Granny Buttons

'Not a criminal': Caitlin Moran writes a WIDITH

Barging around England with the kids – The Times Saturday Travel section, Jan 17th

The weekend before last, Times columnist Caitlin Moran wrote about the Four Counties Ring holiday that she took with family and friends last summer. 

Hats off to the upbeat headline:

Four counties, six days, three young pirates ... Caitlin Moran says a barge [sic] break in England is great for families.

She's done something rare – she's actually written a very witty, very entertaining WIDITH of a canal holiday, truly original.  It starts:

Barge [sic] holidays are rather like childbirth. In that nobody will ever tell you how painful they are.  They hurt.  They really hurt.  A lot.

But then - also like childbirth - I don't want me telling you how much it hurts to put you off.  You would love a barge [sic] holiday. You really would.

When you finally hold that week-on-a-tin-boat in your arms, and look into its eyes, you will undoubtedly find it one of the most rewarding moments of your life.

It's full of turns of phrase that are new to me - for example canal boats travel at 'the pace of custard', a narrowboat is 'a tin bath', and they moor up in 'a flurry of ropes'.  

She won't make many friends in Stoke on Trent with this article – she calls the city 'a shit hole'.  She presumably only saw the canal part of it – which I think is lovely, the best part!  She neglects to mention the most dramatic part – Harecastle Tunnel – perhaps because they didn't see the boggart, the Ghost of Harecastle Tunnel. 

But her kids had a good time - "their best-ever holiday" she says - and when you are a family, that's what really counts.

I really enjoyed this article; it's one of the best WIDITHs I've ever read, and great PR for the canal hire business.  So I'm glad to discover that Caitlin Moran is an anagram of 'not a criminal'.  Compared to many journalists who write up their canal holidays, she's innocent.   

Definition of WIDITH (my own word) here. 

Oak Afloat leaflet at Cowley Lock

While my water tank was filling at Cowley Lock the other day, and I was inside filling a bucket with water to wash the boat, someone left a leaflet tucked under the breast rope on the roof. 

I didn't notice until I splashed a clothful of water on top of it.  How irritating.  You know, it's like those leaflets they stick under your car windscreen wipers. 

(The leaflets on your car always look formidable; at first glance you think they are fines, or notes ticking you off for parking there.)

The leaflet on GrannyB seemed like that sort of litter at first.  Then I saw it was for Oak Afloat (www.oakafloat.co.uk), a boat carpentry and joinery business, and I relaxed slightly.  This, I realised, was relevant.

They could probably tell Granny needs a bit of care and attention, and perhaps knew I wasn't getting back to Streethay for some weeks.

The leaflet doesn't have an address or location, just a couple of mobile phone numbers (Matt and Dave), and if the photos they showed on their leaflet were examples of their work, it was too small for me to get any idea.  (Still, well done, guys, for pushing out the word, even if the word got a bit damp!)

I do need some interior work doing on Granny Buttons – bookshelves, some interior steps at the front and back, and a few other bits, and I might get it done on the way back to the midlands.

But if you are going to leaflet for my business, I can't emphasise enough just how much store I set on a physical address – a workshop or an office, or even just a corner of someone else's boatyard – full names and prior examples of work. 

Maybe other people will phone a mobile cold, but I never would.  Too shy, I guess. And it really helps if there's a full physical name, nowadays with a short biog/CV.

Actually there are some carpenters, joiners or cabinet makers who work from boats.  A couple of these have boats that look just magnificent and are superb examples of their craft.  If Oak Afloat are like that, I'd be really tempted.  And the name's pretty good – oak is a good wood to use indoors in your boat.

First narrowboat with Hybrid Marine drive, but not first with hybrid drive

Over the last few months Dave McInerney has been writing a great blog about a serious refit to his narrowboat Chelonian, centered on a powerful and quiet diesel-electric drive from Hybrid Marine, being installed at Reading Marine. 

Until the refit Chelonian had the same engine as Granny Buttons – a BMC 1.8 – so I was really interested to hear what he's doing.

That's barely half of the refit, but it's the most unusual and striking half.   Dave's done a good and literate job of explaining how he's going about it – one of the best refit blogs I've seen, albeit without many pictures.

