awash with lies, damned lies and statistics and it’s getting quite difficult to know which bits one could usefully commit to memory and which bits to dispose of thoughtfully.   We once again wrote to the supplier’s helpful support team setting out where we’d got to, and put the whole thing all more or less out of mind pending their reply during normal working hours tomorrow.

Don’t blame the internet though, disinformation used to happen long before “on the line” was a twinkle in its parent’s eyes.  

Jacques once famously told us of his time running cruise barges, that his passengers didn’t want to know answers, they just wanted to ask questions, which is why, if asked every crop they passed became "Mustard of Dijon"   

We feel a bit lazy and even a teensy bit guilty but can we be excused from joining the walking tour this afternoon?  

We are pretty much questioned out, and informationed out as well for now, for what it’s worth.  

How, we wondered, can knowing that in the twelfth century, someone living in any given house made candles for a living, or that someone else was imprisoned in the tower for twenty something years, possibly affect our lives going forward?   It certainly isn’t likely to improve our VHF reception.

On another day, of course the guide’s banter would be entertaining, informative and even enriching.  If we could remember any of it we’d be a certain favourite on a trivia night, but today it would have just made our heads hurt.

TRIAL AND TRIBULATION - SATURDAY 12TH JULY - BRUGES

Another day dawned, filled with promise and grand ideas.  Oddly enough the AIS unit worked perfectly (well there’s no harm in trying), until it didn’t, so with hopes up, then dashed again, we started work on plan B.

We could raise the antenna if only we had a bit of threaded rod, some plastic pipe and a bit of chewing gum, and with a large hardware store just a few kilometres away, raising the antenna should be a lot easier than raising say, the Titanic.  

For reasons that are hard to explain we decided to walk rather than get the bikes out, which in retrospect,  given the state of the knees of one of us after another round of knees versus cobbles yesterday, might not have been the smartest decision we’ve made.  None the less we walked there, and hobbled happily back with our bags full of promise.

"Pleasant" describes whiling away the afternoon with bits of home made Meccano, fiddling and fussing until we found a solution with indifferent results, but which might make a workable compromise.

Then Franky arrived as arranged, to finish the work on Mr Perkins and all seemed well with the world.

As things turned out, Mr P was not in the mood for being finished with.  To Franky’s great disappointment and in some ways to our tragic amusement, a tiny part in the fuel system, with a hidden, dodgy repair made decades ago would turn his slumber into something more akin to a coma from which there was no awakening.   It’s not the end, not by a long chalk, but between him sitting in his little black hole immovable until the tiny part arrives next week, and our AIS not yet proven, perhaps Antwerp can wait a few more days.

For the first time in a very long time, we sit, unable to move even if we wanted to, by no means discouraged, thankful that none of this came to light on one of the tidal races, or when manoeuvring in close quarters with a container ship.  We're waiting lazily for the weekend to pass, ready to perhaps make plans to move.

ALL FOR SHOW - FRIDAY 11TH JULY - BRUGES

 

The reply from customer support that “Everything looks good in terms of installation and settings, perhaps you could try relocating the antenna”.  This was at once a confirmation that I had not made a mistake, but also that I had.   

The number of places an antenna can be located on this boat can be counted on the fingers of one thumb, and the solution we had, we thought was quite clever.  It had taken a couple of hours to route the cable invisibly, so  even if there was an alternative location which would not offend our aesthetic sensitivities, the prospect of moving it was not a happy one.

We did what most would do when faced with a problem of this magnitude.  

We ignored it and took a long walk through the backstreets of Bruges, pausing only for waffle and coffee, except instead of waffle we shared a rather large and delectable slice of apricot cake, while we considered our next move.   Perhaps sleeping on it would fix the problem?

By the time we’d done that, and with no solution in sight, Tony and Amber had arrived, berthed directly behind us.  Before we could say “that’s after our bedtime” we’d made arrangements to visit the light and sound show in the market square late in the evening.   Very late, of course, because it requires an absence of sunlight to be seen at its best, or perhaps to be seen at all, and the sun does not make itself absent until almost tomorrow.

Light shows are a curious thing, always spectacular but in differing degrees.   We’ve seen a few, or perhaps many, in all sorts of places, so we think we know about this stuff.  The one that started them all, projected onto three sides of Place Stanislas in Nancy has set a bar so high that thus far none have matched.   

It might have been the cobbles on which we were sitting that added to our discomfort, it might have been the nagging thought about relocating antenna or it might have been that we were looking through tired eyes, but we left what was undoubtedly a clever production feeling that bar had not been reached.  

The subtitles played live in one's choice of language on one's own phone were a nice touch, but impossible to follow and watch the screen contemporaneously.  The action on the tall narrow screen was remarkable, but it was so narrow that the scenes had gone before they arrived. It was worth the cost of admission of course, but we couldn’t help but feel that someone was just trying to be a bit too clever, just as perhaps they had with the antenna location on our boat.

