Granny Buttons

Craven A-list of canals

BBC Countryfile magazine this month has an article by John Craven on 'Britain's Best Canals'.

He lists 'a very personal rundown of our top 10 canals and waterways'.

I've not seen the article, but I bet the magazine's own agenda of rural recreation will affect the list.  And I don't suppose by 'rundown' he means the state of the canal or the neighbourhood it runs through.

Canals were built as roads of industry, and for me they are at their most interesting in industrial areas, both active and derelict.

Of course the countryside is beautiful, but a canal trip that doesn't start or stop - or at least pass through - an industrial area is missing something.

So it's sad that there are fewer and fewer genuine industrial stretches of canal now.  And every year that passes, some canalside factory closes down and some piece of urban dereliction is greened and parkified and countryfiled.

Update: Thanks to Adam of Debdale for pointing out that the list is available on Waterscape here. 

Yes, as I expected,  John Craven's A-List is truly rural.  And many of them aren't canals, but features. He rates the Llangollen for 'heritage', but as far as I can see all it's got to stand out for that is the Ponty aqueduct.  (The Chirk aqueduct is matched by the one near Marple).   If you want heritage, try the BCN.

Personally, I'd like to see best for nightlife, best for boat maintenance, best for shopping, and other modern bests too.  But that might be against the spirit of Craven's countryfilia.  Which is only a light-hearted game, after all.

Motorcycle on the towpath

Armitage, May 25th 2008

Do you need a photo of a kid riding a motorbike on the towpath?   Will one of these do?  (click to enlarge)

Moments later this little tearaway was joined by a mate on his pillion, and together they drove past again in a roar of jeering and finger-waving. 

That would have photographed rather better, but in taking these pictures I'd lost my steering and I needed my hands on the tiller.   

Meet Robin Evans and Aunt Sally

BW chairman Robin Evans is going on the road, in a series of public meetings, in the next couple of months.

I think it's a great idea.  I hope it's regular.  Every chief executive should be encouraged to sit in smaller gatherings and answer questions from affected parties several times a year, and not wait for the stiltedness of procedure-heavy AGMs.

He's going to appear in each of BW's nine regions on a particular day, in two separate locations.  I applaud this, although it's brave of him - he's set himself up to be an Aunt Sally.  Wikipedia defines 'Aunt Sally' well:

The term is often used metaphorically to mean something that is a target for criticism. In particular, referring to the fairground origins, an Aunt Sally would be "set up" deliberately to be subsequently "knocked down", usually by the same person who set the person up.

The original Aunt Sally is a traditional country pub game where a ball is set up on a stick simply to be knocked down again by throwing another stick at it.   Click here for the rules.

My picture shows it being played in an Oxfordshire pub garden a couple of years ago, The Fishes at North Hinksey.  I doubt the players had any person in mind when they were playing the game.  Unless they were throwing 'Posh' at 'Becks'.

Of course, Robin Evans isn't BW's real Aunt Sally. Leastways, not for boaters.  Type 'Aunt Sally' into the BW website search box, and you'll find that ... Aunt Sally is!  I don't know if she'll be alongside Robin Evans at the meetings.  I'd love to meet her.

If you want to know when the meetings are, perhaps now is a good time to test my Granny Buttons calendar.  Web link here.  RSS feed here.  Have a look for 'Meet Robin Evans' in the entries. 

In the new calendar I'm trying to enter every waterways date I come across - even if I don't write about it in this blog - to create a useful diary for me (and anyone else who cares). 

If you know what a Google calendar is, you can twist and turn it to suit your own ends.  You can soak it for whatever information you need, add the Granny Buttons calendar to your own Google calendar, embed it in your own website, get it to email you with reminders, or even have it send you free text messages reminders to your phone.  Robin and Aunt Sally have no excuse for missing the meetings, thanks to Granny!

Huddersfield Canal's mini-me basin at Greenfield

Marina ‘will be a boon for local economy’ - Oldham Advertiser

A controversial £1.7m marina has opened in a Saddleworth village in a bid to attract tourists.

