I stayed at that quiet spot outside Kinver for four nights, during which time 'Ian and Scruffy' arrived. Ian owns a chainsaw and kindly gave me a bag of logs as well as inviting me to join him and Martin to go to a Country and Western night in a pub. I thanked him for his kind invitation but declined. I prefer to stay in near the fire and read. I eventually left that mooring, with Andy on board (or rather taking pictures of me from the towpath) on Sunday 8th. We moored in Cookley and went for a bowl of soup in a pub. Then Andy cycled home and I continued on to Wolverley, where, in snow, I moored above the lock. There was no internet reception there, nor the next night above Wolverley Court Lock, just half a mile away, where I moored next to Geoff and Mags. They invited me in for tea and a slice of homemade Bakewell tart and we talked boats and the life. They've been living aboard for three years and Geoff - being a former engineer - is a mine of information about alternators and batteries that leaves me mind-boggled and realising I have a lot to learn about technical things.
On Tuesday, with sun shining, I travelled through shopping-trolley and rubbish-strewn Kidderminster, to Cadwall Lock, with its sandstone cliff, dripping with vegetation, dappled with wavy light reflected from the canal. I took some pictures with the camera on self-timer of me opening the lock. Then, it was down to Stourport, or rather a mile or so on the outskirts, at the spot I moored with my Dad on the way up. Geoff and Mags moored behind me an hour or so later. I felt like I'd come back. No more locks now. I return the boat tomorrow morning just above York Street Basin. I already feel sad to be leaving it. I've chopped my last batch of wood and started the process of clearing out. It's the end of an adventure.

Another snowy day. Gritting salt is running out in Staffordshire, they said on the news. It's a good job the Worcestershire border is a few metres away, marked by a post. Not that the condition of the roads affects me. I've hardly been near a road for weeks now. Neighbours, Bill and Martin had a snowball fight this morning. I listened to the radio. The coal man called by on his boat, heading through to Stourport today he said. That made me feel better. I've been imagining it's still a long way off. Nine miles or so plus about ten locks. Several days' journey. He's doing it in a few hours. Martin bought some coal. I cut some firewood. I baked a potato in the embers. Another busy day on the cut...

It was the quietness that was most noticeable. The day it first snowed - Monday - there was no wind and nothing seemed to move. The pigeons fluffed themselves up into balls and stayed still in trees. No birds sang. No-one was around, not even any walkers. There was a silence and stillness that you rarely experience, even in nature. Then, yesterday, the sun came out, the breeze blew and the birds flew and sang. Today, surprisingly, the sun came out again. With blue sky and snow covered fields and towpath, the scenery near the canal is more picturesque than usual. I moved about a mile from Kinver, through Whittington Lock and on to a spot where I stopped on my way up. This time, it wasn't to be alone as two other boaters are here. Two liveaboards, one on a rather bashed and ancient cruiser style boat. I think they've stopped here because it's a good spot for cutting wood. I cut just one big log with my little saw and then chopped that into bits with my axe and mallet. Now, I sit by a searing fire once more.

I left the perfect mooring spot on a wide bend opposite a pine tree edged field, with a backdrop of beech trees all traced with snow. Nina Simone's 'Here comes the sun' accompanied the sunrise over the snowy hill. Everything looked so beautiful.

The neighbouring boat is an ancient wooden hull, covered with bits of tarpaulin. There's no sign that it has an engine or has moved in the last century or two. A smoking chimney pokes through and, at the bow, bits of dolls and pot plants form a surreal garden. On the towpath, there is a pile of chopped wood but I hadn't seen who lives there until today when, as I passed by, windlass in hand, having readied Hyde Lock, a boy said, cheerily "it's a long way to the next lock mate." A woman with a nose ring and a Peruvian hat looked up from the bow with its cornucopia of objects. "Leave him alone, maybe he wants a walk!" she said. I realised I'd seen them in the Co-op last week and in the greengrocer's before that, where she was buying a sack of onions to pickle.

