Granny Buttons

Three different ways of taking photographs

I've just printed off three of my favourite waterways photos for friends. It occurs to me that they reflect three different ways I take photos on the canals.

You can see all three at high resolution by clicking on the thumbnails here.

1: Watch and wait - Langollen Canal lift bridge   

The conventional way is to see a scene in advance and visit to catch it in the right light and weather.

Stand there with your camera, waiting. And waiting.  Often you'll have to give up because of the weather, and come back later.  Eventually you throw up your hands and say 'to hell with it, this'll do'.

That's how I photographed the Whitchurch Arm on the Llangollen Canal in November 2003.  I tried to photograph it the afternoon before, but the light wasn't right.  I photographed it here the next morning (a weak winter sun) but the light still wasn't quite right.  But it never is, is it? 

The lift-bridge is the attention-getter in this scene, but a lot depended on the weather and the light to show the Canal Arm in the background.  And someone to come along and work the bridge and add some excitement.  Which they never did.  To hell with it, this photo will do.

2: The tableau - President at Burton

Then there's the scene with humans, and you have the chance to manoeuvre them around.  It's what I call a 'tableau' - a composition of humans.  (based on the old tableau vivant).

This scene was the steam narrowboat President at the IWA Festival at Burton in 2004, waiting at Horninglow Basin for the arrival of the local mayor. And while they were waiting, I spotted this chap relaxing on the bow.

I was about to click the shutter, but something was missing. The background was blank and boring. My model was bored too, and he shuffled to get on his feet.  So I shouted across to him, asking if he'd lay back again for a moment. 

No, not there, I said with considerable bossiness. There, just there. That's right, thanks!

With good grace he moved to the right place on the boat's bow, and after a few seconds - just as he began to fidget with impatience - my prayer to the Great God of Composition was answered by a passing cyclist. I had to work and wait to get the elements into place.

The limiting factor here is mainly social. It's all about 'directing' - the ability to be cheeky enough to tell your models what to do, even if you've never met them before.

(Anyone recognise my male model? The Mayor arrived shortly afterwards, and I never got the man's name, so couldn't thank him.)

3: The contingency shot - Windmill End

Then there's just the moment you seize, unplanned.  You just have to hope you caught it.  I call it the contingency shot.

This scene at Windmill End was in the dying light of 30th December 2006. Coming out of Netherton Tunnel, I found it raining heavily, and as I pulled in to the side, a parade of Canada Geese emerged indian-file from the Bushboil Arm, following the directions of the junction signpost. 

[The link to the Bushboil Arm is the best one I can find.  It's significant that No. 1 on Google for such significant spot on the waterways is one man's record of his holiday seven years ago.  Just goes to show that we can all be equal on the web.  Well done, Gerry Cork!]

I grabbed an umbrella (good cameras aren't waterproof) and it was tricky holding the umbrella while trying to catch the goose parade.  And I only got one chance. The result was woefully underexposed, and needed a lot of tweaking to recover the picture.

Of course, I'd like to have stood on Granny's roof so that the line of geese was more in the centre of the water.  But I'd never have caught it at all if I'd stopped to adjust the camera settings or the composition. Or the umbrella.

The limiting factor here is perfectionism.  The best is the enemy of the good.

Three missed subjects

Just three things I was unable to finish writing about before the weekend:

• The Northamptonshire water supply contamination.
• Saul Junction Festival
• Cotswold Canals - Stroud Council steps into BW's empty shoes.

And I did a lot of research and had something to say about each of them. 

Damn, perhaps later.

Canal boat chase ends in wry smile

A couple of people have emailed me about the recent Newsbiscuit story, Canal boat chase ends in capture after eight days.

The silly picture, particularly, appealed.

An eight-day police chase across two counties ended peacefully when a suspected canal barge thief was cornered in a canal basin near Wolverhampton. 

When the emergency call came in last week, police officers ran to their specially-equipped police canal barge with sirens and tracking equipment that has been fitted out for exactly this sort of low-speed chase across the inland waterways of Britain.

But I recall a similar story told in a canal magazine about ten years ago.   One that really happened.

In the 1920s or 30s a boatman on the Grand Union stole a loaf of bread from a canalside bakery and made off on his boat. 

The baker called the police, who commandeered another boat (or at least hitched a ride) and followed the errant thief for many lock-miles and several hours before catching him.

The story made the local paper, which hinted that two bored policemen simply wanted a day out.

I don't remember which magazine it was, and I don't remember if it was the April issue.  Perhaps you, dear reader, remember?

Newsbiscuit is an amusing website, a Brit version of The Onion.   Fewer of the stories hit the mark for me, but it still can raise chuckles. 

It's a Google ad-sponsored site, and for me the best part are the ads served up alongside the story.  Are they for real, or a wind-up?  They seem authentic - I clicked through and couldn't see any fakery.

