Châlons-en-Champagne (Our pontoon garden)

Last week’s blog update covered the building of a garden for the dogs to exercise in; this week we have concentrated on our own garden.  We are putting our pots on the pontoon this year rather than adorning the boat.  This will ensure I have as few excuses as possible for not getting on with patching up the paintwork on the roof. 

Our pontoon garden

The eagle eyed will have noticed that we have fewer pots than usual and have had to improvise.  You may remember that our favourite two earthenware pots were stolen from the roof last year when we were moored in a dodgy part of Paris. We also had to discard a few before winter because they had reached the end of their lives.  With the lockdown it’s not possible to buy non-essential items such as plant pots so we have used plastic bags, turned inside out, and also a hessian shopping bag we found floating in the cut.

Most but not all our herbs survived the winter

The dogs are oblivious to the lock down and spend all day sunning themselves on the pontoon or rolling on the dusty ground in their garden area.

Looks like Gorete is oblivious to it too!

Mentioning Gorete reminds me that neither Karen nor I have been stopped by the police yet whereas everyone else in the port has, in fact Gorete has now been stopped three times to show them her attestation (certificate to leave home) and ID. 

A modified certificate has now been introduced and the electronic version generates a QR code which we have noticed carries the date and time it was generated.  This will stop people cheating and putting an incorrect time on the form so they can stay out for longer than they should.

I said I left at 14.10 but the QR code has recorded 14.07

Karen and the girls are still doing their pilates every morning on the pontoon and have had a tacit police approval.  One morning a police car turned up, the two guys inside sat and watched the girls for a while and drove away.  They probably couldn’t fault the fact that they were all keeping their distance and were, in effect, in their own gardens on the pontoon at the end of their boats.

Having pontoon pilates every morning sets up a structure for each day and we have fallen into a routine that suits us as we enter our fourth week of lock down.  We take Buddy for an hour walk along the river Marne every afternoon but as the weather has got somewhat warmer the distance covered has fallen off.  We blame the fact that we have to stop to watch the increasing number of butterflies and also allow Buddy to play in the water to cool off.  If we hadn’t been standing still on Saturday watching a butterfly at rest, then we would have missed an adult grass snake slithering off the warm sand into the long grass.

A peacock butterfly the worse for wear after hibernating over winter

The plan is to do a big, out-of-town, supermarket shop in the car every two weeks and top up with fresh fruit and veg once a week at the small supermarket in town.  It’s amazing what we find stimulating when following the same routine each day.  For example, on the way to the local shop Karen had taken the main road into town and noticed lines of barriers on the pavement outside the closed post office but couldn’t work out why they were there. Setting off on our walk later in the day we noticed that the post office was now open, and the barriers were controlling a queue where everyone was keeping their distance.  It had been closed for some while and clearly they were expecting a large number of people when it opened.  The police were checking attestations and IDs as people arrived to join the queue.

Barriers outside the post office before it opened

On the same fruit & veg shop day, Karen returned full of excitement because she had taken a detour where she hoped there would be few if any people.  The detour was along a couple of back streets that were new to us and she was excited because she found five painted manhole covers that we hadn’t seen before.  These brought our total to 79; remarkable considering that when we briefly visited Châlons for a few days last July we didn’t see any.

Two of the latest covers…

…and yet more excitement: an éclusier adjusting a sluice to one of the canals through town

Some while ago, Chris & Sue gave us a sun catcher that they had made especially for our boat.  Having never thanked them properly I have included a picture of it here.  As you can see, the sunny weather really brings out the chalkhill blues painted on the glass. 

Our sun catcher inside the boat…

… and Karen being a sun catcher outside

Karen was having a relax before sharing our Sunday evening barbeque with the girls next door.   They provided mussels for the starter which was the first time we have had them for some months, so they were most welcome.  Before tucking into the main course, Nikki brough Karen up to date with her latest project.  Karen had mentioned a few days previously that it would be interesting to get hold of a spreadsheet showing various figures relating to Coronavirus.  With children in four countries across Europe we like to keep an eye on how things are progressing.  Nikki, as usual, had grasped the mettle and put together a program to extract data from a website and display it on a small screen to show the four countries on a rolling display.  She was quite distraught that she hadn’t managed to get it to interface with a larger screen.

Nikki’s latest project

I’ve already mentioned butterflies but not the bird life.  Things have really changed on the water as the geese, herons, cormorants and other waterfowl are all paired up and very quiet now they have established their territories and are concentrating on nest building or incubating eggs.  The only bird sound we hear now is the dawn chorus and the occasional angry goose attacking swans that venture too close to its nest. 

Our first ducklings have arrived

The main thing I have done this week is get our VR post box catalogue up to date.  If you want to learn about the history of the different types of Victorian post boxes, then click on ‘VR Boxes’ under the ‘Miscellany’ menu on the right-hand side.  I’ve now got to find time to add a section showing the boxes seen by family members and friends who have sent in their sightings 😉

With the very real prospect of not being able to cruise this year we are all waiting to hear how the town proposes to charge us, if at all, for being here throughout the summer.