Granny Buttons

Should have got up earlier to photograph ridge and furrow

Following my post about ridge and furrow a couple of days ago, I jut remembered this photo of the R&F fields at Lower Shuckborough, taken from the canal.  

If only I'd set off earlier from Wigram's Turn Marina, where I'd spent the previous week.  Early/mid morning in April is the best time to capture this scene.  But you really need sheep grazing in the picture, since this helps to point out that this fossil of mediaeval ploughing methods is only preserved because of several centuries of non-stop grazing after the introduction of the Enclosures.

 

Single-sex surcharges

Yahoo Answers had an interesting question recently, in their Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered forum:

Same sex couples charged a security bond when hiring a narrow boat?

I have been looking for a holiday on a narrow boat but was put off because I am going with a friend of the same sex and because we are the same sex we would have to pay £200 security bond. That applies if hiring a boat on the Caledonian canal too.

Two men would also have to pay the bond, but if it were a man and a woman going they would not have to pay the bond. Is this blatant discrimination, or are same sex pairs more likely to damage a boat?  Check on the net - it's all there - look for holidays on the canals and narrow boats.

I've heard of single-sex surcharges.  For example, CanalHolidays.com says:

Many firms do not allow under-25 or all-male or all-female groups on some or all of their boats. Those that do may often require an individual Security Deposit refundable on satisfactory return of the boat.

And Canal Junction says, more bluntly:

Q: Can we have a stag-do or hen night on a canal boat?

It depends what kind of party you want! I f the focus is on spending time with friends, then it’s ideal, but if you’re more inclined to the traditional clubbing approach, then perhaps not.  Some hire companies have a no-hen/stag policy or don’t allow single sex groups to hire, others specialise in it, so make sure you check first and go with a stag/hen friendly company.

Neither website actually says which hire boat companies might be unfriendly to single-sex groups. 

But pardon my innocence,  it never occurred to me that there might be 'gay' ramifications.  I've just been browsing assorted canal hireboat websites, and asking around, and for specific companies (as opposed to general websites like Canal Junction) I've not been able to find a single example of refusal to rent to single-sex groups or surcharges.  Can anyone quote chapter and verse?  

(Local link:  Classic Narrowboats at Mercia Marina says nope, no restriction on single-sex hire.)

Of course, let's be honest, this isn't about single-sex groups.  It's about testosterone-charged heterosexual riots.  Maybe they should introduce a ban on silly hats instead.

(The last sentence, above, was supposed to be alongside a photo I took a while back of four guys having a great time on the back of a narrowboat near Braunston, every one of them wearing a silly hat.  But I've lost the picture, sorry! 

Instead, here's a photo of two guys having a great time at Stafford last year.   (The original picture also included two girls on the boat's roof, looking particularly embarrassed, but if I included the girls here it would spoil the relevance).

Canal Rage - man identified?

Interesting picture illustrating the 'Canal Rage' story on Google News today. 

Is the man pictured  the unfortunate OAP who's accused of the killing, or the luckless man who lost his life?

It looks remarkably like Conservative MP Alan Duncan to me.  

Whatever, it suggests that "the first draft of history" is still in beta.

Ridge and furrow

'Starman' of Narrowboat Star wrote about ridge and furrow farmland last week:

The picture doesn't really do it justice but this was just one of numerous fields near Braunston where evidence of ancient medieval ridge and furrow farming can be seen in fields which positively ripple like gentle waves.

Commonly, any reference to ridge and furrow landscapes begin with the words 'this picture doesn't do it justice'.  Capturing the rolling, serrated landscape of ridge and furrow is devilishly difficult.  The best time, one would think would be with the sun very low in the horizon, perhaps at dawn while the ground glisters with dew. 

The Friends of Hob Moor, near York, photographed their own ridge and furrow after heavy rain.  This meant the furrow was submerged in water - which, ha ha, almost feels like cheating!

Most people try to photograph ridge & furrow from side-on, to show the rise and fall, but as Kevin has found, pictured from a moving boat makes it very hard to catch.

Thanks to Google Maps you can see it here from above (I think Kevin's photo was taken near the point pictured in this aerial view), but from above it's hard to be sure if it's true mediaeval R&F or simply modern  ploughing.  (In this case it's genuine - most of the land around here is protected, unploughed grazing, and to be frank, modern plouging lines are usually more regular. )

My own best effort at picturing ridge & furrow (see below) was an accident.  Three years ago on the summit of the Oxford Canal near Fenny Compton I just liked the striped pattern of the grass in the hot overhead sun.

