Granny Buttons

Canal boating isn't like sex.

A Canaltime narrowboat share is up for sale on Ebay.  First time I've seen a Canaltime share for auction.  The vendor says that if you buy it direct from Canaltime, the price would be £4,000.  The opening bid is £1,500. 

Out of curiosity, I found the RCI Community, to which all Canaltime members (owners?) can belong, and one of the posters (Jsewell) wrote:

Anyone looking for excitement should skip canal-boats. They are a lot like camping - on the water. The narrow boats are just that - long and very narrow but quite adequate and quite a bit of fun actually. They cruise along about 4mph so it's easy to hop off and walk or ride alongside and then jump back on later. Canals crisscross England - choose your route with care - some offer more interesting sites to visit than others.

Oh dear.  I don't really think it compares to camping.  Perhaps more to space travel, with the ability to stick your head out of the spaceship whenever your claustrophia palls and you wish for a bit of wonder.  I was intrigued recently about a definition of sex:  It's exciting - but it's not interesting.

Boating on the English waterways is interesting, but it's not exciting.  Unless you are a kid.

Granny Buttons, the sirry irriot.

Studying my blog statistics tonight, I learned that someone from Taiwan visited me, and needed a translation.  I clicked on the link they found me by, and it turned out to be a Yahoo translation of grannybuttons.com, in Chinese. 

I was tickled, not least because the current picture I've got up there reminds me a little of Mr Chow Mein , Benny Hill's 'sirry irriot' Chinese character.  Oh dear, I hope they didn't think I was pulling their collective oriental legs.

Fish in Daw End Canal get shampoo and set

My post on Friday about a lorry full of 'women's clothes & accessories' crashing into the Daw End Canal was based on early newspaper reports and was slightly inaccurate.  In fact, says the Express & Star, it was 'full of hairspray and shampoo'. 

The poor old lorry owner (now even poorer, unless the insurance pays out) said: "I can only hope the water seal is a good one and the load is all right."

BW warned that lifting it out the lorry would be a delicate operation:  "The danger we have is setting the crane down on land solid enough to hold it without breaking the bank and causing the water to flood into the nearby quarry.".

If they are not careful, tons of shampoo may burst out of the vehicle with a thickening sud.

Maffers to Berko

Marsworth to Berkhamsted.  11am to 5pm.  Canalplan estimates I should have done this in five hours.  I took six .  I also overran yesterday.   If I take longer to do these runs, it's partly because I'm now on the wide locks, and these are trickier when you are going single-handed.  Well, not so much 'harder', as slower and more complicated.  Or perhaps I'm just getting older and less fit.

Leighton Buzzard to Marsworth

Leighton Buzzard to Marsworth today.  I just spent half an hour typing this entry, then lost it all!  Lots of good stuff lost, too, dammit.  Not just writing, but research and links.  It's all gone now - twice, as it happens.  Whoever said a Mac and Firefox were more reliable, less likely to crash?  Not here, they aren't.  I'm far more productive with a PC/IE combination.   Anyway, quick precis:

Set off after 1pm; much later than planned. Arrived  Marsworth 8pm.  Cold and in the dark, I worked quite slowly. 

Lorry crashes into Birmingham canal

Thieves this morning drove a lorry full of 'women's clothing and accessories' into the Daw End Canal, reports the Birmingham Evening Mail. The incident happened near Lathams Bridge.

Insp Pete Haywood, at Walsall police, said: "It looks like the offenders managed to negotiate getting down on to the canal towpath and we believe they may have been on their way to unload the lorry. "But they have either misjudged the size of the lorry or the road and they have ended up going in the canal. "As far as we are aware, the offenders managed to get away and all the signs point to that but the worst case scenario is they may have gone under."

There's a stoppage on the canal while BW remove the lorry and check if the dickhead thieves have gone & drowned themselves. Presumably, given the vehicle's contents, the police will need to drag the canal. Curiously, Waterscape lists the stoppage as starting in 22 years time, and lasting for exactly three years. 

