Granny Buttons

The Rose Revived

I've been reading The Rose Revived by Katie Fforde.  It's a light, ephemeral, highly enjoyable bit of chick-lit froth.  I didn't take it out in public, just in case anyone saw me reading it.

Synopsis: 'The Rose Revived' is a canal boat on a residential mooring in London is the base for three girls thrown together by a cleaning job they all need.  Each one meets an eligible bachelor, and the the path of true love follows the usual route.  Perhaps the most realistic part of the story was in the main heroine's desperate struggle to pay for her mooring fees! 

Katie Fforde's later book, Life Skills, features similarly feisty girls, but is a much better read for boaters. It's about the tribulations of running a hotel narrowboat business, and I found that one fascinating and truer to life.  No surprise, then, to learn that Katie was, in a previous life, a hotel boat operator. I wrote about her old boat three months ago.

Why the curious name of The Rose Revived?  It's the name of a Thameside pub west of Oxford, on the edge of the Cotswold, perhaps most famous now for being where restaurateur Raymond Blanc got his culinary start in England about 35 years ago.  Katie Fforde lives in the Cotswolds, and a large part of the plot takes place in the countryside there, as well as on a narrowboat similar to her old one, so I suspect she was simply writing about what she knows.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar cooling towers

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, near Redhill Lock, 6pm Dec 17th 2006. 

Another night picture, 6 secs exposure.  Look closely at the hi-res version (on Flickr) and you'll see a couple of white dots in the sky near the RH cooling towers.  Those were planes headed for East Midlands Airport.  Some day I'd like to get across the river Soar (to the right of the picture) and photograph this scene from a distance, where the towers would look stupendously brobdingnagian behind the little farmhouse in the foreground.

Have I run this one in front of you before?  While Granny's stationary at Streethay I'm having to hunt back through my files, and I'm trawling the bottom now.  This 'photo a day' business is a rod for my own back, it really is.

Not to mention the dog

Two found dead on canal boat - Shropshire Star

Immediate reactions are that this could have been carbon monoxide poisoning.  If so, it's sadly ironic that it comes during Boat Fire Safety Week.

Update 3/4/07 - confirmed:  Poison fumes killed couple -  Express & Star

Spring clean on the canals

Canal given spring clean - This is Wiltshire

One local paper (amongst many several) reports on this year's Towpath Tidy:

A section of the Kennet and Avon Canal in Bradford on Avon underwent a spring-clean yesterday to help prepare it for the tourist season. ... The spring clean is part of a week-long national campaign, called Towpath Tidy, which will see canals across the country spruced up. It is hoped the clean-up effort will bring important benefits to wildlife as well as improving the appearance of the waterway.

John Kirby, marketing and membership director of the Kennet & Avon Canal Trust, said: "It went extremely well and we collected about 100 pounds of rubbish between us. We had about 10 or 12 volunteers helping us with the clear-up.  (photo above stolen from link at top)

In the comments, 'Jo of Trowbridge' sniffs: 

John Kirby, is the marketing and membership director of the canal trust. His comments proves this was a marketing project not a conservation one!

I notice that neither newspaper nor Jo mentions the reason the canal was built: boats.

Narrow Dog gets to Fort Myers

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne author Terry Darlington emails:

We made Fort Myers and made it home, and had many strange adventures and Narrow Dog to Indian River is finished in draft.  The main challenges we met were insects, wind against tide on twenty-mile crossings, and being partied to death by the Yanks, who rose from their graves to come and see the Phyllis May. 

We found nothing to suggest that a narrowboat had ever sailed in the US before, but as ever would like to hear of any.

Jim attracted a lot of attention - whippets are known there but very rare.

As are narrowboats. 

Before they left the UK, Terry said he worried about a half-starved dog being the sole survivor of their adventure down the Intracoastal Waterway from Carolina to the West Coast of Florida.  But when I met them at the Star Inn, Stone the week before they left he wore his lucky 'Fort Myers or bust' T-shirt (pictured above) so all came good in the end.