The main Chelonian website (chelonian.co.uk) also has some goodies – including the smart use of Google Calendar to let you know of his cruising plans, and a good explanation of his new Artel wood-pellet stove - but I prefer the blog.

There's a good explanation of diesel-electric hybrids on Hybrid Marine's site, explaining simply the three basic types.

Interest in 'hybrids' is fast-growing.   They've been made for narrowboats for years – I remember Reading Marine's  'Switched Off'  being introduced at the Braunston Show in 1998 (or was it 99?) and I was madly jealous. 

A year or so later, when I was looking for my own boat, I saw a lovely one with an HFL diesel-electric drive that ABNB was selling (I couldn't afford it, not even second-hand).

Braidbar Boats is fitting out a 60ft narrowboat called Felonious Mongoose with one of the Hybrid Marine units too, and owner Charley Johnston calls them 'seriously quiet'.  I suppose hybrids will appeal to those who like birdsong, but there's something about the heartbeat of a traditional engine that relaxes many of us.

Reading Marine pioneered the groundbreaking Pangea narrowboat about seven years ago, powered by fuel cells.  It proved an abortive trip to the future – it was later converted to diesel (or diesel-electric) drive. 

This latest hybrid technology isn't new either – the first boat using it was built over a century ago in Germany - but its time might just have come.  

Appropriately, for a technology that's taken a hundred years to arrive, Chelonia is the Linnaean name for the tortoise and turtle family.

Update: On the subject of quiet boat engines, Halfie (below) reminds us of the recent post by Sarah of Warrior, "A different kind of quiet". 

Bathampton Serial Marina, with knobs on

 Bid to buy Bathampton canal land – Bath Chronicle

Bathampton is the village just above Bath, on the Western tip of the Kennet & Avon Canal.  I've only been there on Granny B once, in 1985  2005.  My memory was of a solid stream of boats - furlong upon furlong - that I had to putter past at low speed. 

There were free mooring spaces, here and there, but it was clear this was a 'serial marina', with the occasional home-made 'slow down' signs to remind me that lots of people lived online here and didn't care to be moved much.

Things haven't changed in three years, if the Bath Chronicle is to be believed this week:

A group of canal boat owners has announced ambitious plans to buy acres of land in Bathampton in a bid to help fellow boat dwellers – and stem a tide of complaints from villagers.

The newly formed Kennet & Avon Community Project (KACP) is hoping to buy a parcel of land near The George pub in Tyning Road so it can store members' vans or motor homes while their owners are away.

It has not ruled out buying land adjoining the canal in other areas, and says it also plans to use the land for 'social gatherings' and camping.

A spokesman said the site could also house laundry facilities for boat dwellers who are less well-off.

That'll be a marina, then.  With knobs on.  

"A place to store members' vans or motor homes while their owners are away … [and] laundry facilities for boat dwellers who are less well-off … To use the land for social gatherings and where visitors can camp. "

Social gatherings and camping?  Even more than a marina with knobs on, it sounds like a great big canal festival.  

Seriously, I think it's a good idea for social and voluntary groups to buy land adjoining canals, but I hope they use it to dig out offline moorings and not simply to use as car parks so that they can squat on the canal towpath.  

They don't have to be full-blown marinas; just small, discreet canal arms would be fine.  I believe the IWA is pressuring BW and local authorities to allow that sort of development, and I'm all for it, and I wish the KACP the best of luck. 

But I do hope KACP are doing it so that they can move off the line of  the canal.  If not, they'll make it even harder for visitors to find moorings. 

Mind you, I can see the delights of being moored near The George Inn, Bathampton.  It's a Chef & Brewer pub (and Chef & Brewer's marketing department is useless in promoting it) but the sheer charm of the pub rises above the stolid middle-management of owners The Spirit Group. 

I'll drink the health of anyone who wants to tie up near The George Inn, and I did so when Granny passed that way in 2005 (below; note the Pimm's cocktail parasol in my drink, arf arf).  The KACP can't be blamed for wanting their own private car park near this lovely pub.

 

[See also:  It's the car parking, stupid.]

Dad's police notebooks

Sorting through my late father's effects recently, I was delighted to come across his old police notebooks. 

