Granny Buttons

Garstang's got something that Middlewich hasn't

£100k boost for canal towpath - Garstang Courier

Work has begun on a £100,000 spruce-up of the canal towpath at Garstang.

The move follows British Waterways' decision to earmark Garstang as a special 2008 visitor destination.

This comes hot on the heels of the Middlewich towpath story yesterday.  What's Garstang got that Middlewich hasn't?

British Waterways North West general manager Debbie Lumb said ... "The fact that the towpath is part of a safe route to school for local children means it is a high priority scheme".

Perhaps Middlewich should make their canal towpath a route to school too.

Deer ramps to avoid drowning on the Stainforth and Keadby Canal

Ed Miliband, MP for Doncaster North, will be visiting the Stainforth & Keadby Canal this coming Friday [2 May] to review vital improvement works to the canal and rail network to prevent animals drowning.

Mr Miliband called for action after he was alerted to the issue of animals - mostly deer - drowning by a concerned local resident from Thorne.

Mr Miliband, who chairs a working group to reduce the number of animals drowning in local canals, will be visiting the area following months of hard work, resourced and funded by the working group.

... says a BW press release this week.

I had no idea that deer drownings were such a problem.  And I had no idea that the subject of drowning was so deer to Ed Miliband's hart.

After all, type 'miliband drowning' into Google and you come up with a very different perspective!

Once in the water, animals can’t escape as the canal walls are made of sheet metal piles, allowing them no way to clamber out.

Of course, the larger, more 'efficient' and deeper canals like Stainforth & Keadby are death-traps for smaller deer, who probably can't even stand up at the side, let alone 'clamber out'.  The solution here, apparently, is to install 'deer ramps and fencing'.

I wonder how close together these new deer ramps are, and how far the deer will have to swim to reach one.  If, indeed, the deer can read the signs pointing to the nearest one.

I also wonder what navigation hazards the ramps will represent to boats.

Towpaths were built for horses, of course, and sure-footed though they were, they often fell in the canals.  Most early canals were saucer-shaped and the horses could climb out easily.  In many other places, ramps were built to allow horses to 'clamber out', such as in the Grand Union Paddington Arm (below). But even in those cases, humans would be nearby to coax them to safety.

Nowadays the ramps aren't used by horses any more, still less by deer.  But they have their uses for dogs.  The fellow pictured here watched his dog 'clamber out' easily at the ramp - but a minute later still had to retrieve one of them manually when it insisted on jumping in again a few yards away.



Daft mutt!  What hope the deer?

Middlewich towpath improvements

Opinion split over towpath improvements - Middlewich Guardian

Locals have branded a £185,000 project to overhaul the canal towpath a waste of money'.

Some residents have said Middlewich Vision's plan to rebuild 1.5km of the Middlewich canal towpath should be a job for British Waterways.

Middlewich Guardian is one of those nice papers that allow comments, and in this story Will Chapman of SOW was quick to jump in and defend/praise the local council about rebuilding the local towpath.  That's alertness, well done Will!   

Will points out that the towpath in any town is nowadays a public amenity for local walkers and deserves council support and maintenance.  (Although he's wrong when he says "It is not strictly true that BW own the canal and towpath...".   It is true, Will; BW do own them.) 

But will Middlewich Council and Middlewich Vision help to take care of the towpath after repairing it?  They recently spent some considerable sum installing interesting canalside panels ('supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund') giving a history of the town.  But the panels (one of them pictured below, near the children's playground) are already in poor shape, at the hands of Middlewich's finest. And these panels are nothing to do with BW.

Towpaths are prone to wearing out quite quickly, particularly when bicycles use them.   So Will Chapman is quite right: if Middlewich wants to embrace the canal, it ought to consider not only paying to help upgrade it for the local people, but help maintain it too, while BW remains underfunded.