Mortality is a recurring them in Terry's writing.  I love the '...rose from their graves' bit.  I've heard that Florida is where you queue to meet God, but Terry didn't go there to wait; he's already near-finished the book.  Dead lines clearly aren't a problem for him.  On www.narrowdog.com there's already a contents page here and a new sex tract here.

My earlier posts about the Narrow Dog's adventure in America include items here and here.

Horses and carts on bridges over the Bridgewater Canal

Acton Grange Bridge, Bridgewater Canal, near Moore, Cheshire, August 2004.

As these horses and carriages crossed the bridge, I think I was waving harder to them than they were to me.  This time it was me who was the gongoozler, frantic that I couldn't photograph them clearly enough.  I'll put the hi-res picture here on Flickr if you want to see it in more detail.

I think the first one is a carriage , but I forget what the official term is.  And is the second one a two-wheeled 'trap'?  I don't know much about that sort of vehicle.  If I was asked to draw a picture of one, I could do a horse, but I'd have to get the horse to draw the cart.

The British Driving Society might be able to identify them from the meagre clues here.

Photographing webs

 
Spiders' webs, Streethay Wharf, October 30th 2004.

If you don't move your boat very often, it will inevitably get coated with spiders' webs, and these can look especially pretty in the dew of an autumn morning. 

I've never managed to photograph these successfully.  Dew-lapped spiders' webs are like holiday sunsets - you imagine you've photographed the glory, but what you end up with is tedious for your friends to look at.

Digital Photography School today has good hints on how to photograph spiders webs successfully.  I'll read it carefully before I try to photograph webs again.   But then again, in canal photography the trick isn't to photograph the web, but to photograph the boat and show it coated in webs.

Mr David

Nb Mr David is blogging. 

David & Brenda Scowcroft have become a familiar sight at waterways shows, selling photos and hand-made crafts, and travelling the system for nearly eight years since their boat was built by Warble in 1999.   The crafts are on www.nbmrdavid.com but while it works as a 'catalogue', I think they'll soon come to find that a blog is a much easier way of publishing bit by bit.

The then-new Mr David was featured in - I think it was Canal & Riverboat - the same month that Granny Buttons was the cover girl on Canal Boat Magazine in Jan 2000.  We moored up together in Millwall Dock during the Millennium celebrations.  I was very envious of their shiny new boat.

Eight years on, last Saturday's blog post was "Day two of the Make Mr David a Beautiful Boat Again Programme".

World Canals Conference 2007, Liverpool

I've planned my summer cruising to be up to Manchester, then Wigan, and on to the Lancaster Canal.   Late in the summer I hope to be within day-tripping distance of the Lake District.

It's just occurred to me that I'll be close to Liverpool during the World Canals Conference, 13-15th June 2007.   Perhaps I can attend the conference, and finally reach the terminus of the Leeds & Liverpool at Eldonian Village.

It was back in 2003 that I got as far as the Mersey Motor Boat Club at Lydiate, but a bridge repair stopped me from going closer to Liverpool.  then I was trapped from returning by a breach in the canal near Burscough.  That month of immobility allowed me to start writing www.grannybuttons.com. 

My blog will celebrate its fourth birthday on August 3rd.   Here's the first post I ever did.

Granny in Gloucester Docks

Granny Buttons in Glos. Docks, 23rd July 2005.

Paul Balmer of Waterway Routes says he was watching a canals DVD the other day (and apparently nodding off) when he spotted a familiar boat 36mins into the programme.

"That's GB" I shouted to the rest of the family.  The writing is not quite distinct, but comparing this with stills I have of GB the window layout and spacing certainly matches.

I don't recognise the location, but perhaps you do.  The DVD is marked (c) 2005 and all the other locations I recognised were around the Avon Ring, with plenty of green vegetation suggesting summertime if that helps you work out when and where it was taken.  The DVD is from a set of 3, this one marked "Narrowboats - Working on the Canals", published by Pegasus.