04 Nov 2026 - 04 Nov 2029:
Stoppage: Lathams Bridge
An articulated lorry has been driven into the canal at Lathams Bridge and is blocking navigation. The waterway will be closed while the vehicle is removed. (Enquiries: 0121 200 7400)

It's quite amazing how far ahead BW are now planning their stoppages.

What to look for in online chandlery

Earlier this month, on uk.rec.waterways a guy called Steve who runs an online shopping site selling boaty things - mainly lighting and pumps - ask users how they bought equipment.  He didn't advertise his site, but simply wanted feedback on how we purchased stuff.

Purchasers have commended us on our website's ease of use, our good range and our good prices, yet the conversion rate of genuine hits into purchases is low.  How do members of the group buy this type of equipment. Do you buy on the internet? Do you look for the cheapest price? Do you expect quick delivery from stock? Would you find a better selection than your local chandlers an attraction?

Someone did some digging and found out who he was and what his site was, and pitched some pretty blunt comments.  And it went downhill from there, with quite a few people rudely criticising his site and picking holes in the copywriting and design, despite the fact that he'd asked simply how they purchased generally. They hunt in wolfpacks too, these boaters, so when they found he'd crossposted to uk.rec.sailing, one or two of the same people went to that newsgroup to skewer him all over again.

A most unusual and useful windlass.

Beginners usually call it a 'lock key'.  But the correct term for the winding handle you must carry to operate most English canal locks is 'windlass'.  Stephen Postlethwaite is now selling his own exclusive design of windlass by mail order.  It has an extending handle, the better to increase the 'throw' and torque as you turn the handle.

I suspect Postlethwaite is perfectly aware of the conventional name and calls his site www.lockkey.co.uk because it'll be better understood than windlass.co.uk.  Besides, the latter is already hogged by a cheesy domain squatter. 

It's a peculiarity of English canal boating that the men like to do all the hard work steering, while the women do the fun bit: running ahead at the locks, getting them ready and then standing around gossiping.  Postlethwaite nods to this time-honoured demarcation in his page of (very funny) testimonials, including:

"Since using your marvellous lock key I haven't had to get off the boat once to assist my wife..."

"The resounding splash it makes on being carelessly thrown overboard makes it much easier to locate than any conventional windlass..."

It's a very clever idea, and if your winding arm is weak the extra (and adjustable) 'throw' is definitely useful. However, it's clearly a cottage industry: at £28 the Postlethwaite windlass is more than twice the price of a conventional windlass and rather more than the mag-alloy Dunton windlass.  And that doesn't include the £6 p+p.

Giving thanks on the canals

America traditionally sits down on the fourth Thursday of November and 'gives thanks'.   Brits and the rest of the world haven't really picked up on this until recently.  In our newly globalised world we are starting to acknowledge it as an ethnic ceremony, like Diwali or Eid, albeit on steroids (as anything American always is)

The blogging world is full of thanks today, reflecting that most blogs are American, although the exact purpose and origin of the modern Thanksgiving is sometimes disputed, even by Americans. 

So in an ethnically diverse spirit, I'll give thanks too, and here's a picture of a little lapel badge an American fellow gave me from one of the Shakespeare Line hire boats at Branston in September.

• To Mr Flag Donater.  I forgot to get your name, sorry.   But I keep it aboard for luck, just in case I meet any Americans who might suspect me of impure thoughts.
• To James Brindley, for carving a model bridge out of cheese to demonstrate to sceptical parliamentarians his ideas for the Bridgewater canal.
• To Thomas Telford for his muscular confidence in crossing valleys and plains (whose embankments the old boaters called 'valleys', paradoxically).
• To William Jessop for not complaining about his thunder stolen by Mr Telford.
• To Bee Lavender, the only narrowboater I know who has already posted about Thanksgiving.
• To Sirius Black for making me defecate bricks and realise how wonderful my boat is when it's not broken into.
• To Streethay Wharf for fixing Granny Buttons and not sending me the bill for nearly two weeks after leaving them.  Oh, and only phoning me up to remind me yesterday.
• To No Problem and Moore2Life for blogging regularly as continuous cruisers.