Dad was a colonial policeman, a fairly enlightened one, from his days in the Kenya police 1942-1947 (he had a 'lucky war', as they used to say), through Aden and East Africa to the Caribbean, retiring in 1977.

Although serving abroad he had a truly British training, including stints at Hendon Police College in the 1930s and '40s.

One thing he'd done, in Aden, about 1952, was to write his own police training manual, in two 150-page volumes, in his own handwriting. 

Why did he do this?  I don't know, and don't now have a chance to ask.  Perhaps it was simply an aide-memoire,  or it might have been to help train Arab recruits to the Aden Police (although it's a peculiarly British book).  Or perhaps it was just they were short of books after the war. 

I didn't even know of its existence until I was sorting through his effects.  Do British bobbies ever do this sort of thing so diligently nowadays?

The scans here are of a Table Of Contents and a sample page showing what happens to the human body after death.  (This information might be useful if you come across a body floating in the canal. I try not to think of dad, lying near-frozen in the undertaker's chapel of rest.)

Granny Buttons is supposed to have a waterways-related link in every post, but I'm not sure what it could be in this case.   Neither the table of contents nor the index mention boats, canals or waterways.

Which is hardly surprising, since my father wrote these books in Aden, in what is now Yemen, the very south of Arabia.  Not many canals in Arabia.

A while back the London Canal Museum (LCM) was asking for information about canal police for a special exhibition.  Had any of the canal police compiled such a book as this, it would have made a fascinating exhibit.

(The canal museum link above is No. 1 in Google for "police canals".  Granny Buttons is No.2:  Police helicopter buzzes the canal at midnight - something that the canal police of old would have found supernatural.) 

Granny Buttons is named after my mother, but I feel a need to name something after my papa as well.

OwnerShips has a flash new website (but a much better owners' section)

Shared boat scheme OwnerShips launched a new website last month.  

In technical terms it's a big advance on the old one - well done!  (View (a copy of) the old OwnerShips site here)

But Granny really hates this new site!  It's entirely 'Flash' based (ugh) and needs a faster internet connection than my rural broadband landline can provide, let alone my boat-based 3G link.

There is only one URL address – www.ownerships.co.uk.   Y0u can't 'deep-link' (in the sense of a web address taking you directly to a particular page) and if, like me, you get headaches at excessive animation, you might want to look away at times, especially as you flick from page to page.

I wonder if Ownerships demanded of the developers that it be an animated flash irritation, or if the developers saw them coming and saw a chance to get as much money as possible off them?   (It was no doubt another reason, one that was rather less libellous, m'lud.)

Nevertheless, I'm sure they'll be demonstrating it with pride at the Ownerships Show at Braunston on 7th-8th February 2009. 

(At this point I'd like to link to the Ownerships Show page so you can plan your trip there as quickly as possible.  Only, because of the design of the website, I can't).

Enter the Ownerships competition – win a share worth up to £4,000: 

Answer three simple questions, and  then create a slogan of up to 25 words for OwnerShips.

The three answers will all be found on the website, so if you can't guess the answers you might want to open up the website twice so you can tab to find the answers.

The link to the competition is here: … Oops, no, sorry, I forgot, you can't deep-link.

I've entered too, and I'm certainly not telling you my own suggestion – I think it's a cracker!  There's no small print that says any entry is their own property even if you don't win, so I'll recycle the slogan for another boat ownership scheme if I'm not lucky.

Yes, I want an OwnerShips share too, even though it will cost me £400 a year or more for the privilege of winning.  Spending my weeks on a boat other than Granny Buttons would be just as much a holiday as baking on a foreign beach.

But would they let an existing boat owner win?  (Let alone someone who's so rude about the website?)

However,  not all of the Ownerships web presence is Flash.  I commend the Owners' Area, which is much as it was before, is open to non-owners to read, and has a lot of really useful content for all boat owners.

[Thanks to Phil Duerden of www.boatshare.co.uk for alerting me to this]

My picture's not in the attic, it's on my blog.

Ha ha, Halfie cracked a really good joke last Friday in The Curious Case of Granny Buttons.  

But I changed the picture just as he made the joke, and accidentally ruined his joke.  (Sorry!) 

