First Thursday

Gillian Bolt, the Marketing Director, had arranged for a series of three minute interviews on the Radio Berkshire breakfast programme yesterday morning, and I was lined up to talk at 9.20 about living aboard. Since the interviewer was Maggie Philbin, one of my favourite Tomorrow’s World presenters in days of yore, I was quite pleased to do it.

We got up at the usual time, and I was just having a relaxing shower when Sheila came into the bathroom; Gillian had been down to the boat, they’d changed the schedule and I was on in 15 minutes. After a quick exit and dry off, I had to run over to where they had a radio car set up.

The interview was going quite well when the studio decided the sound quality wasn’t good enough and we wound up. All concerned were a bit irritated as it seemed that everyone except the producer thought it would have been better to prerecord the pieces, which would have made for a much better result.

However, Maggie did come and have a quick look over Sanity Again, our first celebrity guest, I suppose you could say.

After a belated breakfast, we got some more office work done, and ambled over to the WRG compound mid morning. Tasks for the day were erecting the crowd barrier around three sides of the arena and removing some more unnecessary fence. More fence panels have been ordered, as even scavenging them in this way still leaves us short.

In the WRG compound, the marquee company started putting up the eating and sleeping marquees, and had pretty well finished them by the end of the day. Both are floored, and the sleeping marquee will be carpeted today, after the wooden floor has dried, having been washed last thing.

Erecting the frame

The finished marquees

Inside the sleeping marquee

Elanor arrived just before dinner, and she and Sally, her dog, are now staying on Sanity Again with us. Elanor is WRG administrator for the camp this year; as I write she’s wrestling with the spreadsheets sent from Head Office, two of them in the latest version of Excel, which she doesn’t have. Fortunately, iWork Numbers could cope with them, so we moved them onto my machine, I opened them in Numbers and then saved them back to the .xls format Elanor can use.

WRGies ancient and modern; the bust is of founder Graham Palmer

No peace for the wicked; the QM interrupts his lunch to deny having the heavy duty staple gun.

Strangely, the fanciest pontoon leads to the chippies' boats.