Granny Buttons

US canal boat is potential terrorist threat

Do canal boats look like terrorism threats to you? – Morning Call

There's an interesting story in a Pennsylvania newspaper today about a mule-drawn rural trip boat on the Lehigh Canal.  

The operating staff are required to be fingerprinted and carry ID cards to prove they aren't terrorists.

Photo of mules and boat here.  Come to think of it, that boat could carry one hell of a bomb, and who would suspect the delivery mechanism!

What shall we do with the drunken sailor? Drink a toast to him.

Yacht owners to be subject to breathalyser drink-drive rules – Daily Telegraph

Each year, new laws suffocate our lives a little more, and make lawbreakers of us all.  One of the most recent is the new 'drink-sailing' laws.   This now applies to canal boats too, for some bizarre reason. 

I'd heard talk last year that this might turn into law.  Both BW and the IWA protested feebly about it, but I never realised it was going ahead. 

It won't be officially put into operation on the canals, of course.  I was speaking to a BW official last week, who said he'd been at a meeting where it was agreed that it was absurd and they'd not take any proper notice of it.  After all, consider these two recent headlines, both about drunks on the towpath, falling in the Kennet & Avon Canal:

Brothers save man from canal at Wilcot 
Boater found dead in canal near Pewsey had been drunk 

And that's just a couple of headlines from the last fortnight.  The real problem is not boaters on the move, but pedestrians.  It's exactly this enacting of stupid, unworkable laws by compulsive legislators that puts the law into disrepute. 

Look at this picture (nicked from This is Wiltshire illicitly, thanks!), picturing the official response to Christopher Saker's demise:  

It shows FIVE emergency officers - all wearing helmets and lifejackets, stupidly dressed like boys playing Bravo Two Zero as if they were dicing with death themselves - and this was just the aftermath of an inebriate found in a shallow rural canal.  

I enjoy a glass or two of proper cider as I cruise along the canal in the dusk and early evening.  And I'll continue to do it. The problem with these stupid laws is that they give us greater and greater contempt for the law and for the officers charged with upholding them.  No wonder the prisons are full to bursting. 

It wasn't always thus.  Sometimes the police were the ones who needed policing.  Consider this news report from the New York Times archives of July 24th 1898: 

Say the guards were drunk
Canal officials complain of the conduct of Pennsylvania troops ...

The Twitter fad

I can't ignore Twitter, so I've drawn up a list (see top right) of all the canal Twitterers I know about.

This fad might die soon.  Mind you, I was told six years ago that blogs were a fad.  Granny Buttons will soon be a six-year-old fad.

The great thing about Twitter is that it forces you to be concise.

BW's hot-air trolley hotline

Hotline to report dumped trolleys – BBC News 

British Waterways this week managed to pump up the media on the problem of supermarket trolleys in the canals.  Press release:

British Waterways is today calling to account many of the UK’s biggest retailers after figures show that it wastes £150,000 of public money every year recovering thousands of abandoned shopping trolleys from the nation’s 2,200 mile network of canals and rivers. 

Stacked one on top of the other, the c. 3,000 trolleys British Waterways retrieves each year would reach more than ten times the height of Canary Wharf. 

Supermarket trolleys are never stacked one on top of the other.  Why would you do that?   That's as stupid as throwing them in the canal in the first place!  The pile would fall over after the fourth or fifth.

No, trolleys are wheeled up to nest inside one another, laterally, and on average take up a foot-length each – plus one single trolley-length.  

So a better analogy would be IF BW Chairman Robin Evans were to say:

"Imagine the world's biggest Tesco in central Birmingham, stretching canalside from The Mailbox, via Gas Street Basin and Old Turn to St Vincent Street Bridge, near the exit from Sherborne Wharf.  [i.e. about 3,000 feet]

"Imagine all the trolleys lined up outside, alongside the canal, nested one inside another - three thousand of the blighters - all glistening in the streetlights.  [see map, purple line]

"And imagine three hundred of Birmingham's finest specimens of manhood ejected from the clubs and bars in Broad Street after midnight.

"Now, watch them PUSH those trolleys into the Birmingham canal – ALL AT ONCE.  The city would resound with one massive splash.

"I don't know what effect they have on the army, but by God, yobs on the to frighten me!"

That's what I'd say if I was Robin Evans.

BW's press release continues:

A new Trolley Hotline (01923 201120) going live today will allow members of the public to report sightings of abandoned trolleys in British Waterways’ canals and rivers.  This information will be used to help recover trolleys, to map hotspot areas and to identify a league table of the nation’s least and most environmentally responsible retailers. 