But consider:

The above police/canal story carried this ad alongside:  'Careers in anti-terrorism - free online degree.'

A story on police stopping drivers to test their accents to see if they are poor enough to charge with any offences:  'Got debt?  Click here for free bankruptcy evaluation.'

Another story of a pederast complains that police upset his computer settings:  '2008 cute kid of the year contest ... enter a photo to win.'

Archbishop of Canterbury converts to Islam:  'Muslima - The international Muslim matrimonial site.'

Jack Skinner obituary on Radio 4

Jack Skinner, one of the last surviving canal boatmen died a short while back, at the age of 88. 

Original boatmen are rare-enough these days that his passing merited a spoken piece last week on BBC Radio Four's Last Word obituary programme, along with tributes to Cyd Charisse and the founder of Asda.

It's taken a while to reach the airwaves; Jack Skinner gave up the ghost on April 28th and his radio obituary seems based on one written by local historian Catherine Robinson on 12th May.  Read it here on Canal World.  Or a variant here in the Guardian. 

I confess I only heard about it on Radio 4, which shows that - for good or bad - I don't have my ear to the ground.

Being an ignoramus and a learner on all things to do with the waterways, I think I confused him with Joe Skinner, who also was married to Rose and also wore a trilby hat, and died a few years ago.

Joe is perhaps a more iconic figure amongst the Last of the Working Boatmen.  He was Jack's uncle, and the chief subject of Hugh Potter's book The Last Number Ones.  (Allegedly the Last Number One.  As I've remarked before, another claims the title).

Egosurfing on Baidu

If you are in the smug position of being No. 1 on Google for the search of your own name, you need to look at yourself from a different angle.

Try Baidu.  It’s the big Chinese search engine, and it’ll give you an angle on the web you never knew existed. It’s apparently the world's 13th most popular website, which makes you think, eh?

Granny Buttons doesn’t feature on Baidu; not on the first page of results for its name anyway.  Be warned, those results are not decent.

Which is puzzling, because Baidu's search results are subject to China's censorship policies.  I don't know what I've done to offend them that 'Eva Mendes nude' hasn't.   She's No. 1 in the results.  Or rather, she isn't.  I mean, it's not even Eva Mendes who comes up when you click the link.  Let alone Granny.

Build A New Life with an old lock cottage

No sooner do I go all lock-cottagey (viz. my recent posts about Little Bourton Lock and Hardmead Lock and Linton Lock) than up comes this alert from Channel Five programme Build A New Life:

Are you moving to your dream location where you will be renovating your dream property?

The Build A New Life team are looking for hands-on people who are starting work on a property renovation.

The producers would like to hear from people who are moving to an idyllic part of the countryside to renovate properties such as an old boat or barge into their dream home or dream business.

If you would like us to document your inspirational journey please call 0207 985 7165 or email [email protected].

Little Bourton Lock Cottage and Linton Lock Cottage might be ideal projects for this.  The former as a private dwelling, the latter as a canalside business.  The Build A New Life team are looking for hands-on people, and lots of people want to get their hands on lock cottages. 

Hardmead Lock would suite too, provided you planned to turn it back into a proper traditional lock cottage, with no electricity, no mains water, no sewage and no road access.

The programme is sponsored by Norwich Union Direct, so perhaps there's some compulsion to insure with them at the end. 

Disclosure:  Granny Buttons is part-sponsored by Adrian Flux insurance services (i.e. my employer does PR for them), so their home insurance division gets a free plug:

Due to the type of Homes insured, [Flux] policies are designed especially for the out of the ordinary and our staff have a high degree of knowledge in this field.

This is not an on-line quotation system using computer rates. Instead each risk will be individually calculated by our expert staff. 

Please note that our sales staff are experienced underwriters not just 'computer monkeys' and along with our tailor made household insurance online schemes we believe we offer the best quotation service around.

Click here to see some Adrian Flux staff.  These are real, trained insurance staff - not models, not 'computer monkeys' - I'll be and I was photographing them on last Sunday at the French Car Show.  I was wearing my best raincoat.

NB cast off on Severn at Worcester

Narrow boat gets stuck after being untied - Worcester Standard

Three people were awoken by fire-fighters after their narrow boat became lodged in a railway bridge archway on Saturday evening (June 21).

The rope that had been securing their 40 foot long boat to banks outside Worcester Rowing Club had mysteriously come undone.

The narrow boat drifted downstream before getting lodged broadside between the bank and a pillar.

If it was some oik's idea of a joke, they deserve to be thrashed soundly - this could have been a real tragedy.

On the other hand, perhaps the boaters used mooring pins and didn't hammer them in tightly.