It wasn't until later that I realised I was looking at this mediaeval phenomenon.   The grass on the top of the ridge was sticking straight up, like a punk hairdo, and seen drier and side-on, while the grass elsewhere was following the contour of the ground and appeared greener.

In the hands of a more skilled landscape photographer, with a better camera and a better-framed picture (mine was also a snatched boat photo) this might be as good a viewpoint as it gets.  It won't show the rise and fall in cross-section, but in the right dawn light it could convey the swell of the land quite well.

With luck I'll have now got you rooting out your camera gear and asking:  OK, so where's the best place on the canals to photograph this phenomenon? 

My vote would go to Lower Shuckburgh, near Napton Junction - Google Maps view here.  You could stand on the A425 bridge and catch a morning sun sun sweeping down the field (from East of Jubilee Ave) while a boat sweeps around the big bend right in front of you.  The R&F sweeps up and over the low hill, allowing you to see the folds on the horizon itself.  

If you get a good professional-quality shot -  one that does the scene justice - then please send me a complimentary print as thanks for the idea, OK?

iPhone camera shows object in motion strangely

When photographing the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station cooling towers from a coach at the IWA Festival (earlier picture here), one of the pictures showed a strange deformation at the bottom.

I was using the camera in my iPhone, and I'm guessing its shutter (if it has a shutter) 'sweeps' across the field of view.   Or perhaps there's a slow delay as the various pixels get saved.   Whatever, the upshot was that objects in relative motion near the camera got distorted.  

Certainly the road signs weren't really leaning back like this!  Anyone know how it happens?

The Sun drags Alvechurch into 'canal rage' manslaughter case

'Canal rage OAP appears in court' says The Sun. 

I'm not sure if Alvechurch Boat Centres will be pleased or annoyed that the paper used this picture of their instantly identifiable boats - captioned 'barges' - to illustrate an alleged manslaughter case that had nothing to do with them.

The site of the event at Garstang is nearly 50 miles from the nearest Alvechurch base at Anderton Marina. 

The Daily Mirror's initial report of the story, last July, included a photo showing the towpath location of the original boats, and much more detail of the case than presumably can now be reported under the UK's sub judice rules.

Incidentally, can I just briefly rant about sub judice?  I have little sympathy or support for it. And as the Daily Mirror's original report shows, the internet now really blows a hole in sub judice, and I reckon the sooner it's abolished the better.

Thanks to the good offices of Google, I quickly found a Guardian column by Andrew Neil 4 years ago that makes the case better than I can. 

The idea that a jury risks contamination and that jurors will not be able to come to a fair verdict because they have read some (possibly warped) report about the case or the accused hails from a bygone age when the ruling elite thought juries could not be trusted to come to the "right" verdict unless closely protected and guided by the legal establishment. In this more democratic age it is surely time to start treating jurors as adults equipped to sift through the evidence.

In the United States, sub judice fought a losing battle in the 20th century with the first amendment to the constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. Whenever US judges were asked to choose between sub judice and the first amendment, they tended in general to side with the newspapers' right to print whatever they thought fit for publication. But then US judges, unlike their British counterparts, have an admirable record in defending press freedom.

Next, after we've killed all the lawyers, we'll get Carter-Ruck to issue The Sun with a gagging order stopping them from calling narrowboats and cruisers 'barges'...  Um, no hold on, I got that in the wrong order...

See also: Hello... Alvechurch Boat Centres, with my own photo of their boats lined up ready for illustrating court cases.  Note to tabloid picture editors: My licensing rates are very cheap.

Looking at weird clouds

On 17th October, in my post Birthdays, doilies and clouds, I pictured a weird cloud formation on the River Nene, where an overcast day seemed simply to come to a dead halt, with blue sky beyond, and the sun giving it a truly silver lining.

Last week, as if in reply, the Webdesigner Depot blog handily came up with The weirdest clouds that you'll ever see, of which the most striking, for me, was the lava-lamp pattern.  A brilliant selection of odd clouds here, although the pudding's a bit over-egged with too many bright but not unusual skyscapes.

Maffi excels at ... distemper?

As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, I'm impressed by quite a few canal blogs.  And often for very different reasons. 

I love the tone of Victor-Meldrewish exasperation cultivated by 'Maffi', who blogs as Aardvarks & Maffi's Boat. 

I'm not quite sure why - I don't normally like to read angry writing - but Maffi just sparkles for me when he gets grumpy.  He just excels at ... oh, I don't know what, distemper?  He's brilliant at it!

