WELCOME

WHAT a difference a day – and a decade – make!

Exactly four weeks after writing my welcome to the May edition, it had been feeling a bit like Groundhog Day, with every day blurring into the next following the same stay-at-home routine.

That was until the Prime Minister opened the proverbial can of worms with his ‘road map’ out of lockdown and phased easing of restrictions.

I am writing this on Wednesday, May 13 – the day people could go out again for exercise as many times as they liked and go back to work, if they had to, all within social distancing guidelines.

Each day since the announcement has seen more ‘clarification’ with the resultant press releases from the industries affected, including the inland waterways.

Things have been changing while I have been finishing off the remaining news pages as we go to press which, at this moment in time, have up-to-theminute information… but for how long?

I mentioned a decade – that is because it is 10 years since I wrote my first welcome, having just taken over the editorship of Towpath Talk in May 2010. What a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

These were the days of British Waterways, although there was plenty of discussion about the impending move to the ‘third sector’. Although it would be another two years before the Canal & River Trust came into being.

On a sad note, news reached me recently of the death of long-term contributor Suzanne Kelsey, who covered the Thames and Oxford area as well as being a prolific book and pub reviewer. Her name won’t be familiar to many of you because she wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth Rogers.

I know she still had reviews she was working on so my apologies to any publishers who sent books or pub landlords who she had spoken to, about their non-appearance. Please do contact us if you want us to follow any of these up ourselves.

Stay safe