The Frenches Wharf marina, at Knoll Mill, in Greenfield, has been built on a former derelict site and can accommodate up to 20 boats.

On my only transit over the Huddersfield Narrow Canal in 2004 I was struck by the lack of boats and moorings.

What the Hudd needs, I said to everyone who'd listen (which was no-one), was moorings.  And not necessarily big marina-cities, but 'mini-mees', little communities, where every boat knows every other.   Floating villages, in other words, or even hamlets, where people live afloat and watch the canal.

The story from the Oldham Advertiser tells of the new Frenches Wharf, which they call a 'marina' but I think they ought to call a basin: Frenches Wharf Basin.

It's only 15-20 boats, which sounds exactly what the Hudd needs, and these should be peppered every couple of miles from Stalybridge to Huddersfield, with a healthy proportion of them being liveaboards.

If you want to chase a mooring at Frenches Wharf Basin, the story says 'the scheme is a joint venture between Wiggett Homes and Paul Speak Properties'.

I can find very little online about this fascinating development.  20 boats means it ought to have modest facilities - bunkering (refuelling, sanitary station) for example.  But who knows - it doesn't say if there'll be any liveaboards, and the Frenches Wharf development don't even have a website.

This is unfortunate, because the Oldham Advertiser says it's 'a bid to attract tourists'.  I would be interested to know what developers Phil Wiggett and Paul Speak have to say.  Especially Paul.  What an ironic surname, considering I can't find a quote from him.

The Greenfield and Grasscroft Residents' Association talk about the development, but their comments don't mention the canal.

Almost as a demonstration of the remoteness of Greenfield, someone else has nabbed the domain www.frencheswharf.co.uk to sell his nearby cottage, which he says has a private canal mooring.  He doesn't say how many feet of frontage it has to the canal.

And none of them seems to talk to each other on the web.  Which is a huge disappointment to me.  Were I retired and had office hours at my own disposal, I'd bang their heads together.

Sadness - not tragedy - on the canal near Devizes

Fire on the canal - Wiltshire Gazette

It's National Boat Safety Week. And to bring it in with a bang, here's a story about a narrowboat at Devizes that caught fire and burned out on Tuesday night.  (Wow, the boat's sunk in mid-channel, that's a bummer.)

The newspaper reports the story as 'tragic', although no one seems to have been hurt in the blaze, so that doesn't meet my definition of the word.  Sad, yes.  Tragic, no.

In all, 4 appliances and 18 firefighters attended the fire.

That's quite some attendance for a narrowboat fire that didn't look like it would spread.  Perhaps they needed the exercise.

Any boat owners who would like further advice are encouraged to request a free home safety check for their boat by calling 0800 3897849.

I'd like to call this number.  I wonder if it's truly free.  I don't mean the phone call, I mean the house call, from the boat safety doctor.  I hope they know where to site the CO detector, because no one else is sure.

In the picture (nakedly stolen from the newspaper story, thanks Gazette, you're a great paper!), I'm interested to see the huge TV aerial.  This suggests the boat was a liveaboard, which suggests the fire was from a coal or wood fire. 

It would be useful to learn lessons, but we rarely hear more from these occasions.  Unless they are truly tragic, like the one at Lyme View Marina early last year, which gave some useful lessons to learn, in solid-fuel stove installation and the use of smoke/CO alarms.

Update:  This later version of the Devizes story says oxygen and acetylene cylinders were aboard, which rather muddies the safety side of the story.  Welding equipment aboard a liveaboard narrowboat?  The story gets less tragic by the moment.

Wi-fi 'rip-offs' at marinas

Bruce of Sanity said on 23rd May that he'd moored at Crick, and had signed up for a week's worth of wifi access from Crick Marina at £9.

£9 a week? 

That made my blood boil.  £9 a week for wifi access; why, these days that's a whisker shy of theft!   

I've been banging on about wireless internet for four years here, and even three years ago I felt shafted at having to pay £25 month for a BT Openzone account and cancelled the account when I had the chance.

Marina managers who don't understand wifi (and likely don't understand computers anyway) must see a chargeable connection as an easy cash-cow. 

