We put in long hours with Nigel and Sandra because we wanted to make it through the dreaded Wolverhampton 21 and on into Birmingham while we had help. We also had to take another day off at Brewood while Vinny and I worked on the boat. The 21 locks at Wolverhampton are in a single flight and run through a seedy industrial area beloved of vandals and graffiti artists. The locks are protected by anti-vandal padlocks which make them even slower to operate. In the event we did the flight in about 3 1/2 hours although we were following another boat which meant that every lock was set against us. I once did the flight in 2 hours but that was long ago when I was twenty-something and in the company of a gang of fit young reprobates.

At first, the journey along the BCN (Birmingham Canal Navigation) is much as it was on that trip 40 years ago. Factories still line the banks, though most have turned their back on the canal and erected steel fencing along the former wharves. Their products now disgorge on to the roads in articulated trucks instead of into boats. The French upgraded their canals over the years and they are still commercially viable and ecologically sensible modes of transport. With a few exceptions, the British have not, and are paying the price in clogged highways and excessive pollution. The Brummie yobs still throw all their trash in the canal and we had to stop three times to clear the prop of plastic bags. On the 1967 trip we collected a steel cable which stopped the motor dead and required a set of bolt cutters, borrowed from a construction crew, to cut it off the prop. Fortunately, nothing like that happened this time.

There are some fine old buildings along the route and several great examples of cast iron bridges built by Horsely Iron Works and others. At Spon Lane, we passed under another section of the BCN, a rare 'canal flyover'. There was a railway station built on a bridge over the canal with commuters waiting for their train idly watching us from the platform. In another weird vignette, I saw a women being frogmarched off by a policeman. She was waving and laughing at us and he was grinning broadly as he took her away. Drunk? I don't know. The air hummed around us with the sounds and smells of commerce. Trains roared alongside the canal at breakneck speed. It was a far cry from the solitude of the Llangollen. There are more miles of canal in Birmingham than in Venice and we hope to explore them all one day. We did leave the Main Line to do the Icknield Port loop and the Soho loop, which passes alarmingly close to Winson Green prison. Somebody threw a rock at us from a bridge but it missed. There are several islands on the Main Line which are the sites of former toll offices. The passages past them are very narrow and Sandra and I bumped almost all of them. We worked hard all day, cruising from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and covering a record 25 locks and 20 miles from Brewood to Birmingham.

Suddenly we were in the heart of Birmingham in one of the finest canal settings in the country. The whole area around Gas Street Basin and Farmers Bridge locks has been rebuilt with the canal as the central feature. Old warehouses have been turned into pubs and cafes and the Mailbox, a modern shopping complex, looms above. The bridges are ablaze with flowers and lights. We moored right in Gas Street Basin underneath the Hyatt hotel. The place buzzed with activity, especially at night when the locals poured in to enjoy the clubs, restaurants and bars that line the old wharves. We spent an enjoyable three days there even though it rained most of the time. We later met other boaters who think Gas Street has been ruined by development but we liked it and were impressed by the careful juxtaposition of old and new. In the 60's it was a dangerous and seedy area largely cut off from the city.

My cousin Selwyn, whom I have not seen for years, came to visit us for an afternoon. Nigel and family left, and our friends Stacey and John came and took us by car to Worcester to see their house and cats, gaze at the swollen River Severn and to eat in a nearby restaurant. Stacey is an American actress, comedic author and radio personality and John is a Brit who animates the Harry Potter movies, among other things. We returned on a late train, somewhat tired out by the constant company. We were glad to be alone again. We spent a solitary Sunday in the rainy and deserted gloom of Gas Street before getting our toilet tank pumped out on Monday morning and heading off through the narrow Worcester Bar and on to the Worcester and Birmingham canal. August was waning and the weather began to improve. September was mostly fine and sunny.

We slowed down now, as we suddenly had plenty of time to reach our winter moorings by mid September. We dawdled down the North Stratford canal, in open country again. A beautifully maintained set of locks, the Lapworth flight, leads down to pretty Kingswood Junction where there is a link to the Grand Union canal and the South Stratford continues down to Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace. There are several barrel-roofed cottages at Lapworth, built by the canal company to house their workers. They made the roofs barrel shaped, the story goes, because it was a familiar construction technique used on the bridge arches. We debated which way to go and decided not to go to Stratford, as it would have added a week of heavily locked cruising and put us behind schedule a little.We visited by train instead.