Lots of others, but I'm bored with giving thanks.  Thanks should be private.  When you do it publicly you start after a while to cry a canal, like Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, and nothing's ever in proportion.

And anyway, you can't keep a stiff upper lip when you are saying thankyou. Whatever stupid over-emotional people think, I reckon a stiff upper lip is a noble thing, and I'm proud to have one.

Book covers restoration of the 'Ponty' - though not renaming, unfortunately

Richard Turner-Thomas has published Pontcysyllte Aqueduct Restoration a book about the major restoration of the famous aqueduct last winter.  It's a big A4-size thingy (the book, not the aqueduct), including lots of lovely colour pictures in case you can't read.  It's available by mail order here, for £10, including P&P  (£13 overseas).  Helpfully for more web-savvy types, you can even pay via PayPal. 

Richard was the BW Site Supervisor for the project, the biggest restoration of the aqueduct for many years.  The 'Ponty' counts as one of the Seven Wonders of the Waterways, but with its outre Celtic spelling it also ranks in my book as one of The Great Wonders of Dyslexia.

I spent the last two months of last year on the Llangollen Canal, but because of the restoration Granny Buttons was unable to cross the Pontcysllte Aqueduct and had to pull up short at Froncysllte (there's another candidate!) for a week. 

But, afoot, I wandered down the valley and up again, photographing this splendid structure (including a marvellously surrealistic view with sofas) and walking the towpath up to Llangollen itself.  Granny Buttons herself must wait for another year, another time, to complete the trip across the valley of the River Dee.

Incidentally, if you haven't already got a PayPal account, you really ought to get one.  You could try the alternative (and British-owned and sterling-oriented) Nochex, but Ebay-owned PayPal is steamrollering it.  I ordered my copy of this book via PayPal, and it took me less than thirty seconds.  And that included typing in a request to the author to sign the book to 'Granny Buttons'.

Stoke Fire

Mike Holloway of Snecklifter relays an email, received from his regular correspondent Pat Bycroft, which ends memorably.  Mike ends his own comment just as memorably.

Pat:  While we were out this time we made it to the Anderton boat lift, and saw a boat come up.  It was about 100 yrs old, the rear end of a butty with a new aft end added after she was cut in half, and new cabin added, the owner was telling us.  So her bow was once her stern and she goes backwards all the time.  He is looking for the other half of her - not sure why -  but it was an interesting tale.   Shame I can't remember her name.  Like you, we did find out how cold it can be in November - our first hard frost on a boat. We just stoked the fire up and enjoyed the view outside.

Mike: Her last sentence sums up my attitude to winter weather exactly.

Fireship on the Llangollen canal

Fireships have a long, fearsome history in the English Navy.  But I never expected to find them employed by vandals on the canals, as the Shropshire Star relates last week! 

This happened here.

Happy birthday, Vic No Problem!

Sue on No Problem says it's her husband's birthday today, and they are having a birthday party.  I think this might be the first blogged birthday party on a canal boat. 

Not a massive party, and no crowd control problems; but it's special because canal blogs are now hunting in packs, and hopefully we will find No Problem and Moore2Life not only cruising together, but blogging together too.  And hopefully more joining them. 

I've put this in my 'Waterways now' category.  It's certainly more apposite than 'weblogs'.

Odd boat gets new suit of paint.

Raymond Harvey thinks an update is needed for my picture of an 'odd boat' at Lyme View Marina on the Macclesfield Canal.  It was touch & go whether I included it at all, originally; it's only on the cusp of oddity.  But if it was strange then, it's certainly blossomed now, with a splendid new coat of paint. 

"Who's a smart little chap now?", Ray remarks.  He's right. Nothing quite like a new suit of paint to make a boat glow with beauty.