Granny Buttons

Bad coffee at Restaurant Barajee, overlooking Gas St Basin

I dined at the Restaurant Barajee last night with a lady friend. It was a good quality curry house, a little too formal and expensive for my tastes, but formulaic. If you like this sort of thing, well, this is the sort of thing you will like. It stands atop the Broad St Bridge in central Birmingham, overlooking Gas Street Basin, and if you've come for the view, you'll certainly get your money's worth.

The entrance, off the street, leads straight up the stairs, and there's no menu outside. By the time you've seen the prices, you feel obliged to stay. It has all the usual touches for this sort of restaurant - linen napkins, obsequious waiters, too many plates, each one wiped with a flourish before setting it down in front of you. Food is fine. etc. etc. etc.

To the point: The coffee is dreadful - real canal slops. The ship of dinner was spoiled by a ha'porth of tar-water. But this is not unusual amongst Indian Restaurants. They rarely know how to serve a decent cup of coffee. Instead, they nurture and nourish a coffee pot as if it's a precious family heirloom, handed down from dad to son. And they pour out the long-stewed but overdiluted slop into a tiny demi-tasse which sits on a saucer which sits on a sideplate.

If you have dinner at the Barajee, you'll eat well, if pricily. But go back to the boat for coffee. However, to preserve that special Barajee memory of a lovely dinner, fill your kettle for coffee from the canal!

Where should I put my CO detector?

I bought a CO detector just before Christmas. It's a neat Kidde model, complete with digital min/max readout. Apart from one short hour when I had the Vanette oven running and the high-reading was just '10' (it happened only once), it's resolutely stayed at zero, despite my having a constantly-running Kabola and a gas fridge. The instructions talk of a readout of about 50 60 for three hours as being dodgy, of 100 or more for a couple of hours of being dangerous, and of about 300 as being 'get out of there NOW' territory.

But I'd be slightly more reassured if the readout bumped along near the bottom, instead of flatlining.

I took it off the wall and held it against the diesel exhaust outside, and it gradually rose to about 230, which was reassuring in its way. But it's back on the wall now, and still giving a big round zero readout. I wonder if I should have it up there

or down

here?

'What I did on my holidays'

Another canal cruising article in the newspaper travel pages this weekend. Times Online - Families

This one described a week on the Warwickshire Ring, hired from Valley Cruisers of Atherstone. It's good publicity for boating and the waterways, and very interesting for those who've never tried it before, but like so many travel page articles it reads more as a "what I did on my holidays" essay rather than travel writing. I'm being precious about this, I suppose.

On the same page there's another, summary, article from Nick Corble, for complete beginners. Corble wrote up his own introduction to boating in 1999, in the entertaining Walking on Water, of which I'll write more later.

Flat Stanley and the Falkirk Wheel

Not a lot to do with Granny Buttons, except by a couple of degrees of separation, but "here's the first picture I have from a friend of a friend who's actually been to the Falkirk Wheel. Hannah looks so sweet, and will win a packet of Buttons if ever she makes it down south as one of Granny B's Grandchildren. So what's a Flat Stanley?

This is a Flat Stanley, apparently. Interesting concept. I think Flat Stanley could have a high old time on Granny Buttons for a few days.

The Channel - er, Canal?

Apropos the recent Channel crossing by Terry and Mrs Darlington on their narrowboat, The Times ran an amusing little letter last month that my sister clipped out this week (I think she mislaid her scissors).

Entitled 'Missed opportunity', it outlined an alternative to the Channel Tunnel!

The Truckonauts

Every so often a new concept - and word - comes along that catches your eye. See truckonaut I do admire these guys. They've taken boating where no boater has gone before.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

A minute's walk from the nearest mooring at The Mailbox in Birmingham is an astonishing art gallery, well worth the short detour. I only heard of Willard Wigan less than a week ago, when he appeared on Radio 4's Midweek. He's no newcomer, and he's had a lot of press ink in the past, but I suspect he'll go on catching people by surprise for some time yet.