Later in 2009, a ‘Golden Trolley Award’ will be presented to the retailer showing best environmental management of its trolleys, while an ‘Off Your Trolley Award’ will be presented to the least environmentally responsible retailer.

(Google News has many other reports.   The Today programme on Tuesday ran a 5 minute interview with a lady from the British Retail Consortium, who asked why no one was protesting about the vandals who caused the problem in the first place.  The Guardian offers 10 uses for a dead trolley.)

However, BW's story is more hot air than hot line. 

The so-called 'Trolley Hotline' is actually the standard BW customer relations number.  Ring it, and you are first presented with a long, sloooow:

"Welcome to British Waterways.  [pause]  If your call is about boat licensing, press 1", etc.

And then you finally speak to a receptionist - who asks you what you are calling about!

That's unless you call out of office hours (the time when you are most likely to see yobs throwing a trolley in the canal), when you'll be greeted with:

"Thank you for calling British Waterways.  We are sorry, but our office is currently closed."  

Look, guys, that is NOT a hotline!  A hotline is something that answers quickly and directly – including out of office hours - and has a human on the end who can immediately discuss the issue.

The correct term is not 'a hotline', but a publicity stunt that's gone off half-cocked.  The media swallowed the story, well done, but clearly none of them tried phoning the number they published.  I did, and it's rubbish.

SEE ALSO:

All the posts I've done about trolleys in the canals. 

Supercart ("Changing the world one trolley at a time'").  If only the people behind the UK-designed Supercart would reply to me, I might well be able to tell you more about it.  But they hide their light under a trolley and it's impossible to phone them. Surely a floating plastic supermarket trolley would be an improvement? [Update: I found Supercart's phone number here.]

Trolleys in canal protect rare weed.

Waterways jobs and apprenticeships

Why not work on the canals? – Droitwich Spa Advertiser

The local rag today invites job applications to work on canals in the Droitwich area. 

Salary: Nil. 

With a new volunteer leader in post and an interesting array of events planned for the next 18 months, British Waterways is seeking volunteers to get involved with important heritage work on the Droitwich Canals Restoration Project.

With the major construction work on the new Junction Canal progressing well, there are plenty of other interesting and varied jobs for volunteers to come and try. With no experience necessary volunteers can expect to get involved with plenty of hands on work.

Some of the activities on offer over the next few months include making repairs to brickwork on locks, installation of lock ladders, restoration of lock gate quadrants and the installation of bollards.

Training for all of this work will be provided, along with the necessary tools and equipment.

As I wrote last October, the future of employment on the canals is volunteering.  

Or rather, look on it as 21st Century apprenticeship. 

If you want your training to be recognises as a qualification, join the Waterways Recovery Group.

Canal boat Twitterers

(Twitter has exploded into such a phenomenon this year that I feel embarrassed into lapsing into the Twitter vernacular.  So if this makes you yawn, feel free to move on…)

Twitterer @rupertg hankers after canal narrowboat life.   He tweets: 

Reading about @tdolby2001 's lifeboat studio kicks off the narrowboat dreams. Know one canal boat dwelling twitterer - any others?

If  you have a Twitter account and spend your quality time on a canal boat, would you like to tweet him back? 

For starters I know of:

@shoedesigner

@richardf

@nbalacrity

@english_blogger

@hotelboats

@zulu_warrior 

That's just for starters. 

@shoedesigner isn't the 'sole' (sorry!) canal Twitterer, but she certainly has the right canal boat spirit.  Last Saturday she said:

I really really want to go boating, I really do.  Toby is back and I'm going to persuade him that a trip to Hertford is the thing to do.

The Atherstone Ball Game - a modern metaphor

A 'tweet' from @estamora :

@grannybuttons - Today's Atherstone Ball Game http://bit.ly/NlqHb seems up your blogging street Andrew.

Whilst I've heard of The Atherstone Ball Game - every Shrove Tuesday for eight hundred years - I've never really paid attention to it.  So much England, so little time!

The Ball Game is one of England's glorious eccentricities; a free-for-all that would ill be tolerated in New Labour's Britain were it not backed up by centuries of tradition.

ATHERSTONE BALL GAME – THE RULES

There is only one rule, there aren't any.

The game begins at 3pm when the ball is thrown by a local celebrity from the window of the Barclays Bank on Atherstone's main shopping street.

