City light

As we got closer to Stoke-on-Trent the canal was no longer bordered by fields but by brick walls with blocked-up arches, and graffiti’d concrete slabs held together with rusting girders. The towpaths were no longer tracks through grass but paths made of setts and steps, cut-and-covered, to accommodate the 19th century town's pressure on space.

We moored for the night in Hanley and headed out for ‘Pub Use level 2: Darts’. Much harder for the tutors to set up than expected since the first pub we went into had its dart-board on one side of the route to the toilets, the throwing space on the other side and a landlady who clearly disapproved of us. For the second we were seriously under-dressed and anyway it didn’t have a dart board. The third had a usable dart board and friendly locals but something I’ve never come across in a pub before: no beer ‘because there’s no call for it’. Very perplexed, we introduced our charges to darts with cider. A helpful local bar-stool coach found something to correct for all of us so we invited him to join in our second game. He reluctantly agreed but, sadly, scored less than any of us in the first round, didn’t improve in the second, and slunk out midway through the third.

At the mammoth 24-hr Tesco lighting up the way John was confidently picking back to the canal across Hanley’s brownfields, he set the day’s 11.30pm challenge: we were split into two teams, one to find vegetarian haggis and the other to locate kippers. John managed single-handedly to beat both teams, not very surprisingly since both ‘kippers’ and ‘haggis’ were alien concepts to all but Jürgen and me, neither of us knew where smoked fish might be kept nor how haggis might be categorised and John seems to have an inbuilt capacity to locate anything anywhere.

(Etruria along the Trent and Mersey Canal to Hanley.)