I'm fine lettering design

The lock keeper at Hythe Bridge has stopped asking after you, which Mam says is a kindness, though I think it just means he has given up. Bess is still hauling the Marigold along the cut with the same bad hip and the same disgusted snort every time the towline tightens. We made Oxford on Tuesday with eleven bales of wool that smelled of wet dog, and the river was so low at Sandford that Dad walked the last half mile beside the horse with his stick and a face like a shut door.

There is a heron in the willow below the second lock. It has nested there three springs running, and every morning it stands on the same flat stone looking at the water as if it dropped a coin in and wants it back. Yesterday it took a perch right in front of me and swallowed it whole, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the coal box.

Mam asked me to write properly, so here it is. I have the tiller most days now, and I can read the water the way she reads a bill. Where it goes dark and slick, there is a shelf underneath. Where it ripples over nothing, go left. Dad says I am getting too clever for my boots. He is wrong, but I have not told him so.

I have written I'm fine four times on this page, and I have noticed the letters getting bigger each time, like the old painted numbers on the gate at Abingdon. Come home at Michaelmas and I will stop. Bring the good ink, and Dad's spare pipe, and tell Mam the heron is still robbing us.