Actually, marinas are missing a profitable trick.  What they should be doing to make money is offering it free. 

£Free?   

Yes.  Wifi has a marginal cost of almost zero - that is; once you've set it up for one customer it costs almost nothing to service two, three or four.

And the point where a boater connects to a wireless network is a fantastic opportunity to connect back with him, to get him to read or see your messages. Marinas can benefit from giving free wifi by displaying their message in a sign-in screen.  Each time the user logs on, he sees an advertisement or message or 'brand' of some kind.  It can remind him of the local price of diesel or gas, say, or of a mooring rule, or he could see simple advertisements from local businesses. 

The point is, your potential customers get a reminder of your business every time they go online.

Mobile phone 3g signals are an alternative to wifi, but they are rare on the waterways.

Roll on WiMAX, which will make obsolete the rip-off of marina wifi access charges.  WiMax can give you wireless internet at mobile-phone distances, and you won't be reliant on the grace of mobile phone companies.

The service at Crick Marina is currently supplied by 1stHotspot.com.  Judging by their useful Improve Your Wi-Fi Signal page they seem very knowledgeable and must offer a good service. 

But in my view the whole wifi concept is ripe for upturning, like the moneychangers' tables in the temple.  Charging for it is like paying to enter the city centre.

Empty Crick Boat Show

I was looking forward to seeing assorted people at the Crick Boat Show on Saturday, but put it off until Monday because of other commitments.

I was dismayed to learn that it closed early on Monday morning, due to worries about the marquees being blown away in a gale.

I went anyway, and shouldn't have been upset.  The empty site perhaps more fascinating than if it had been fully populated.  I had the main marquee exhibition area to myself, and found it a bit eerie.  Even when shows are closed, you normally see many more administrative staff than were on the site at 3pm this Monday afternoon.  The exhibitors had stolen away, leaving it all abandoned like a tented Marie Celeste, or as if all the people had blown away to Oz.

The wind had subsided a bit by the time I arrived and the marquees were no longer in danger of not being in Crick any more. 

Yet it was still gusty, and the standards were still flapping wildly under lowering clouds that threatened rain (but luckily didn't deliver).  In fact, it was less muddy than in most previous years.

I didn't even have to pay to enter.  Life hands you lemons, don't make lemonade.  Suck 'em raw; it's quicker and cheaper. 

I also got to see Whitefield from the outside, at least.  This is the remarkable narrowboat that's designed to have the look and feel of a 'Mediterranean cruiser'.

The tick-list of Whitefield's features includes - well, see for yourself.  You'll be full of scorn or envy - there can surely be no halfway house.

Whitefield is just too, too outré and kitsch for me, summed up in its chrome-plated 'michelin man' dome at the front (can you see his astonished little face?).

Yet who knows what we'll come to expect from our canal boats in future years.  A modest 'floating cottage' like Granny Buttons must have seemed weird and outré to the canal boaters of old, and were I to spend a night aboard Whitefield, I fear I might be smitten.

I had a good chat with Stuart of Fernwood, the builders.  I mentioned I was a blogger and he suggested I might like to look at the blog of Whitefield. 

Er, that's not a blog, I said; it's a build diary.  And it seems to have stopped a year ago anyway.  Nothing radically wrong with the content, it's quite interesting.  It's just the way it's served up - all in one lump, like a full spittoon. Your next boat, I said, Derwent6, now that is a proper blog! 

With charm turned on like this, it's no surprise he didn't invite me to look aboard.   I never learned tact.

Whitefield certainly is an interesting exercise, with every conceivable labour-saving gadget.  It's a veritable reinvention of the narrowboat. 

I daresay one of the canal magazines has already reviewed it, but I haven't read the magazines recently.  They are all very good these days, with high production values and many good new columnists (including our own Bones, who writes for one of the three best).  But to paraphrase Noel Coward's comment on television, canal magazines are for appearing in, not for reading.  (Like I said, I never learned tact)

Later I went around to see Bruce and Sheila on Sanity for a chat.  It was a first meeting with another blogger, and what a blogger Bruce is, one of the most active and informative, and he is perhaps the most prominent of the continuous cruisers on the Save Our Waterways organisation. 

