Less than a week to go!

Today is the final Sunday before the big day . . .

Currently it looks as though there should be three of us doing the walk from my end - me, my brother Martin, and Sean Spooner. Sean lives in Leicester but he'll be joining us in Birmingham on Saturday morning and then getting the train back to Leicester from Penkridge after the walk finishes. He works at Walkers Crisps, and he's been doing some fundraising there - with considerable success, too!

With just six days to go, the weather forecast for the 17th is pretty good - temperatures in this part of the country expected to be near normal for the time of year, but it should feel fresher than it has of late. I very much hope that the nights before the walk are cooler than they have been of late - I have great difficulty sleeping in this weather. I could open all my windows, of course, but that would mean my being disturbed by noise, and invaded by moths - which is what happened last night.

I hope to fit in a couple more hard walks at the start of the week, then to keep those muscles in shape with some light work the rest of the week.

I'll leave you with this - Kate Rusby, The Barnsley Nightingale, on Jools' Holland's show.

Just Testing

I hope to be able to bring you all the news on the day of the walk.
From the Special Operations Room England (SORE).

Fourcanal joins the digital revolution!

We hope to bring you live updates of the progress of the walk on July 17th.

That's "we;" recently a highly-trained and highly-motivated team of individuals has joined the Fourcanal team.

On the big day, they will be operating from this cutting-edge facility, Somewhere In The Midlands.

*Those of you receiving broadcasts through ITV HD may experience occasional interruptions to signal.

I'm Back!

After a long break, and happy to be here again. I haven't actually been away, I've just had difficulty finding the time to update this blog. So, what has happened since I made my last entry?

Well, Tommy - our Mission Nutritionist - wasn't in the best of health for a while, but seems far better now.

Though his spirits have suffered - as have mine, and Sparky's - because the people who organise the internet forum through which the walk was conceived and arranged have decided to update it. That's 'update' in the sense of 'ruin.'

Previously it was a no-frills forum, with quick refresh and response times - now they've 'improved' it by slowing down the response times, altering the appearance of it, and . . . .and doing heaps of other things to it, almost all of them making the experience of using it worse.
Ah well.


As for the appeal - that's going very well indeed. We've progressed rapidly since the last blog entry - we reached the original target of £1000. Sparky raised the target to £2000 and, as I type this, we've raised £1195. A cause for celebration, indeed. And an opportunity for us to thank all the people who have made donations so far.


I've managed some fairly long walks over the past few weeks - a couple of times walking from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, and once walking from Wolverhampton to Penkridge.
Penkridge seems to be a bit further away than I thought it was and that walk took me far longer than I had hoped it would - I'll try it again in the next week or so and I hope that I can do it a bit quicker then. It's very different from the first part of the walk.

The Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal was built to link the Severn and the Mersey - the northern end of it forms a junction with the Trent and Mersey Canal. The idea, when all these canals were built - which was at the end of the 18th century - was that the manufacturing industries of the Midlands would have quick links to England's four main river estuaries - the Humber, the Mersey, the Severn and the Thames. The canal network has Birmingham as its hub.Hence the Birmingham Canal runs largely through an industrial - or, now, post-industrial - landscape. The Staffs & Worcs runs largley through a rural landscape, and it's very different.
It's really strange for someone like me, spending nearly all my time in a big city, to be able to hear birdsong. I didn't, sadly, take many photographs on that walk; that's something I hope to put right next time.

All in all, then, things are going quite well. I continue to be inspired by Susie Hewer, to whose blog there is a link on the left side of this page. Click on it, and take a look at her entry for May 3rd.

And here is another link: a restful piece of music for you, a cover version of Kate Rusby's "Who Will Sing Me Lullabies."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VprYG072wrk&playnext_from=TL&videos=cNCN5yl01-o

D Day!

Today the amount raised through our justgiving page passed £500.

It's been, at the same time, an inspiring and a humbling experience. Thanks, again, to all who have contributed so far.

We are now getting to the stage where contributors are coming from various places - not just the internet forum that Mark & I - and Tommy - post on, but from further afield, too, to the extent that none of us is quite sure who some of the people pledging money are.

I haven't been in the best of health in the last couple of weeks. That's slowed down my training programme somewhat - but I'm much better now and things should be back on track shortly. I can always take inspiration from Susie Hewer, who I have mentioned on here before.

Susie will be running her first marathon of the year this weekend. Then another one - the London Marathon - the weekend after. Then another the weekend after that. Then she'll take a rest, and much-deserved it will be.

I tried looking in google, to see whether this blog appears on it. And it does!

Bizarrely, one of the sites that links to it is based in India. It appears to be because of the appearance of the words "canal" and "rural;" "Canal Rural" is a TV station in Brazil which has links to the website in India. I'm not sure I can explain why!

We're off!

The justgiving site has only been up for a couple of days - and well over £300 has already been donated to it.

A most impressive start. Thanks to all who have made contributions.

Thanks, also, to the game, who has mentioned the walk on his blog, to which I have added a link.

Vive la révolution technologique Muntzienne

A mighty couple of days in my life, and in the life of 'four canal'.

The walk has its own justgiving site

Sparky - Mark Holtz - is the person who set it up, and it's already taken a fair amount of money from generous supporters.

But it's been a big couple of days for me, too.

I realsied some time ago that I would require - or at the very least, considerably benefit from - having a mobile phone with me on July 17th. And so, yesterday, I took the plunge, and bought one. I had only had one once before - that was in the 1990s, or, if you prefer, 'in the last century.' It was about the size of a TV remote control. And I only ever received two calls on it. One of which was a wrong number.

I've already received several on this new one. And several texts, too. Though most of the texts have come from the network provider. Usually along the lines of "Don't you think we are just brilliant?" Followed, as often as not, by one asking "On a scale of 1-10, just how brilliant do you think we are?"

Now I can join the ranks of those people who announce to everyone on a bus "I'm on the bus!!!!"

And I may, just, get the hang of texting.

I hope to do a longish walk on Thursday or Friday. On Saturdays the towpaths are inhabited by fishermen and cyclists, making them more difficult to negotiate. Weight loss seems to have slowed down somewhat, though my bathroom scales seem a bit erratic - latest weighing puts me at 14st 9lb, a couple of pounds more than I hoped to weigh by now, but 11 pounds less than I weighed at the start of the year and 17 pounds lower than my peak weight last autumn.