Last year Tany and I were given an amazing wedding present, a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads with Bob and SJ. It was a great plan, until Bob, doing some downhill mountain biking, failed to complete a jump and landed on his head. We joke about it now, but actually it was pretty scary for everyone (especially SJ) unless you were Bob who had a thirty second memory and was so highly medicated he probably didn’t have much idea what was going on.

Fortunately, he made a pretty good recovery, and we were able to rearrange the holiday for the middle of May this year, overlapping with our 1st wedding anniversary.

So Tany and I have now spent a week learning to sail a proper sailing boat. The boat, Luster, is part of Hunters Yard, a fleet of 1930′s broads sailing boats. This fleet of wooden sailing boats were designed and built specifically for negotiating the shallow waters of the Norfolk Broads. Pretty well equipped, our boat had four small births, one of which I just managed to fold myself into, and when the awning was put across the top of the boat the cockpit turned into a small galley. Light was provided inside by a couple of oil lamps and squeezed between the two births was a small toilet.

We didn’t have access to the luxury of an engine, which meant that everything was done under sail or using a quant – which is a long pole a bit like a punt.The great advantage of only having a sail was that we moved so silently we could get really close to wildlife, such as nesting Coots, Geese and Herons.

Bob had carefully chosen an instruction manual for Tany and I to get familiar with sailing on the broads. Coot Club by Arthur Ransome. Well worth a read if you ever want to understand what sailing in this part of the world could be like, or to remember how perfect England was in the 1930s.