The picture showing until last week was from 1976.   I was looking short-haired (but with a full head of hair) and bearded, and with a ridiculous cartoon bowtie.   Quite dishy, apart from the 1970s cartoon fashion. 

The portrait showing at the moment on this blog is my passport photo from about 15 years ago.

The picture in this blog post is from a birthday card the girls in the office gave me a couple of years ago, joking about the single long hair at the front that I refuse to trim.  That strand of hair is like the last palm in an oasis, and I love it to bits and grow it very long.

Like the old joke says, my youth was wasted on me.  I must root out some more (real) photos of the youthful, wasted, version of me.

Wandering Snail slowly catches up on last year's blog posts

Anne and Olly of NB Wandering Snail have started a blog of their cruising on the continental canals last summer. 

Starting from Streethay at 4am one day last May, the boat was trucked down to the channel and across to Belgium, all in a single day.

They only started last week but are quickly playing catchup, posting their cruising diary in arrears, day by day, from last May, June and onwards.

The picture of the Wandering Snail being lowered into the water in Holland shows a very sleek and glamorous narrowboat.  I wonder who built this Snail's shell?

Wait - according to Jim Shead it was D. Thomas.  

[Thanks to Brian of Harnser for the alert]

Crane lifts out cars over canal in Macclesfield

Stranded cars freed at last as crane takes the strain – Macclesfield Express

The Macclesfield local newspaper this week reported on rescuing cars stranded last year after a canal wall collapsed onto the towpath at Macclesfield.  (Pennine Waterways report here.)

A number of vehicles were stuck because their access road was part of the collapse.  (Location here.)

This week, after ten whole months, a crane was finally brought in to lift the cars over the roofs of local houses. Apparently BW have been paying for the unlucky parkers to have hire cars all this time.    I would have thought it should have been cheaper for them to hire the crane straight away, but perhaps not.

It's said the operation to lift the five cars and two vans took seven hours.

Or rather, it took ten months and seven hours.

Good lord, why did it take so long? 

It takes me back to the Parbold Breach of 2003 on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.   Granny was stranded along with many other boats.  Yet within ten days BW had arranged a crane to lift out all boats who requested it, and transport them overland 12 miles to Adlington.  And they did them all in five hours.

I don't think I'd do it again (there are still cracked tiles in Granny's kitchen where the strap hugged the hull) but it was an exciting time.   I wrote about it here, in one of my very earliest posts.

Perhaps BW should have paid us to rent some boats for several months instead.

Where are the model canals?

Andy of Khyamanzi was at the Leamington and Warwick model railway society's annual exhibition last weekend, and came back with some impressive pictures of members' exhibits and layouts.

See Andy's post Too much to see.

At least one of the model rail track layouts he pictured has an impressive canal with a narrowboat pair running alongside the tracks – and even locks.

Not to be outdone, Derek of NB Gypsy Rover includes some model rail pictures of his own (but no canals).

This reminds me of my own post of 30 months ago:  A model train service – one that runs on Sundays! 

My post then was written in the wake of the fight to get a Sunday train service from Oxford to Banbury, mentioning Burnham & District Model Railway Club, and their inclusion of a railway that ran alongside a canal.

This further reminds me that I've never heard of a Model Canal Society (or Club). 

John Rawson builds his wonderful Bespoke Model Boats to typically 1/24th scale, although he does many other scales.  Since many of his 1/24th models actually work – in one way or another – with propulsion, I would be amazed to seem him build them at the model railway 00 gauge, which is about 1/76.

Still, it would be interesting to see a working model canal system. Is there one? 

If not, I'll build one as soon as I make my first million.

... and when did they know it, and when will they reply?

Until yesterday I'd never heard of whatdotheyknow.com, a website that helps you to make Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests from public bodies.  Now I'm exploring it like a season ticket to a naughty-house. 

Here's a FOI request by Will Chapman (presumably on behalf of Save Our Waterways)  from last October:

Could you please provide me with a breakdown of costs and type of repairs/stoppages over the last 3 years that have been caused by:

1. Boaters (poor technique rather than normal wear and tear)
2. Vandals

For example, I am aware that boats cause damage to lock gates and surrounds by careless or inexperienced handling, erosion of banks and towpaths by excessive speed, etc.