On Friday, I left Wombourne on my own and was proud to take the Bratch flight of three locks in my stride, doing it all in 45 minutes without cocking anything up and flooding the place. Eventually, I moored up just south of Swindon, where a cob swan pecked angrily at the boat for most of the night. I think it was a territorial thing.

The next day, once I'd moored at Greensforge, my friends Sue and Hazel with Sue's daughter Kesia came to visit. We travelled down to Stewponey with them on Sunday, in bitter cold and then I moored up here. I think it is my favourite spot on the canal. The boat gets morning and evening sun, you can see who's coming along the towpath in either direction as you look out of the boat away from the path and, instead of a line of trees or a canal bank opposite, there is an empty field edged with reeds.

Hyde Lock and its canal-side cottages looked especially pretty too. I wish there had been someone to take a picture of me and the boat coming through the lock.

I've had a quiet day in again (apart from a morning swim at Wombourne Leisure Centre). I've cut a little of the stock of wood on the roof, re-heated broccoli and stilton soup that I made the other day and sent and read emails. A glossy magazine picture editor contacted me out of the blue, looking for a 'quirky' and fun picture story. There were a few hours today where the very delicious bait of a lucrative seven-page spread dangled in front of me, but I probably bit too hard - with my suggestions of my (now vintage) Mr Tahiti portfolio or perhaps one of traditional Samoan tattoos or, more recently, of funeral festivities in Sulawesi. Eventually, after thrashing around enthusiastically in the pond, another fish got lucky - or perhaps not, if we take the analogy to its ultimate conclusion. Perhaps I'll live to fight another day? Or perhaps I'll just get fat and forgotten in this back-country, black country, waterworld? Increasingly I think I am turning into Ed Reardon, the fictitious past-it author trying his best to scrape together a living, whose antics I listen to on Radio 4. Mind you, at least he has written some books in his life.

Radio 4 continues to work its magic. Today, in Material World, there was an account of 'morphic resonance' a theory of one Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biochemist (a bit like me, except my honourable degree is from less renowned Dundee). I learned that "nature has memory". Sheldrake cites experiments where rats learn to escape from a maze. When other unrelated rats, in a faraway location, are put in an identical maze, they, apparently, find their way out of the maze faster, thanks to some telepathic learning process whereby they acquire knowledge from the distant pioneer rats. Today's crossword is easier to do tomorrow by the same reasoning - many people have already done it and so you can harness that miasma of problem solving. (Or you can look at the answers.) It seems a preposterous notion. If it is true, why do humans become increasingly out of kilter with nature? Why haven't we learnt from mistakes and why aren't we heading towards Utopia? Is chaos not the more natural degeneration? Or is that just pessimistic? It would be great to believe that we can inherit all the skills and knowledge of our ancestors through some ethereal morphic field. Perhaps then I could write well, always take good pictures and be able to sell myself? Perhaps I wouldn't be an Ed Reardon figure, rejoicing over a pound coin I find on the floor of the swimming pool changing room?

Now I'm at Wombourne again, just above Bratch Locks. I know that I have about 20 miles and a remaining 25 locks before I get to the River Severn at Stourport. I will take it slowly and stay overnight for at least two nights in most places. I met a neighbour yesterday, Dave. In his 30s. He was heading off on a bike and asked me if I knew about what was happening "down at the Bratch"? I explained that I'd just moored up but I had heard from a walker on the towpath, on my way here, that there were police at the locks "looking for a body". That's two bodies-in-locks scenarios I've come across in as many weeks.
Dave, who, with his girlfriend, has lived aboard just since June 2008, is loving it and has no regrets. "It's magic. A robin sat on my finger the other day..." However, he also told me stories of youths at Compton who had thrown bricks and spat on him from bridges. It seems like having car parks full of ferraris and audis doesn't mean there are no yobs. But he hasn't let this put him off. Dave hadn't even been on a boat before they bought theirs. They still have a flat though so they have the best of both worlds.