A precedent is the towpath on the Oxford Canal, as Michael Pearson pointed out only last year when researching his excellent Oxford Canal guide:

Having just tried to make my way over the Oxford summit, to me the biggest sadness is that the authorities (BW, local government, Sustrans etc) pour money into upgrading lengths of towpath then quietly go away and forget about it, just as though you mowed your lawn in March and expected it to stay pristine all summer. 

I seem to remember a lot of European funding being spent on the Oxford before it became designated as a long distance walk. They did I great job, but I suspect they haven't been back to look at it since, and now the hardcore they brought in by narrowboat has been recovered by turf and the nettles are shoulder high.

WordPress is now Granny's recommendation for starting a blog

(After a rant about BW losing their record of his narrowboat Boat Safety Certificate) Bob Scott last week asked me:

What I really wanted to ask is, what is the best way to start building a website and a blog?

Bob, hear this:  A website and a blog can be (and should be) the same thing!  A blog can do what a website does, and it does more too. 

I think the simplest way to start is to type 'How do I start a blog?' into a search engine. 

Here's Google's answer. 

Here's Live's answer. 

Here's Granny's answer.  Granny Buttons itself is feeling warmer and warmer towards WordPress. 

If you are starting a blog, the first thing is that it must cost nothing.  You might not continue, and it's no good starting if there's a chance you might not continue.  30 days trial is not enough.  Bad habits start within a week, but good habits can take far longer.

And if you do continue, you need a good blogging tool.  I currently recommend you use Windows Live Writer to enter new post and add photos.  It's also free.

[Windows Live Writer is not applicable to Macintosh.  Mac users: what's your recommendation?]

Geoprojects maps

Canaltime boater Colin Pretlove reads Geoprojects map of the Trent & Mersey at Rugeley, Sept 2007.

I've been meaning to write something for ages about the Geoprojects series of maps. 

Not everyone wants a book.  Sometimes you want a map you can fold up, like origami.  There's nothing quite like the crackle of paper as you fold and crease it to reveal a new stretch of canal.

Geoprojects maps are the ones for that.

(Unfortunately I can't find much about Geoprojects beyond a basic website which isn't properly compatible with my browser/screen.  You might have better luck.)

But not all their maps are folding paper. I had their excellent Thames Ring ringbound atlas aboard Granny a couple of years ago and gave it to the Bateman family at Banbury. 

I wrote about that occasion in the post Resolution, strength and courtesy.

They'd set out a couple of days previously from Napton Narrowboats without any maps at all, and had plans to do the Thames Ring.   

To my pleasant surprise, they sent it back to me three weeks later by post - with a crisp ten pound note inside, by way of thank-you.

Colin (above) was similarly friendly and courteous, and helpfully paused to give me the pose above.

Rod Dungate, boating poet

Jo Bell isn't the only boating poet.  Rod Dungate says he's one too:

Writing On Water:  A collection of poems about UK canals with photographs by Carl Hopley and Agui da Palma. 

[Amazon link here]

See also Rod's blog: roddungate.blogspot.com

But the blog is only partly about boating - in his case, as a co-owner of Challenger shared-ownership boat Centurion - so I don't know it counts as a truly boating blog.

Moo Cards and QIK

If we've ever met, have I ever given you one of my Moo cards?  These are chewing-gum-stick-sized business cards with the basic contact information on one side, and one of my photos on the flip side.

I first wrote about them 18 months ago, when I received my own first batch.

Robert Scoble has a video interview this week with the founder of the Moo Cards business, Richard Moross.

What's most interesting is that Scoble's interview with the Moo Cards boss is conducted while they walk, and on his Nokia N95 mobile phone, and  uploaded immediately to QIK.

The point of QIK is that you can instantly upload your mobile phone videos online, a bit like a movie version of Flickr.

I always offer my little Moo cards to people.  However, I've been much slower about doing these instant-upload video interviews. 

If you want to steal a march on me, start recording your video interviews as you cruise or walk - the waterways. 

And do it even as you hand over your cards.

Are Morrissey and his 15 friends aware of Granny?