LOVE’S LABOUR MISPLACED - THURSDAY 10TH JULY - BRUGES

 

Today will go down in history as the day Mr Perkins received his new injector studs.   He didn’t have much fight in him to be fair, just enough so that Franky will have to come back in a day or two to finish the job,  but the damage that the years of running with parts that did not quite do the job have extracted a toll.   It seems for now he’s dodged a bullet once again, but we’ve put up posters of recycling plants in his engine bay as a reminder of what happens to old horses that give up.

I do know how he feels though.  All of the fancy new electrical things arrived at the parcel pickup point yesterday, which in itself was fantastic, but an extra five thousand steps on cobbles felt like a million the next day to aged knees.

Those same knees doth protest a bit when told to invert themselves and haul a near two metre long body with gangly arms into a cupboard for the day to get on with the installation of all those shiny parts.  They sent messages to elbows and fingers to try to convince them that enough was enough, but the brain to which it sends those messages refused to play their silly games until the job was done.   This was a little foolish, but a paracetamol sandwich for lunch did it's bit towards getting the job done.

In the afternoon, the body and it’s attached brain which when all is said and done is twice the age of Mr Perkins, (and we all know what allowances we make for him) was greatly tired, but looked on in self admiration at the tidiness, yea, inventiveness of the day’s labour.  Will anyone else marvel at that bracket carved out of a scrap of metal that conceals the wiring within the spotlight?   Of course they will, he’ll tell the internet!

It is splendid it thinks, quite satisfying, or as Shakespeare might say, honorificabilitudintatibus even.

Now we wait for the response from customer support to figure out why it doesn’t work, and whether we’ve overdone that thing that comes before a fall.

THE MONSTER THEY CREATED - WEDNESDAY 9TH JULY - BRUGES

When we bought our present house it’s fair to say that there weren’t too many features which were in line with our own particularly eccentric tastes.   As some said, it had good “bones” and there was much that could be done to build on them.

The garden however, much to the dismay of its former custodians who it seemed were quite fond of their collection of exotica, was not in our opinion, in a state deemed worthy of preservation.  Our thoughts were confirmed not long after we’d contracted to buy the place, when we visited a “landcare” exhibition and to our horror found an example of every plant in our garden in the display of “noxious, listed and undesirable plants”.   All of that of course is in the dim dark past, with almost no trace of that miscreant vegetation remaining.   The hardy remnants even after a decade, are regularly castigated by means chemical, mechanical and in recent times pyrotechnical.

Ahh, the pyrotechnics.  The other of us was given one of those propane blowtorch things by her daughters, for Mother’s Day.  These are things they use to take the life of anything green or its progeny for doing no more than say, trying to grow between the cobbles on a footpath.  Suffice to say that things have never looked more pristine in our gravel paving edges ever since.

All of which brings me to the little florist shop we passed today, proudly displaying little buckets of exactly the sort exotica she takes such joy in incinerating.

As we stopped to inspect the display, she developed a twitch in her propane burner finger.  Actually it was worse than a twitch.

We had to move on quickly, had there been even a stray box of matches within reach there was a very real risk of conflagration!

FOUR KINDS OF PEOPLE - TUESDAY 8TH JULY - BRUGES

There were four kinds of people down in the heart of town today.

There were people queueing for a ride on the tour boats, people already on the tour boats, people who, having completed their ride on the tour boats were drinking coffee and eating waffles, and finally there were people walking back to their boat with their new vacuum cleaner.

We mostly tend to stay away from the parts of town where the other kinds of boat people are when they are running rampant, but we do admit that we just might have been tempted to join the coffee and waffle set had we been there before the crowd, which is actually not joining them at all when we think about it.   

While normally being there before them would not be a problem, our body clocks are set in “super cruise” mode at the moment while we wait a few more days for the collection of radio and fuel injector bits to arrive.  We’ve not just lost track of the days, but also the hours in them it would seem.

“It’s good to be out earlier” one of us was heard to remark as we happily zigged and zagged through the throng in the bright sunshine carrying our shiny new box. 

At midday. 

THE FORCE JUST MIGHT BE WITH US - MONDAY 7TH JULY - BRUGES

We slept so late this morning that when we woke it felt like a public holiday, so we had a vote and unanimously decided to have the rest of the day off.

Admittedly this is becoming a bit of a habit, so we did pretend to attend to some outstanding paperwork over our morning coffee, but became distracted when to our astonishment we discovered a note in our email inbox confirming that following receipt of our application yesterday (Sunday) our Ship’s Radio License has been approved and the original is already in the mail to our home address!  

Sadly with no digital copy, we did not have access to the information we required, so we replied, pointing out our situation and asking if it would be too much trouble to send us a copy by email.   There wasn’t even time to take another bite of biscuit when the reply arrived complete with the requested attachment.  

My wish it seems, is someone’s command!

This of course leaves us in a quite pleasant quandary.   Not wishing to outlay significant sums of money on equipment in the absence of a license, we may have perhaps mistaken on the application form, the words “installed in your ship” for “will buy one shortly if this application is approved”.   

We’d better get shopping then, lest our friend arrives in his uniform and discovers that our vintage VHF radio does not do the things the license says it does!