The Chaffinch of Charfield

We have met many nice people on this trip including friends from our childhood. One of these is Dave. We look forward to our visits with him and him with us with great glee as each visit has it’s life challenging moments and side splitting events. This trip was no exception although our dangerous plan to remove the corner of the neighbours house which obstructs the Sun from Dave’s garden was not executed due to lack of chemicals. Having said that I’m sure his homebrew would have sufficed. Apart from laughing and drinking we did some serious listening to music. Dave has the best classical music collection in the world; often waking up with the BBC frantically knocking on the door asking to borrow something for their morning show! This time a collection of Beethoven’s symphonies conducted by David Zinman, awesome, a bit faster but also with lots of extra notes I’ve not heard before in other recordings. Apparently this was the way it was intended to be played but as Beethoven is long gone we’ll not have chance for his critical opinion.

Saturday saw us loading up the VW bus and heading out for a picnic. It was Dave who got us into VW’s in the first place. We owned our own VW camper van when we first married and have yearned for another ever since. Anyway, I digress, we picked up sandwiches in Tesco’s and with half a dozen thermos’s of tea on board we headed out to Purton for a walk. We parked up and walked down to Sharpness along the canal bank. The setting is perfect with the River Severn on one side and the canal on the other. Seeing canal barges chugging up and down reminded us of last years trip. The River has several old wrecks along the banks as a reminder to how dangerous the Severn tide can be. At low tide as it was this day it’s just a trickle but on certain tides the bore can be surfed and regularly is. There is also the remains of a railway bridge that was destroyed in 1960 by a run away barge loaded with petrol.

Back at the van we enjoyed our sandwiches and tea and a wonderful little church all decked out for a wedding that afternoon.  I've figured out why the canals are so shallow.  Every day tons of stale bread gets thrown into them in efforts to feed the birds.  Obviously bread is not a staple for ducks but one greedy swan certainly enjoyed a couple of slices that Dave and Sally threw to him.