Ann Reeves, Soroptimist, tells me she was delighted to spot Granny Buttons at Stoke on Trent last week, and adds

"... it isn't every day that one encounters a true celebrity".

Well, thanks, Ann, I'm honoured!  But it reminds me of the definition of blogs:

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.

That joke is taken from a 1991 essay, 'Pop stars?  Nein danke!' which also included the immortal line:

Your granny isn't aware of Morrissey.

Ann enclosed some photos of Granny, quietly moored near Festival Marina.  But more importantly, she also attached a photo of four ducklings in a row, one more than I've ever managed myself. 

It's not so hard to photograph a Granny, but it takes an alert mind (and ready camera) to spot the ducks-in-a-row.  I can testify to that.

Hello, David Turner of Alvechurch Boat Centres

I mentioned Bob Scott yesterday, merely in passing, and he quickly mailed:

If you get the chance could you make reference to a friend of mine, David Turner - he is a Director of Alvechurch Boat Centres and, frighteningly, spotted my name in your post of today.

If you are really unlucky he will put you on his circulation list.

Bob, I long since ceased to worry about Alvechurch, and I'm sure they never worry about me.  Or at least, I don't think they do. 

But ... just a couple of months after I started writing Granny Buttons, in September 2003, I wrote a post called 'Extortion at Anderton Marina' after being charged nearly £50 for mooring Granny Buttons there for five nights.  And I believe it was in a space that was already being rented out to another boat that had gone cruising - so I assume they were making another layer of money on top of their original moorer.

And I see that particular post is still No. 3, 4 or 5 on Google for the phrase 'anderton marina', which is presumably why David Turner reads me.  Or more likely, watches me.

Hello, David, nice to meet you!  Please will you put me on your 'circulation list'?

Snap! Bell's 'Navigation' jars against Poole's 'Gloucester'

The cover of Jo Bell's poetry book Navigation (right) which I wrote about today, has the picture of bow of a boat. 

I haven't seen Jo's book and I dunno the significance of the image.

But ... I just noticed that it's an eerie echo of the image to the bow of Chris Poole's tug replica boat Gloucester that I wrote about only last Sunday.

It wasn't deliberate on my part, honest! 

But it's close enough that it counts as another of Granny's spooky coincidences.

Catch up with the finished boat Gloucester at the Saul Canal Festival in June.

Will Jo Bell come to the Festival with her book too? 

Bell Jar Blog

I just discovered the boating side of Bell Jar Blog from Jo Bell, who was last year's 'Cheshire Poet Laureate', and I'm impressed and I've subscribed to the RSS feed.

Jo merits a mention on GrannyB because she is a boater too - she lives aboard NB Tinker, "which in 2007 moved very slowly around the Cheshire Ring and is currently sinking".

Jo's blog uses Wordpress and I'm impressed with its fast response and elegant design.  It makes me realise the clunkiness and slowness of GrannyButtons.com. Jo's blog is also beautifully written and impeccably spelled and punctuated.  It's a lesson to all.

But more than a blog, Jo Bell also has a podcast of her poetry [iTunes link here] 

The only poetry I keep permanently on Granny's bookshelf is Betjeman, Larkin and Kipling.  Oh, and Roger McGough, an honorary laureate.  Perhaps Jo's a bit too right-on for my tastes - she writes:

The idea is to make you smack your lips at the cultures and flavours that make up modern England without the sour taste of nationalism, as it were. 

The soundtrack already includes Vaughan Williams, the Clash and some bhangra, and I’m digging out eclectic poems and prose. 

"The Clash and Banghra"???  As an old-school Brit I rather like to smack my lips at the sour taste of old nationalism, if only to poke fun at St George's Day, a bogus, reinvented feast of modern nationalism.  But I've subscribed to Jo's podcast on my iPod.

Jo's blog strapline says she is a 'poetry professional', and in her blog she says she has a studio and a new book of poetry out called Navigation (available from the IWA shop). 