And that's the full story of my Crick Boat Show visit.

Bruce and Sheila are off to the Saul Canal Festival next week.  Would that I could follow them.

Cosmos and Debdale's and No Problem's 20 Questions

Cosmos has done the Twenty Answers.  As has Debdale. 

... and No Problem.

Define: Hippy hutch

When you take a marina mooring, you usually undertake to follow certain neighbourly rules in order not irritate your fellow moorers.

[Correction: there's usually small print in the mooring agreement that you don't notice until the marina manager tells you that you are breaking it.]

The most common is to keep your boat tidy, and not allow the roof to become a general storage area.

Being so casual and practical is sometimes called a 'hippy hutch'.   The essence of a good hippy hutch is that little of the clobber on the roof should actually be useful - e.g. coal or wood.  It's really just a space for storing whatever's left over after the towpath is filled up.  For example, on the hippy hutch pictured above, there's a weightlifter's dumbell and a car wheel somewhere amongst all the logs.  And on the one below, spot the rusty old car wheel.

Workmates and wheelbarrows are also common items found on hippy hutches.

I first came across the term at Streethay Wharf, where they expect you to keep your boat tidy and respectable.  But the term has had currency in California since the 1960s as a place where the cool counterculture people hangout. There's an original definition of 'hippy hutch' here.

It's a pound to a penny that boats like this will be occupied by polite Caucasian dreadlocked hippy types who keep themselves to themselves, and usually with sweet-natured mongrel companions.  I'm torn between natural suburban scorn and an atavistic longing to join them.  I was a freewheeling student-type myself once.

If continuous cruisers are eventually all hounded into marinas the sight of hippy hutches might become rarer. 

That, for me, would be a pity, because Granny Buttons herself is a little scruffy these days, and it always cheers me up to feel that there are mangier scruffier mutts on the cut.

A Hundred and Twenty Answers

Sonflower, Alacrity and Fade To Scarlet have joined in the Twenty Questions game.

What with Warrior, Dogsontour and Waterlily mentioned earlier, that makes a hundred and twenty answers so far.  

Plus me, of course. 

But my answers aren't online.  Canal Boat hasn't published them on its website, and I can't be bothered to type them out again right now.  You aren't missing much, though - my prejudices are as different as everyone else's, but not notable.

What miffed me is that Canal Boat published a very cropped photo of me, without the great t-shirt slogan that you can see in my current blog pic.

Twenty Questions' list of answerers

Nev of Waterlily has just posted his Twenty Answers, so I've created a list of those bloggers I know of who are taking part in the Canal Boat magazine game (see the list on the right).

The questions are :

1. What's your favourite canal?
2. And your least-favourite?
3. Who would be your ideal cruising companion?
4. What was the last book you read?   (I reckon the question should be "last waterways book you read, not including magazines or canal guides")
5. What's your favourite time of day on the waterways?
6. What irritates you most on the waterways? 
7. When would you most like to have lived? 
8. When did you last fall in?
9. What did you want to be at 12?
10. If I didn't have narrowboating I'd ... ?
11. Narrowboaters are ... ?
12. After a day's cruising I most look forward to ...
13. The waterways need ... ?
14. If you met the Waterways Minister on the towpath, what would you say to him? 
15. Windows or portholes?
16. Pumpout or cassette?
17. Canals or rivers?
18. Where will you be when you are 70?
19. What do you think is your greatest achievement in life?
20. What would your superpower be? 

As good a selection of questions as any, I think.  There's an element of randomness to them, but I can't think that are any that are better, just different.  Since this is Canal Boat's game, let's use their ball, eh?

Sarah of Warrior, in her own post on 6th May, thought it would be a good wheeze to withhold the questions and make you guess them from the answers.

Canal Boat, unfortunately, doesn't put the original feature online, but DogsOnTour has not only given the answers but has also given the questions too, so bang goes Sarah's element of the game!