Will followed it up twice, but the question seems to remain unanswered. 

It's an interesting question, but it must be a tough one to answer, involving a lot of extra work. 

I mean, imagine if BW staff had to apportion blame after each incident: Who was responsible for a hireboat hanging on a cill?  Was it the boater, the boatyard not training him properly, or the BW staff not painting the 'CILL' sign prominently enough?   Or vandals distracting the boaters with interesting graffiti? (Below)

What about the extra paperwork and cost involved in meeting all those FOI requests?  Is that in itself a legitimate FOI question?

I'm hinting here that the FOI act itself has generated an enormous amount of extra bureaucracy.  I don't have an answer, but be aware that any question you ask might have bureaucrats running on their hamster mills at great public expense, trying to generate answers that satisfy.

But it's energetic and satisfying exercise.  As well as Will's questions there are other requests for information from BW under the FOI act which make interesting reading.

Of course, Will is hinting in his turn at how much of the extra maintenance should be paid by boaters via higher licence fees, vs. local authorities, who are really the ones that ought to be paying for vandalism. He wants his pound of bureaucratic flesh.

(via Allan's britishwaterwaysfitforpurpose blog – thanks)

[See also:  BW are **nkers.]

You can now browse the archives on Granny Buttons

At last, I've finally managed to get an archive list on Granny Buttons.  See right.  (or left, if I redesign this blog).

Although I think I was the first canal blog, back in 2003, I've probably been one of the last to have the archives browsable.  If you wanted to see old posts, you had to search speculatively.

I use Typepad, which was far ahead of its time when it launched nearly six years ago, but now struggles to catch up with new features in other services.

Anyway, you can now browse the archives by date.  Hooray. 

Hmm, what can I  fill the next few lines of empty space with?

My father was a lighthouse keeper,

Knew a mermaid out at sea.

She had three children by him,

Two were kippers, one was me.

UK Waterways Site Ranking surprises

I was quickly toppled off the top of the new Waterways Site chart by Martin Clark's Pennine Waterways. 

That's good; there's something absurd about a blog being No. 1 in such a chart, just as it's silly to consider a single neuron as the most important part of a brain.

Encyclopaedic resources like Pennine Waterways and Jim Shead's Waterways Encyclopaedia deserve to be far busier.  And are.

I found the Wey very welcoming

I know it sounds silly, but when I went on the Wey Navigation over the New Year, I was really pleased to get the National Trust 'welcome pack' at its entrance, Thames Lock.  

I'm easily pleased. It didn't consist of much more than the free loan of a long-throw windlass, a folder containing assorted National Trust documents – including a good map of the navigation – and a round orange Wey licence. But the important point was, it felt like an official welcome. 

At £27 for three days, a Wey licence is a steep price - in fact I was only on the river for less than two, so that was about £15 a day.

However, openness and availability mean a lot to me, and I hate it when officials hide behind bureaucracy and anonymity.

The Wey Navigation staff certainly don't do that.  Indeed, the first sheet into the welcome pack was a list of phone numbers – mobile phone numbers! – for the various Wey 'lengthsmen'.  

Lengthsmen are an extinct species on the BW canals,  so it was great to know they still exist in all their plumage on the rural 2o miles between Weybridge and Godalming, and that at least one or two of them were on duty over the New Year – and Thames Lock itself was open every day. 

I'd praise the National Trust for this.  They could well have made the process less welcoming, giving me a list of dos and don'ts, a daunting series of verbotens.  But they didn't.  I felt welcomed instead.

Compare that to the problem of contacting the tidal lock keeper at Brentford.  In short, I wasn't able to.  It was only by the grace of a passage booked before Christmas by NB TinTin that I was able to squeak through with them.  

The Brentford locky was good enough while he was there – going out and coming back – but knowing how to contact him in advance was impossible, and neither BW nor the Environment Agency gave me a little goody pack. 

In fact, Granny spent more time on the Wey than the Thames, and I paid nearly £100 for that, with less to show for it, not even a floating keyring.

It's all psychology, and those personal mobile phone numbers made all the difference.  I didn't try to ring them, and who knows, I might have got voicemail, but just having them was reassuring.