I'm back at Dimmingsdale after a weekend away - two miles and two locks further up the canal to the exotic Wolverhampton suburb of Compton. Judging by the number of ferraris and audis in the Spar car park and the hairdressers with silver sculptures in the window, Compton fancies itself as one of Wolverhampton's more affluent areas. The 'Nisa' shop has vegetables displayed in baskets and, no, I'm not talking about the girls on the till who wear straw boaters. The Oddfellows pub, although it sells champagne (Moet at under £40 a bottle - a bargain), offers the same old collection of dishes - portobello mushrooms with stilton, burgers and steaks - on a menu with the same font and lay-out as £1-a-pint Wetherspoons.
It's a far cry from Dimmingsdale, where there is nothing but a leaky lock and some overhead power cables to distract me from my big garden - complete with its water feature - where today I cut and chopped more logs, which now burn in the stove, beating back the mind-and body-numbing cold that can take so long to chase out of the cabin if I don't get the fire lit in time. I am mesmerised by the flames and glowing embers as the logs burn, releasing all that energy the tree trapped from the sun during its short life.

My friend Rachel with two of her daughters, Shannon and Naomi, came to visit yesterday, accompanied by my favourite dog, their black labrador, Jethro whose coat is so shiny and eyes so full of love, you can't help but hug him. With Andy, who had arrived the day before, we all pootled off on a journey of 300 yards and one lock, just for fun and then moored in my third spot in Compton in as many nights.

Andy and I had been up to Autherley Junction on Saturday, when the sun shone and the sky was blue, distracting us, just, from the Carling Black Label cans strewn along the towpath. We had to do a U-turn, which was unexpected fun and, thankfully, with Andy pulling on the stern rope, not as difficult as I imagined it may be. It was the parallel parking at Oxley Marina that caused more problems. I bought 80 litres of diesel (sadly not recycled cooking oil this time either...) and the tank now shows three quarters full again, after having been on a quarter. This means I have a tank capacity of about 160 litres, which ties in with what the manual says. Therefore, I must have about 120 litres left. I bought 142 litres at the start of my journey, which nearly filled up the tank, so that means, just estimating from gauges and guesswork, I've used about 100 litres to travel 55 miles. That's 270Kg of carbon dioxide for just 55 miles. According to timeforchange, I could have travelled 1,900 miles by train or bus and produced that much. I know it's lots of guesswork, but, it's undoubtedly true, that narrowboat travel is not environmentally friendly when we look at emissions per mile. Not surprising really when you consider that you are pushing your 25 tonne home along, sometimes uphill, even if it is on water. What a shame there is no government incentive or a BW scheme or a farsighted entrepreneur that could make carbon-neutral recycled cooking oil widely available at marinas. I'm sure that, if its performance were equal, there would be many boaters who would pay the same - or more - as for fossil-fuel diesel. It's true, there's not enough surplus chip fat to provide the millions of cars on Britain's roads with biodiesel, but there could well be enough for all the boats on the inland waterways. (According to The Ecologist, in 2003, the UK produced 100,000 tonnes of waste cooking oil which could have been turned into 110 million litres of biodiesel.) Of course, my travel has also provided me with a roof over my head, including all my electricity (sadly not supplemented by solar panels) and hot water for 30 days. So, not counting emissions due to purchasing provisions that have been manufactured and shipped around the world, friends who come and visit by car and those from my lentil soup farts, my lifestyle currently produces predicted carbon emissions of 3.28 tonnes per year, on track to equal those of an Azerbaijani. That's assuming I won't head off on a plane once or twice this year, which I probably will. Oh well, it gives me some leeway to reach the main culprits. According to the timeforchange.org website, which uses data from the World Resources Institute from 2002, that, surprisingly, is Luxembourg, where their population emits an incredible 21.6 tonnes per person per year. Who'd have thought it? USA is second of course. Luxembourg obviously desperately wanted to be first at something for a change.