He says it was outside 'Herbert Warehouse', and there's a Herbert Warehouse in Gloucester Docks (map here shows location of the warehouses).  Yes, Paul, problem solved.  Granny Buttons was outside the Herbert Warehouse for the last week in July 2005.  I arrived on Saturday 23rd and the picture shows GrannyB tied up outside Biddle's Warehouse, before moving onto the pontoon moorings the following day.  The next Saturday Charlie Lyne took the boat upstream to Stourbridge. Here's my blog entry for arrival at Glos.

Gloucester Docks is a terrific place to pause for a week or two, and a great base for exploring the Cotswolds.  But there's enough to keep you busy and interested around the docks and the city that you won't have time for the Cotswolds.  Let Hugh Conway-Jones' superb Gloucester Docks and the Sharpness Canal website be your guide.  I never found a suitable wifi point to view it back in '05, but surely there must be one there by now?

Nice Narrowboat. Not.

On 3rd March I wrote a post called How to get justice if you think your boat has been built badly. 

Ian Westwood felt his new narrowboat had been built shoddily by Maesbury Marine.  He was so upset he set up several blogs, each of them telling exactly the same angry story of being ripped off.  Allegedly.  I thought he made a few mistakes, and listed what I felt he should and shouldn't do.  Apparently Maesbury threatened legal action, and he's taken them all down now. Here's the address of the main blog, in case he gets it going again. He really ought to start his blog up again, although a little more carefully this time.

Maffi today draws our attention to another get-even website:  Nice Narrowboat, a sarcastic horror story based on Jason Clarke of 'J.M. Clarke Narrowboats Ltd' in Blisworth.   Nice Narrowboat is now offered for sale in barely sailaway state, after they've already spent £51,000 on it.

The Island, Brentford Lock

Model of The Island at Brentford Lock, inside the show flat, May 2005

As promised, here are just a couple of the several photos I took at Brentford Lock two years ago in my one-day stay.  Granny Buttons is in the background in the show-flat interior on the right (click on the picture to enlarge it).  Who has the more 'stunning' view?  The boat or the flat?

These photos aren't of high technical quality, but as I trawl back through my files, I'm starting to realise what an interesting historical resource they will be in years to come - provided I keep them filed correctly.  Good librarianship makes up fully half the value of old photographs.

Living On Boats lists project mistakes

On his Living On Boats blog Martin Chinery today has very good post called Houseboat Project Mistakes. 

It's about that Grand Designs TV programme from a couple of weeks back that converted an old barge into a bizarre 'eco-home'. Martin points to seven major mistakes that turned a folly (in the architectural sense) into a near-disaster (in the disaster sense).  Well worth a read.

Incidentally, Martin's blog is really a smart (and free) way for him to publish a newsletter for his Living On Boats website, and it works well, complete with RSS feed.  It's always a good read, although it mostly focuses on widebeam and river liveaboarding.

However, he doesn't include links to the things he writes about (e.g. the Grand Designs programme, which inspired his piece in the first place).  I think he should link externally.

I think he should also drop the copyright-heavy legalese demanding that the whole of his blog posts should be quoted or not at all (and insisting that it should link back to his site).  Coupled with his inclusion of copy and photos from an Apollo Duck ad, without a linkback, it's too pompous rich indigestible, and discourages people from spreading his message.

National Week Week

National Boat Safety Week has begun.  It's also Towpath Tidy Week. 

Regarding Towpath Tidy, The Wiltshire Times says BW Chairman Robin Evans "will be at Bradford on Avon Wharf tomorrow morning to join local residents in picking up litter along the canal route."   Can someone get a photo of him actually picking up litter himself?   How long will he actually do it? 

About Boat Safety, I  checked Granny this weekend.  My boat is officially Safe, thanks to the work Streethay have done on her, and she's got her new Boat Safety Certificate.  But because of all the other work being done - including my new cratch and cover - unfortunately she's not Tidy.