Good morning everyone,

This week I was trying to think of an example of something I didn't want to get emails about. At first I landed on barge restoration, but thinking about barge restoration for about a minute made me think about the lovely bright paints, and what if the emails had stop motions of people painting those beautiful letters with roses on them, and bottom line is, now I want to be on a barge restoration email list. Trying to bring a little slice of that magic to Fem Fri this morning.

Let's start with a group of women who are restoring Sailing Barge May so she becomes a floating bakery and space for women who have experienced trauma. It's also going to sail around delivering bread and cakes. Dreamy:

“We’ll also have a big table on the barge, so once we’ve baked, we can all sit down and enjoy a meal together, getting to know each other and build those all-important companionships.” The Bread and Roses Barge will be using flour from local mills - and the bread, cakes and biscuits that have been baked onboard will be available for collection when May arrives in various ports across the East coast. “May will have a regular route throughout the year.”

https://www.eadt.co.uk/lifestyle/heritage/thames-sailing-barge-may-to-become-floating-bakery-8203758  

Here's some history I did not know about at all - the "Idle Women" (NB not idle at all, they called themselves that as a little inside joke) who delivered vital goods around the UK via canal boat during the Second World War. It sounds like a pretty hard life (more at the link, the pullquote just skims the surface) even though canal boats are awesome:

The girls crewed in threes, but sometimes events meant that they had to manage with two. Each crew carried two loads in a motor (diesel engine) and a butty (no engine), which was towed on a snubber (70-foot rope). Mostly they picked up cargoes of steel or other goods from London, sailed to Birmingham where they unloaded and went to Coventry for coal. Coal was taken to factories and mills and some of it went to London. A round trip could take two or three weeks. They worked 12 to 14-hour days and the boats never stopped. The boats also carried cement, grain, flour, and other foodstuffs.

https://www.canalsideheritagecentre.org.uk/news/world-war-two-and-the-idle-women

There's a video here too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEmKmp8YhI4

I hope you have a lovely weekend, on or off the waterways,

A xx.