The object of the game is to be holding onto the ball at 5pm, when a loud klaxon is sounded to signal the end of the game. The ball may legitimately be deflated or hidden after 4.30pm. Any other tactic to hold on to the ball is permitted, the only stipulation being the ball can't be taken outside of Atherstone.

There are no goals and no official teams, though players often work together and protect each other, often in pub teams or through family connections.

I've just realised what it reminds me of:  It's a metaphor for modern banking!

Atherstone is a lovely little town on the Coventry Canal, best known to boaters for its lock flight and historically for its hatting industry, the latter long defunct.  (If hats are ever revived as general day wear, I'll eat mine.)   Also for its attempts to regenerate itself as Atherstone Booktown.

Incidentally, for children walking down the Atherstone Locks, Wild Over Waterways has a lovely little PDF activity pack here.)

[Thanks to Paul of NB Esta Mora]

Outrigger canoe at Marsworth Top Lock

 

Now here's a sight you don't often see – an outrigger canoe (or is it a kayak?) on the canals.  The lady in this launched it Sunday morning, alongside Granny Buttons. She had problems getting it in because Granny had been there overnight, hogging the temporary mooring space for those waiting to go down the locks. 

And Granny was there because I was waiting for the River Canal Rescue engineer.   Yes, I'd BROKEN DOWN!

I arrived at Marsworth Top Lock on Saturday dusk, at the junction with the Wendover Arm, and thought I'd nip along the Arm to see the most recent extension from 2004.  

(Halfway through, I heard music a bloody great racket coming from a boat ahead, only it turned out to be the boat behind that one, no, the boat behind that, no wait, could it really be coming from that field behind all of them?  Eventually it turned out to be a rave, in a field, in complete darkness.)

Anyway, big mistake on my part.  It took far longer than I'd expected, and I only returned to the junction around 8pm.  Whereupon my engine died just as I revved to a halt at the junction.

It wouldn't restart, so I poled backwards to tie up at the bollards overnight.

The next morning I called RCR and because they didn't have a native RCR engineer available they called around, and eventually found an engineer down at Denham – Ralph Kitts.  He arrived at 1pm and quickly identified the problem – an air leak at the fuel filter, and a quick tighten with the spanner cured it.  Many thanks to Ralph Kitts, Marine Engineer.

I'd only renewed my membership barely a month ago, and I was really glad I did.  I got the Silver level.  At £105 it's not the cheapest cover available, but it's really flexible, and RCR have never let me down since I first joined at the 2001 IWA Festival – the year it launched.   I was member No.16 then, but I've let my membership lapse a couple of times, and now I'm member No. 202859.   

A little more frozen canal at night

Bottom Side Lock, near Berkhamsted, 12:30am, Feb 7th 2008.

I'll never make a good picture editor.  You don't only need an eye for a good picture (wot I have got), you also need to see into the mind of other people (wot I ain't got), to be able to decide what they would like to see.

On my frosty midnight stroll from Berko to Apsley a couple of weeks ago I came across Little More, the boat of Deborah Newbold, Story Teller, Folk Singer, Crowd-Tamer (it says here).  

I photographed just the bow, so that the house was visible (above) and I also photographed the whole name of the boat and shifted the focus to the foreground (below, a more vivid moonlight scene), while at the same time obscuring the house and marring the composition.

But which one to show you?  These are the decisions a picture editor must make, and they are ones I just can't make.

The focus thus shifts from the picture (either one would have been enough) to my own dithering.  So I'm showing both, which makes for a duller post.

Of course, had I been obsessive enough I would have moved the boat forward a bit to suit the composition.   But that's not a picture editor's job, and besides, my hands were getting very cold.

This is the second time I've passed Little More, and again she wasn't in.  The last time was on the Aylesbury Arm, nearly five months ago. 

I leave my calling cards when I pass boats I recognise.  They are all different, like cigarette cards. You could collect them all, but at this rate Deborah will be almost 200 years old before she completes the set.

Bright idea: A battery-soak

I've used rechargeable batteries since the 1970s.  And since I started to spend most of my life afloat I've used them most of the time. 

But I also have a lot of other batteries, conventional ones, and they are mostly half-discharged when I chuck them away.  Modern electronic equipment is very touchy – it refuses to function once the battery drops below half-full.

Here's a good idea of my own:  A 'battery-soak'.  This simple device will 'soak out' all the remaining power from a part-used conventional alkaline battery and store it in a charger, ready to impart it to a rechargeable battery. 