Of mice and men and Minnie, Mortimer and Goofy

Mortimer Bones has kindly (and helpfully) quoted Tom Crossley's latest piece about me in Narrowboat World.  Excerpt:

... We boaters tend to rub along, but dear Andy just doesn't, for I know of a few who can't stand him or his utterings, me I must admit, included. ... One cannot but help feel sorry for him.

Join the club - I can't stand myself either!  You won't believe how ugly my bathroom mirror looks in the morning. 

If it wasn't for Bones I wouldn't have known what was said, because Tom plays a cat-and-mouse game with the facts, and the way NBW is constructed I simply don't have the patience to be his Jerry. 

I'm flattered that Bones seems to care more than I do.  Thanks, Bones!  Caring more for me than I do myself is what I call genuine, wholesome love, like the Christian Agapē.  So, hooray for blogs and Bones!

Actually, Tom could a really great blogger - or rather, NBW could be a great suite of blogs - if only someone was to drag him out of early 20th Century journalism, redesign his website with an understanding of things like feeds and the importance of linking and embedding, and assign him a sub-editor with some experience of journalism.  I hope he knows how to take a compliment.  I'm serious.

Talking of mice and men, and the early 20th Century and cat-and-mouse games, did you know that Mortimer Mouse was Disney's original name for Mickey Mouse in the 1920s?  I feel like I'm playing the ineffectual Minnie in this game, with brave Mortimer defending me from Goofy.

COGS and CO schools poster competition

The Carbon Monoxide and Gas Safety Society is a charity dedicated to raising public consciousness about the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.  And that's a neat way to put it, because raising consciousness is the last thing that carbon monoxide itself will do.

It's a long name for a worthwhile charity, and the official abbreviation (CO-Gas Safety) is clunky, so I'll call it COGS.

Anyway, to the point: COGS is holding a competition for schools to design a poster highlighting the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Two categories:

1: The last year of state primary school (year 6, i.e. aged 10-11)

2: The first year of sixth form (year 12, i.e. aged 16-17) or college.

(I like this idea; it stirs my memory about a safety poster from my own childhood.  The competition I entered was of a more generic idea:  Warn of a common (but neglected) danger in the kitchen.

I won second prize with 'Boiling water scalds', and a picture of a boiling kettle on a gas ring.  Actually, I originally wrote '... burns', but my art master nudged me into changing it to '...scalds'.  I'm not sure if adult help is allowed in the CO competition, but who would know, eh?)

To get ideas you can download COG's own booklet here. (PDF)

And it's a great read, well worth printing out in colour. You'd be hard put to improve on the marvellous illustrations from John O'Leary (himself apparently once subject to CO poisoning).   It's stuffed with advice - and sly humour.  For instance:

Please bear in mind that family members can suffer different symptoms. 

For example, the mother may be tired and have a headache, the son may be dizzy and act strangely and always want to be out of the house, the daughter may have a bad stomach ache, while the father may just be bad tempered.  [Presumably because his wife has a headache and his kids are acting strangely]

The problem is that such symptoms could be nothing [e.g. the wife or teenagers] or they could be CO. [e.g. the husband, because husbands always have an excuse]

Granny has a CO detector.  I wrote about it four years ago - goodness how time flies - and mentioned my hunt for advice on where to place it in narrowboat cabin. 

I also mentioned a then-recent victim of CO poisoning.  The poor man is mentioned on the COGS website in the list of people who have thus expired between 1995 and 2007.   

Eighteen out of 478 unfortunates were on canal boats - that's almost two a year!  So get a CO alarm.  I recommend a digital one, like mine.

COGS is looking for further sponsors for this schools poster competition.  CO detector manufacturers are significant by their absence.

Twenty Answerers

After my Twenty Questions in Canal Boat this month, Sarah on Warrior got jealous and didn't wait for an invitation - she published her own answers to the same questions.

Now Dogsontour has done it too.

I think it's a great idea to do it on your own blog.  It's all about publishing yourself and not waiting for an editor to decide who's important.

If someone else also does it then I'll start a list of 'Twenty Questioners' in the column on the right.  So far there's Granny, Warrior and Dogsontour.  It would be a pleasing symmetry to have twenty of them to list.