Started late, ended early

King’s Norton junction to Selly Oak and return

Another sunny day with a cold wind.  We didn't have much planned for today, so Dave took Jess for a good long walk and I cleaned through with the hand-held Dyson we brought from home.  The one that came with the boat was fiddly to use and gave up the ghost over winter so I was quite glad to see the back of it.  The Dyson was twice as efficient and much easier to use.  We cruised up to Selly Oak for a big shop at Sainsburys. 

Fire hose doors in bridge

There are at least two cruisers we have seen round here whose name refers to the rather disparaging term narrowboaters sometimes use for them, ‘yogurt pots’.  This one is called Yogurt and has an amusing little graphic.

Müllered

It was a four-handed shop to get the shopping back to restock the galley cupboards, and when we got back to the boat Dave immediately went off to Halfords while I put everything away.  We had lunch before retracing our steps back to King's Norton.  I had a Zoom meeting this afternoon, and rather than stay where we were where it is shady and the towpath is busy,  Dave steered while I zoomed.  Apart from the signal cutting out as we passed a high wall by the railway, and briefly as trains went by, it all worked well and I was finished in about half an hour,before we got back to the junction.  There is a lot of graffiti on urban waterways, a lot of it just tags, but it is always worth looking out for interesting examples.

Gypsy Tokes?

We knew what a toke was, although the spell checker on Word didn’t, but gypsy?  There were only two relevant references online.  A thread on Reddit reckoned it’s the names of two graffiti artists, one called Gypsy and one called Tokes which seems like a wild guess.  Or, as the Urban Dictionary says; A rule-breaking intervention during the passing of a spliff, where a 'middle-man' (aiding the passing of the spliff from one person to another across a long distance) cheekily takes a toke of the spliff before passing it on.  That sounds more likely to me.

Shortly before the junction was a sunken workboat.  We've seen plenty of sunken boats but never a workboat.  How on earth did that happen?

At the junction, we winded and reversed back to moor near where we were this morning.  Jess got another good walk and I got to write up the minutes of the meeting!

4½ miles