Saturday 9 July 2016

The collective noun … and the lockie’s lunch

If you’ve read my post of yesterday (if you haven’t you can read it here) you’ll know that we had five pairs of bloggers (note the collective noun?) on board Still Rocking discussing what an appropriate collective noun would be for such a group.

The suggestions were : 
A raft of bloggers
A blag of bloggers
A posse of bloggers
canallegory of bloggers
floateller of bloggers
A natter of bloggers
A bunny of bloggers
as in rabbit, rabbit, rabbit
flotilla of blogetts

My favourite would be (drum roll please) :

A floateller of blogetts

although I am still open to more suggestions ...

For more unusual and funny collective nouns see Some That Might Be.


And now to the lockie’s lunch here at Marlow yesterday ...

Even lock keepers are entitled to a lunch break and during that time the lock goes onto ‘Self Service’ which means that the boaters themselves operate the lock which is usually a set of buttons to press and sometimes to hold to make the sluices (to empty or fill the lock) open and close and also to open and close the lock gates.  

Before the lock keeper leaves he sets the control to operate at a slightly slower rate that when he’s on duty so the whole operation takes longer.

Midday yesterday, Marlow lockie is at lunch and there are boats waiting on the lock landing (just in front of the mooring we’re on) to go up the lock and probably some waiting at the top of the lock to come down.

Then along comes The Georgian; there’s no room for such a big boat on the lock landing so he ‘hovers’ in the river stream (good job it’s wide water here) and there are more boats arriving too. 
He had to wait for over half an hour before the lower lock landing was free of boats before he could move forward to moor up and wait for boats coming down the lock and for her to enter.  I couldn’t discover how long she is but she must be a minimum of 100 feet. Marlow lock is 151’ in length so another boat could have gone in there too, but I bet they didn’t!

2 comments:

Andy Bayley said...

A stream of bloggers

Carol said...

Another good one! Thanks Andy.