A good day for a wander...

...by car. We have a list of places we passed on our Leicester Ring cruise, even stopped at for a short time, which we thought might merit a visit another time. The weather yesterday was mild and mostly dry, so off we went.

Our first stop was to be at Newton Harcourt which, according to the Nicholson map book, "is a well-known Leicester beauty spot, popular on Sunday afternoons." It being Thursday morning when we arrived probably didn't explain why we were mystified by that description. So we passed on through and arrived at Wistow, pulling into the Rural Centre, which looked interesting.

And it was interesting; a cluster of shops and workshops selling a range of foodstuffs, art and craft work, gifts and assorted ephemera. We bought supper - a locally produced lamb and vegetable pie - today's lunch - Italian cheese and dried tomato bread - and various other consumables from the delicatessen,

and spent some time just wandering, admiring the variety of goods on sale. We had lunch in the bistro,

then, deciding that we might well have made some poor decisions when considering which places to visit, we took a longish, countryside route back home. All very enjoyable, and to be repeated.

The day before that, we joined five others(!) at the cinema to see "The Fifth Estate".

A dramatic thriller based on real events that reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century's most fiercely debated organization.

It doesn't seem to have attracted much enthusiasm from hoi polloi, nor from the critics, but it was a good film; gripping, intense, and not short of pathos. However, having read the letter from Julian Assange to Benedict Cumberbatch, I have to say the film lost some of its edge. Assange told Cumberbatch that the book upon which the film was based was the least accurate and reliable of all the books written about him and Wikileaks, and that it didn't reflect the truth. Having said that, Assange is a first-class propagandist...

As for boating, the weather forecast is not encouraging.

Not only would we love to have one more cruise of a couple of weeks or so, but we need to get fasteners on our cratch cover and hull so that we can fasten the cover firmly along its bottom edge. If we're not going to get our foredeck soaked - and we'd rather not, since it's not really intended for that - then we need a couple of dry days when the cover can be off.

We've booked Kantara with John Barnard for April 2015! to be repainted. He's that busy!