Is this possible?  Practical?  Bright? 

I wonder how many amp-hours we throw away every year into landfill?   And what's the corollary?  Is a half-charged battery actually more or less polluting than a drained one?

Canal boat-related link:  Constantin von Wentzel's Comparing Marine Battery Technologies page.  He doesn't say anything about conventional pocket rechargeables, but it's a great jumping-off point for boaters obsessed with electricity. 

Incidentally, Constantin's pages are also a good time-soak. Beware! 

Bourne End Lock 56 iced over

Lock 56 at Bourne End, in canal databases as Top Side Lock.

One advantage of ice on the canals is that it 'fuzzes' the water and prevents glaring reflections at night.

I often need to 'fill in' the shadows on night photos.  And so it was here, where I danced the light of a torch on the shadow of the hedge on the right, and on the walls of the two houses on the right and left.  In quest of the image I probably startle and worry the residents, and I do feel guilty about it.  Somone at the big lock house was presumably still awake at 12.30pm, the far bedroom light on.

Taurus gets hitched to Snipe

If all went to schedule, Corinne and Neil of hotel boats Snipe and Taurus got married this morning.  On their blog Corinne wrote:

We have a date set for February, and being handy with a rope, tying the knot should go without a hitch! 

[geddit?]

I guess it's testimony to their relationship that having got engaged a couple of years ago (I wrote about the engagement here), they have now worked a pair for two seasons and are still willing to tie the knot! 

I've always thought that in any successful marriage one spouse tends to do their own thing (the motor) and the other one puts up with it (the butty).  

That's probably why I'm still alone; I don't have the initiative to be a Number One, and putting up with anyone makes me feel like a Number Two.

So, congratulations to Snipe and Taurus – I envy them.  See their six-month long honeymoon schedule – starting April 11th - here.   Plus, it's a rare pair of newlyweds who want to hire someone to join them on the honeymoon!

David Suchet on Desert Island Discs

Active waterways evangelist (and occasional actor) David Suchet was on Desert Island Discs last week (Feb 8th & 13th).  I waited for him to talk about the canals.

It came after about 25 mins, after 'When I fall in love' by Nat King Cole.  He spoke about his love of his wife Sheila (they've mated for life, like swans) and then the canals (ditto).  

It was a short piece, first introducing him as the president of the Lichfield & Hatherton Canals Trust, then he spoke about having a boat built for them as young lovers in 1974.  The boat cost them £6,000, which I recall as then being about half the price of a house – a ratio still valid today.  They lived afloat for seven years, using the boat as digs as they travelled to acting jobs around the country.

He didn't mention the many appeals and campaigns he's figureheaded in support of the waterways, but perhaps that's modesty rather than forgetfulness.

Granny Buttons met David Suchet in July 2001, halfway down the Farmer's Bridge locks in Birmingham, in the shadow of the BT Tower.  He was coming up with Sheila in his then-latest narrowboat City of Sheffield, which he'd just bought from a chap at Hillmorton. 

As it happens, I was recording my journey on a webcam on top of the cratch, at one frame every few seconds, and sod's law, it missed the moment Suchet nipped across the lock gate in front of the camera.  We met at the back of the boat, my Stanley-meets-Livingstone moment unrecorded.

I got photos of his boat as I passed it (Sheila at the tiller), but it's the very devil of a job to get a screen capture from a Windows video, sorry.  As hard as working out how to record a programme from the BBC iPlayer. 

Waltzing on the beautiful brown Soar

Roger Hutchinson points me to YouTube channel of kinglearie, who makes amusing videos down by the River Soar. 

I don't know who 'King Learie' is, but has the sense of humour of the Bonzo Dog Band coupled with the minimalist style of Warhol.  He appears to be someone who helps out on the Narrowboat Trust boats Nuneaton and Brighton.

I loved the waltzing dredgers of Dredging For Profit, and Tiller Tedium was bizarre and dreamy. 

However, to me at least, it doesn't always work out so successfully.  Although filmed and edited with imagination and talent, some of the videos could do with a script, rather than just an idea held together by a novelty record. 

It helps that I'm a fellow Bonzo fan and have all the original records on vinyl (unplayed for over 20 years).   And I've yet to do my own video online and possibly will never make a video half as interesting, so I'm not really one to criticise.  

Talking of Bonzo, Neil Innes allows you to download a large number of his own tracks free on his website, www.neilinnes.org.  I also have The Innes Book of Records on now-unplayable video, and yearn to see it all on DVD.