There's not much information for me to go on; not much to justify a Granny post.  But I've been there - I've been cast off over night by oiks.  In my case, it was by I'd like to know more about this.  It's the stuff of nightmares.

Bagnall Lock, Alrewas

1:30am, Sunday morning, June 8th 2008, at Bagnall Lock, Alrewas.  I positioned the camera so that the tree on the left was just hiding a garish streetlight.  (There's an old picture postcard for sale here which shows the scene with the streetlight visible and the tree just a young shrub in the foreground.)

Even so, that bright light - with a tiny emulsion of humidity in the air (which reflects/refracts nearby bright lights) - was enough to hide most of the stars.  You really need dry, cold nights for good nocturnal scenes.

I'd thought of going up to the bridge and standing stock-still for the duration of the exposure (some 30 seconds), but two things stopped me. 

1. A dramatic, ghostly costume was needed to make it work.  Perhaps a broad-brimmed hat and a dark cloak, maybe wielding a cutlass - or possibly a boatman's uniform. 
2. This scene needed an extra bit of light filling in the foreground.  It's not enough just to click the shutter and wait. 

So I stood by the camera, hatless and with a small torch, wiggling it around.  It wouldn't work so well without 30 seconds of 'fill-in flashlight'. 

My weekends are so often like this.  I feel compelled by ghosts to stand around for hours in the dark in their popular old canalside haunts, signalling wildly with my torch like the look-out confederate of a burglar.  In the end I'm either going to get arrested, or mugged by another burglar who thinks I'm intruding on his patch.

Droylsden Swing Bridge accident - move along, nothing to see...

Girl, 15, has legs amputated following 'horrendous' swing bridge accident - Daily Mail 

Last weekend a horrendous accident resulted in a girl losing her legs at Droylsden Swing Bridge, on the Ashton Canal.

The Mail allows people to comment on its stories (bravo).  The comments here (currently 27) seem evenly split between pull-your-socks-up: 

Moral of the story - don't mess about with swing bridges!

... and sympathetic platitudes:

What a dreadful thing to happen to such a young girl. My family's thoughts are with you and your family.

Granny came through this bridge last Christmas.  I was single-handed and recall having to leave my key in the lock while the bridge was open, taking my boat through (a tricky process single-handed) and then returning to close the bridge and fetch the key.  Urban bridges of this type don't allow you to remove the key until the bridge is closed.

So, either a boater has forgotten his key, leaving it to the local rapscallions to play 'open/close the bridge and see who's chicken', or there's been a major malfunction.  Or both.

Or perhaps one of the locals has a key too.  I've met quite a few one or two towpath walkers who buy a BW key for the sheer convenience and accessibility and if I was a local kid I'd find a way to get hold of one too.

I suspect we've only heard half the story.  Was a boat going through the bridge at the time?  Who was actually swinging the bridge?

Dog blog thanks

Thanks to Greygal of Dogsontour for the recent alert about other dog-friendly blogs.  She lists twenty of them. 

Her list allows me to list twenty too.  (Not 22, although I could list 22 if I included Snecklifter - not technically a blog and no longer cruising - and Dogsontour itself.   

Greygal doesn't list her own blog.  Perhaps this is out of modesty, since she clearly holds the record for the largest number of dogs on a single narrowboat.  So she's ideally placed  to organise a dog race at the IWA Festival 2008. 

Even if no-one else entered, she could still field almost a full race.  I wonder what it's really like sharing your home with five greyhounds (to say nothing of the husband)?  Do they get on each others' nerves at night and keep you awake?

There are some great greyhound vids on YouTube, including this fascinating timelapse of a greyhound sleeping for nearly six hours (according to the clock in the background).

And YouTube also has one of what a greyhound gets up to when it's home alone.  And another.  Golly, they are fascinating. 

Bachelor Springcleaning and Guerrilla Brass Cleaning

Paul 'Moose' Curtis is a 'reverse graffiti artist'.  He takes dirty surfaces, and 'cleans' artistic patterns into them.

It was born, one day, when I was working as a kitchen porter.  I saw a little dirty mark on the wall, and I got my little cloth out, and I wiped over this little dirty mark, but I left this bigger clean mark...

So I tried to - diffuse it a little bit - but in the end I had to clean the whole wall. 

And when I cleaned the whole wall I thought, 'I'm going to have to clean the whole restaurant now.'

And then I realised the whole power of it ... seeing how dirty a wall is by cleaning it in this way is ... people go up to it, and they realise that it's really, really dirty.

Thus began the Reverse Graffiti Project, where he now takes grimy city walls and 'cleans' art into them instead of painting it.  The video is here.

I call this the bachelor springclean syndrome.  This is when a slob carves a patch of cleanliness into grime that they previously ignored, highlighting the rest of the dirt and making people feel guilty so that they do the rest of the cleaning for him.

