I’m lying on my roof decking staring at a blank sky. There’s not a cloud in sight. With such little visual stimulation, I notice my eye floaters and begin to play the game in which I dart my eyes back and forth so that they move around chaotically. I am very good at keeping myself busy.

I have bread in the oven. I just went to check on it and discovered that the flame had gone out as I closed the oven door earlier. My oven cannot handle infinitesimal draughts. Seeing as I had preheated the oven, the residual heat had forged a crust on the balls of dough and consequently, even with my reignition of the flame, the bread is left with no capacity to rise (much like Liz Truss’ approval rating shortly after her premiership began). The bread shall remain dense (insert second Liz Truss analogy here).

It is evening time and the sun shall set soon. Through the bushes on the towpath, right at the stern of Poohsticks, there is a gap in the hedges. My brother, his partner and I discovered this last weekend when he needed somewhere to fart at a distance from us. Highly considerate. On the other side of the bushes exists a field. Bales of hay line the view in the distance and to the left, the sun is glowing a brilliant bright amber. I fancy a scone.

I have company tomorrow so I made scones this morning. To read this in my voice in your head, I am saying it such that it rhymes with phone and not such that it rhymes with John because I am Southern. If that sentence sounded wrong, change the pronunciation of scone in your head (to the correct one) and read it again. Furthermore, I put the jam on either first or second, depending on the density of the cream available. I hope that clears everything up. The scone I have chosen to eat is the shit scone. This is the product of when you’ve exhausted the process of re-flattening your dough and slicing into it with something circular. You’re burdened with an amount of dough that isn’t quite substantial enough to make a real scone, but too substantial to throw away, lest we waste food. It’s akin to when God had just about enough clay remaining after making all the mammals and fish to put together another creature, but not enough to make something decent, so He chose to create the mosquito. The Dick. Back to the final scone – what remains is a lump of dough that is best manually fashioned into a circle. It’s blobby and messy with an unrefined trim. Fortunately, the UK has rather a fondness for such characteristics. After all, we elected Johnson. Delightfully, the scone is still perfectly pleasant and sweet inside (Johnson analogy ended in the previous sentence).

My initial reason for making scones is that I needed a vessel for my jam. I have been foraging this week. This is something single/ middle class/ unemployed people do – and I’m all three! To jazz things up a bit, I decided to go for the blackberries few else could reach – those growing on the non-towpath side of the canal. I did this with my paddle board because I felt that taking a 58ft narrowboat to the other side of the waterway could be considered as overkill. Regretfully, I traded one jar of jam for a pair of kitchen tongs which fell off of my paddle board and into the canal (Life hack: kitchen tongs are excellent for avoiding the thorns when picking berries). My kitchen tongs, to my surprise, are not magnetic and will thus spend the rest of their existence at the bottom of the Grand Union Canal, unable to be retrieved by my big magnet (I have a big magnet).

Other than making jam, I’ve also been having a good explore. I went through Blisworth tunnel on Saturday accompanied by an excellent crew. I now find myself in a different canal land. The other side of the tunnel feels like a distant world (because there is no towpath inside it and I can’t be bothered to cycle over the big hill to get back to the other side). For reasons beyond my comprehension, there is a lot more canal traffic here and all the boaters seem to have suddenly aged 30 years on average. I haven’t seen a person my age in days. I have cycled North right to the end of the Grand Union now. I dare say it gets a bit same-y. It’s just a lot of canal. I also ran back and forth along the Northampton Arm yesterday and ended up surpassing a half marathon distance in the process – something I have not achieved in several years. This little canal fork is nearly quaint. A staircase of locks forms the border of an endless landscape of pristine countryside. Unfortunately, in the other direction, someone built the A43 running parallel to the water and all you can hear for miles is cars. I won’t be mooring there.

I shall turn around this weekend and head back South for a bit. Not all the way. Just until I find the right balance of pretty nature and pre-retirement water dwellers.