Willard Wigan is a micro-sculptor. He builds/creates/fashions microscopic works of art, most of them mere specks, some of them literally invisible to most eyes. All of them need powerful magnifying glasses, most require microscopes. Four neat ranks of microscopes line up in the gallery, and from the outside it's hard to appreciate how your senses can be transformed when you look

Willard resembles a delicate Lawrence Fishburne, and when you look though the microscopes you'll feel you as if you'd swallowed his a red pill and jumped into The Matrix. What you see there is undoubtedly man-made, and that's the astonishment; it's not nature, it's the artifice of a netherworld.

Look on the link marked 'art'. My favourites are perhaps Girl with Balloon Walking an Eylash, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Cast of Peter Pan in a Fishhook. But that's the entertainment. For sheer philosophical pensiveness, see 'Samson pushing apart a Human Hair' - not on the website I think.

Willard Wigan is surprisingly approachable. When I went on Saturday he was there, swigging from a water bottle (he forswears alcohol and any stimulants) and talking openly about his technigue. He's mystical, almost Buddhist, in his approach, meditating, calm. Look closely at hiswork and you can almost - not quite - see the limits of the detail. It's like a digital photograph, where you can *just about* spot the pixelation. Perhaps an electron scanning microscope would ruin the effect. If you zoon into Snow White and fail to see her eyes, the effect might indeed be ruined.

Wigan told me we'd not seen his limits, by any means. He's got a Concorde almost ready to roll out, the smallest-ever tribute to technology.

Yes, yes, but is it art? Some items are truly kitsch - for instance "Mr & Mrs Jack and Elsie Maple", a pair of (presumably dead but real) houseflies, dressed up as jiving 1950s teddyboy and bobbysoxer. That one could be straight out of Mr Potter's Museum of Curiosities, or a flea circus of old.

Others, like the Statue of Liberty, owe their grandeur to the emphasis of their surroundings, in that particular case the eye of a needle. It can only be a question of time before Wigan sculpts a camel, to accomplish another religous parable - he's already done the Last Supper.

But still others make you think. Samson splitting a human hair is one.

I can't think of a better reason to moor up to the Mailbox than to visit Willard Wigan. £3 entrance, £1 per postcard (a little steep, for a souvenir postcard, I think). There's no catalogue, as such, but you can browse through a compendious collection of press cuttings if you ask.

More Narrowboat World

I was amused to see I got a mention on NarrowboatWorld this week, not least because I'd imagined the little exchange on this newsgroup would be too irrelevant and small to be 'real' news. And it rather missed the irony of my references. Still; nice to have a cheerful, friendly acknowledgement from the voice of the waterways! As I've said before, good for him/them. It's a good effort; well done.

But columnist 'Victor Swift' also said I got the site address wrong, and this puzzled me. I didn't think I make any factual errors. (Allegations, yes; I have quoted on uk.rec.waterways what others had said to me, but no factual errors).

But he might be right about where it's hosted. The hosting of the site seems to have changed in the new year. It's now on www.narrowboatworld.supanet.com.

How this will change indexing by Google I don't know. The old Freeserve site is still there (and indexed by Google), although Tom stopped updating it last month. I think there's also an attempt on the new Supanet site to discourage indexing by Google, although I think they're not using the correct anti-spidering syntax.

It's a shame if he does eventually block Google. Not only is NBW a good resource, but the on-site archive isn't working at the moment, so what's a girl to do if she wants to look back through old news?

I still like NBW, for all its heavily larded opinion. I have to say that the flattery of being mentioned at all was far outweighed by the egregious offence of calling me "Andy"!

All in all, NBW is a tabloid, it sensationalises, in the theatre of waterways news it's a pantomime dame. That's no insult; I think some of the greatest stage performances of all have come from the great pantomime dames, from before Dan Leno right up to the superb Berwick Kaler. But it's theatrical.

And it remains determinedly anonymous. Anonymity makes any inaccuracies so damned infuriating. Even the personal letters they publish are often seemingly pseudonymous.

Waterworld - too dull?