I'm envious. If only I could get paid for Granny Buttons, then I'd be a blogging professional.  Perhaps I could get a post as Blogger Laureate and bring out a book? 

I don't know that I could afford a 'studio' though.  But I can't see how a writer needs one anyway.

My photo filing system

In the digital photo age, how do you save and file your photographs?  Do you have a system at all?

Here's how I do it.  It's not perfect, and I'd love to spend a week revising it, but it's system enough for now.

1. Create a folder and call it by the date in YY-MM-DD format, followed by the general location where the photographs were taken.
2. Copy all the files taken on that day into this folder.
3. Quickly view the pictures and delete the unnecessary duplicates and failures.  I'm fairly brutal about this.   No need for ten different views of the same scene. 
4. Backup onto a big separate USB hard disk.  I also burn onto CD, but that's really getting too longwinded and complicated, and expensive too and I might give it up soon.  External USB hard drives are quite cheap now, and very reliable.
5. I also copy previous years' folders to a portable mini hard disk, to save space on my laptop hard disk (which is why you can only see 2007+ pictures in the pictures below).  If you already have one of the latest hi-capacity iPods (80gb+) you could use that instead, and view the pictures on it too.

See the picture of my current 'My Pictures' folder (above, in Windows Explorer, click to enlarge).  It's not proper cataloguing, but it is a fast, neat and understandable system.

Programs like Picasa, or the photo filing now built into Macs and Vista are pretty good, but when I used earlier versions I found myself trapped in them when I wanted to move my photos around.  It was too complicated to backup and transfer pictures, and when I moved from iLife I lost all the cataloguing information I'd spent hundreds of hours entering.

(See also my post from 4 years ago: 'A Fine time sorting photos' - not much has changed since then, except I'm back with PCs and using ACDSee Pro to edit them).

BW enforcer executes Apache

Remember how I mentioned last week that BW were holding 'public executions' of a number of unlicensed boats at Enfield?

BW Licensing Enforcer Debbi Figuereido yesterday sent me a short snuff video, showing one of the boats - called Apache - being guillotined:

Whether or not British Waterways has too many chiefs, it's certainly got one less Indian now.

Apparently most of these boats are little more than barely-floating tubs held together by algae and rust, and none of them are really worth anything.  Or at least they are worth rather less than the minimum £250 that it's costing to recover and pulp each of them. 

"I’m sure that if I’d kicked the side of that boat before we removed it that my foot would have gone straight through the side", said Debbi.   

Apache has a noble precedent.  Tom Rolt abandoned his beloved Cressy at the boatyard in Stone when it became clear that the boat was slowly disintegrating. 

Waterways bookseller Michael Baldwin knew many of the characters in the Cressy story, and he once told me that one of the Stone boatyard staff almost broke his ankle when his foot went through the rotten floorboards as it was being broken up.  No BW licences in those days, and many boats were left to sink and quietly rot in watery graves.

BW have to go through a rigamarole of legalese, checking if the boats are someone's home, proving that they've been unlicensed, proving that they've made efforts to contact the owner, and a whole bunch of other stuff, including - bizarrely - that there's no life-endangering asbestos aboard, etc etc.  All in triplicate, of course.

Swindon Advertiser, its readers and the Wilts and Berks Canal

Bid to ditch canal project - Swindon Advertiser

The long-simmering project to restore the Wilts & Berks Canal through Swindon has become partisan.  Labour are agin, Conservatives are in favour:

The Labour group will present a motion at full council to call for a halt on the £52m project, championed by the Conservatives.

Labour say that the Adver's recent survey, which revealed that two thirds of Swindonians are opposed to the canal, raised a number of questions about the plans.

Supporters of the project have hit back, accusing Labour of getting their sums wrong and lacking ideas of their own.

It's good to see a return to traditional politics!

It's impressive that the story about the survey attracted 120 comments.  I love - I really love - this ability for online newspapers to allow comments.

[Further reading (and better than the W&BCT in my view): The Gentle Highway.]