The bachelor feels smug, knowing he started it, and says "Well, don't blame me, don't say I never clean!"

Where Paul Curtis differs from the slobs is that he carves art or patterns in the dirt, creating fascinating municipal murals in sillhouette. 

The connection with the waterways?  Ah yes, I was coming to that. It reminds me of the Guerrilla Brass Cleaning incidents three years on some of the Thames locks.

However, the incidents didn't make any art or patterns out of the cleaned brass.  They were done by a vandal who just cleaned parts of the brass, presumably to encourage the locals into cleaning the rest of each plaque.  As here at Romney Lock, near Windsor.

A few weeks later a guerilla brass cleaner struck when Granny Buttons was moored at Stourbridge for a few days. 

The blighter left half the brass tiller and every other brass mushroom roof vent shiny clean.  I had to spend ages cleaning the other half to match them.

Update:  Mortimer Bones will love the way Alexandre Orion paints/draws skulls in the dust of a Sao Paulo road tunnel - and the haunting way in which they are subsequently removed.

[Original link via Boing Boing]

Swedes of Rivendell back in England this week

Mats and Sanne, of shared-ownership boat Rivendell, are the only boaters I know of who do a bilingual cruising blog - in their case, it's in Swedish and English. 

And because they translate each entry directly, it's a great read for language students.

The cruising log of their 5-week 2007 trip is here.

I met them last year on the Ashby Canal at the Lime Kilns pub, and I wrote about it here (our meeting is pictured right).   

They returned the compliment here, complete with a photo of me sitting in Granny's well deck.  In the same post, look for the photo of Mats just below the one of me; he's about to tuck into an enormous pub meal - the photo is a classic of delighted anticipation!) 

Mats and Sanne are starting this year's cruise on June 28th in Oxford, and will return Rivendell to Oxford in early August for the next sharers.

Mats and Sanne's 2008 cruise blog will be here.  (I've updated my boatroll)

They are hoping to go down the Thames and the Wey, and possibly up the Basingstoke canal (weather and canal works permitting).

Plea from Mats:

We would like to get an English SIM-card for our mobile broadband 3G-dongle that we can use when we go online with our laptop while we are in England.  Do you know of any company that would make this possible for a foreigner?

Maybe some short term arrangement with a fixed number of MB, maybe a cash-card (once again with a fixed number of MB – or a reasonable price per MB) or whatever is possible.

Anyone got ideas on a pay-as-you-go or temporary 3G data SIM card?   I'm assuming his dongle is 'unlocked' (i.e. not tied to a particular service provider).

Lee/Lea of the Valley

When I was reading the other day about Hardmead Lock Cottage (near Ware) being for sale, I note that it's recorded as being either on the River Lea or the River Lee.

Is it the Lee or Lea?   I've often wondered.

The park in the valley is officially the Lee Valley Park.

Lea Valley Homes and the 2012 Olympics (amongst many others) call it Lea.

Transport For London spell it both ways on the same page.

Lee, says Canalplan.

The River Lee - Our River, says the Lee Education Network.

The River Lea, says Peter Marshall on his Lea Valley Website, but he suggests that Lee Navigation is a more appropriate name and spelling for the waterway from a boating perspective.

So, not much consensus there.  It really needs a 'disambiguation page', like on Wikipedia. Try this one. 

North and South change rainfall patterns

Last winter has been very mild  but very long.  It's cold and rainy today, a midsummer's day in the English Midlands. But that's just for today.

Meanwhile BW have issued a warning about water shortages this summer on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, a waterway that always sensitive to rainfall:

The rainfall in the region since the beginning of May has been the second lowest over the last 80 years with less than 30% of long term average rainfall.

BW is striving to do as much as it can to ensure that the risks are kept to a minimum, and despite an extremely dry period, there is a 70% chance that restrictions to navigation will not be required over the course of this summer.

Darren Leftley, head of hydrology at BW comments: "Normally the north and west of England and Scotland experience higher rainfall totals than the south and east. 

This year we’ve seen somewhat of a reverse and our reservoirs in the south and east are generally above their long term averages whilst a number in the north and Scotland are lower than normal.

This isn't mentioned on the Waterscape news page.  I suspect it's to protect the hireboat industry on this lovely waterway.   They don't want rumours spread that canals might be closed, discouraging bookings.

But a canal holiday is always a matter of squaring the circle.  Hireboat companies want the rain to fill the reservoirs, but their customers want the sun to fill their hearts.

Granny's advice is to take a boating holiday in the early spring or late autumn, around when British Summer Time changes to Greenwich Mean Time. 

• Choose BST if you are a late riser.
• Choose GMT if you like to get up with the dawn.

Either way, you'll be less affected by water shortages.  And you'll compete with fewer boats.