A recent post on uk.rec.waterways suggest that the Waterworld TV series has too much negativity, too many bad examples, and that is making for a dull series, and it's thus no wonder it is still only shown in Carlton's midlands area
"Allowing four untutored hen-party women on a narrowboat, crashing into everything they pass is another example of how the program portrays the completely wrong impression of narrowboating", writes 'Grey'.

I think this is being a tad unrealistic. A Waterworld that showed our own perfectly handled boating wouldn't make for gripping television. Well, it might for us, but not for the punters.

Indeed, I suspect it hasn't been taken up by the broader mass of TV companies simply because not enough drama is happening on camera. Too few boaters locked up by police, too many retired boaters retiring to cocoa and bed before 10pm, not enough shagging by drunken 23 year old secretaries, etc.

In comparison, the drama of extracting mattresses wrapped around propellors, or lengthsmen pulling coconuts out of the canal is hardly gripping stuff. As amply displayed by dvboy, who writes on his blog:

Waterworld, a dreary regional programme about canal barges. Did you know Radio 2's Alex Lester lives on a narrowboat? Do you care?

River Canal Rescue to the rescue.

I broke down at Kings Norton Junction at dusk last night (5.15pm). Just as I reached the Junction and was manouvering to turn the sharp right hand bend, under the bridge (the first one shown on this page) the engine stopped responding to the throttle. It seemed to tick over fine, it just wouldn't accelerate, either in forward or reverse. Turned out to be a broken Morse cable, the second in four years. And there I was, stuck in a lonely place that Pearson's describes as 'more than one hire boat company advises against spending the night there'. Oh dear.

Thank heavens for River Canal Rescue. I phoned up at 6pm, saying I'd be happy if they came out the next morning, but the guy on the phone was calm and helpful, and engineer Peter came out from Nottingham in a couple of hours with a replacement, in the cold, dark and rain, and I was underway again by 9pm, on my way to Gas St.

It's the fourth time in 2 1/2 years (Peter was on three of those calls, two of them in the dark and rain) and each time, they've done superbly. They refuse any tip or refreshment and simply seem happy to help.
There are a lot of good testimonials on their site. Of course any business is bound to get complaints at least now and again, but my experience, like those testimonials, is only good.

Hockley Heath to Brum

Journeying back to central Brum this weekend. When I arrived at Hockley Heath, it was supposed to be just a gentle week's pause before heading to Hatton. Unfortunately I had assumed it was lock 28 (on the Lower Stratford) that was closed for repairs, and it's actually bridge 28 (a lift bridge just above Lapworth Top Lock) so I discovered I was trapped in the Brum area until March.

Nothing for it but to go to the Sheepcote St moorings for a week and rethink my whole winter voyage. It's a pleasant rural run until Kings Norton Junction, where it's said 'bandit country' begins.

Quite a few peole have made some pleasant records of this stretch. Try catshill.com and canalsguide.co.uk

I saw Wedges bakery before I departed. It's a real treat.

Broke down at dusk at Kings Norton Junction and was saved by River Canal Rescue (I've described this later) so my journey to central brum was rather more nocturnal than I'd planned, and extremely cold. However, late at night in a slushy, windy blizzard is the right time and place to pass this stretch in safety.

Canals & Canal Boats DVD

DVDs about the canals are fairly sparse, and especially TV-quality stories and documentaries. Canals & Canal Boats is an entertaining history about the British waterways, and you'll especially enjoy it if you are new to the subject. Enthusiasts might pshaw and splutter that it's all ground they've covered before, but I think it's a delightful introduction.

What comes across so starkly is how important the waterways were to the Industrial Revolution, and how much they were the sinews of British industry in the days when it was the Workshop Of The World.

One quibble: The cover says its narrated by Robert Powell. Don't know where that came from. It's actually Brian Glover, your favourite Yorkshireman. Glover is entirely in character for the subject, and does a superb job

Robert Powell's beautiful honeyed voice might have added a slight sense of authority and history, if like me, you enjoy bathing in the fast-diminishing pool of of Received Pronunciation now and then.

Trivia of the day: I've heard that Powell lives in one of the penthouse flats above Sherborne Wharf in Birmingham.

Code CHV1029. www.sanctuaryrecords.co.uk