Boating on The Lady in 1985
Boating on The Lady in 1985

From Barford to Bedford on The Great Ouse cruising on The Lady as pressure mounts on the South African regime with the UK withdrawing our Ambassador and the Rand collapsing and Reagan has more cancer tests and Ulster makes the news with more IRA bomb attacks

A little restless, but overall a fair night’s sleep and I wake first to read some chapters before Diana stirs and makes the morning drinks. Debbie & I then look after the baby whilst Diana washes and then we take turns about. Breakfast for all and then we get Daniel to walk round with the baby in her pushchair, which lets us clear up. I check the fuel and water tanks, but cannot fill up the water tank from the riverside tap because it does not have a screw fitting. Straight off with the canopy back on a reasonably fine morning. We negotiate Barford Bridge before the breeze gets up and then cruise through three locks to Bedford. At the last, the lock width is barely enough to ease The Lady through but, with one side higher than the other by us all standing on it, we just scrape through. A helmsman from another boat takes a ride with us up to our mooring at Mill Meadow and we push our sliding canopy right back to get under the old Railway Bridge.

From our maps I note that the dimensions are given as:- Width – Cardington Lock – 10’4”, 3.1m. Headroom – Old Bedford Road Bridge – 7’2”, 2.1m. But we could have managed with a few inches less of headroom if necessary. We moor up, reposition the canopy and walk into Bedford town centre to eat lunch at McDonalds. I walk around Bedford with Debbie after, failing completely to find any paper shop that had a quality daily paper. I did get a couple of rent books, however, before phoning Nicholas de Zoete and agreeing to sell my Barclays shares and long dated stocks and buy £1/2million+ of 3% 1990 for the interim 4/5 months. This evening I walked to Peacocks to get an auction catalogue and then played ball with Daniel. News tonight of mounting pressure on the South Africans as Britain and the rest of the EEC withdraw Ambassadors for ‘consultations,’ as the S African Rand collapses on the foreign exchanges and the call for sanctions goes on in legislative debates in the Congress. Reagan is undergoing more tests for cancer as a piece of skin is removed from the side of his nose. Thatcher speaks out again today to try to get football authorities to use identity passes compulsorily, but the officials demure. Unemployment went up sharply last month to 3,235,036, which is 50,000 more. The Electricity Board annual report reveals that the miners’ strike cost it an additional £2 Billion because of burning oil. Large scale bombing has returned to Northern Ireland after the NI Secretary, Douglas Hurd, had claimed that the IRA were on a losing trend. The forecast, dry and windy tomorrow, but showers and rain coming for the weekend.