I first wrote about his blog in my post Maffi Mushkila in Feb 2006 (when he was still working in Saudi Arabia and had already commissioned the boatbuild but couldn't decide on a name.)

Deciding on his boat name could have been the least of his problems, though.  His January 2006 post, Time to go, was so larded with irritation about The Kingdom that he was probably lucky it wasn't spotted by Saudi zealots.  (I warned him at the time to be careful and I think he removed one or two risky bits.  Never mind, he's safe now.)

Four years on, and he's lost none of his vim, as the following excerpt from his post last week, Day 6 Kingston, shows.  He'd moored the boat at Kingston-upon-Thames and was shopping in John Lewis:

ME:  Excuse me, where might I find the restaurant?
STAFF:  Oh you want the place to eat ...
ME:  I know what I want, that is why I asked for the restaurant.
STAFF:  No it is called the place to eat
ME:  No it is called a restaurant, its definition is 'a place to eat'.
STAFF:  yes sir but ... 
ME:  Don't 'yes sir' me, young lady.  I have a degree in talking bollox, and if I say it's called a restaurant you can bank on me being right.
STAFF:  but ...
ME:  doesn't matter, I am 'not in an eating phase' anymore.
STAFF:  Oh, you're not hungry.
ME:  well done, you're getting the hang of it now.

...  I eventually got my cover but could not get a 13.5 tog duvet in the value range.  They only had 4.5 and 10.5.  I asked, and was told they don't do 13.5 anymore.  So I asked if poor people were not allowed to be warm.  To which I was told I should sew one of each together.  I pointed out that sewing was women's work and that 10.5 and 4.5 equals 15.

...  I told him I didn't like the shop and if it was a proper shop and not a design exercise it would have cost only 30 quid and not 47.50.  He agreed.  On the way out I stopped in the menswear department looking for a chunky winter jumper with no zip or buttons.  No chance!  I went home with my overpriced cover.  If you can't walk very far this is not a good store.

Hey, Maffi, can you put up an archive index so we can read the old stuff?  I only found the 'Time to go' post because I'd linked to one or two of your old posts.

Wasp and fly traps

I've had a late-summer fly infestation at my new house.  I hope there's not a body under the floorboards, or walled up behind the  Harry Potter bedroom. 

Not wanting to spray poison around the rooms, I stuck up some supposedly environmentally friendly B&Q 'flying insect catchers', but they didn't work properly. 

A more powerful flypaper only made me feel like a sadistic serial killer as I watched the poor little things wriggle fruitlessly, even days after they were trapped.  Swatting them - with a newspaper or a dedicated fly swat - leaves you with fly innards smeared over walls or work surfaces, and that turns my stomach more than the thought of fly dung or invisible bacteria left behind.

Last year, when a wasp shop opened for business next door to our office someone told us about mixing water into half a jarful of jam.  That certainly worked - to stunning effect.

But I forgot about trying it last week, and only  just stumbled on the photo taken during last year's outbreak.  I guess if you were a wasp or fly this scene would look horrific. 

What are your preferred methods of control?

See also: In which I find a wasp in my thin glass of Guinness.

Motorcycle on a narrowboat foredeck turntable

After all the various cranes and cutaway sides and stern brackets and so on, here's another fascinating answer to keeping a motorbike on a boat.

I spotted a gent (I forget his name, and the boat's, sorry) at Shardlow Lock last month, with a motorbike on a turntable on the tug foredeck of his narrowboat.

He'd built it originally for his Harley Davidson, I think he said, but that particular beast just proved too large and unwieldy.   The current bike, a smaller model, is far more practical.  Like trading in a Great Dane for a Rottweiler, I suppose.

I remember that the boat is a Mel Davis shell.  Mel Davis is not afraid to tackle difficult projects, and always produces something stylish in the process. 

Mel's own website has pictures of the boat - clearly some years ago - here and here.  The paintwork's got a patina of age, but the turntable itself is still working well.

My new sui generis granny flat

Granny Buttons has taken up residence in Mercia Marina, and - I must declare an interest - I'm taking the King's Shilling and advising them informally on their PR. 

So anything I say in future about Mercia Marina must be seen in that light.  I'm not planning to make enemies!

But I genuinely do like the place.  Huge as it is (room for well over five hundred narrowboats, most of them with full-length pontoons), it's deliberately low-profile, with wooden single-storey buildings, a very 'environmental' atmosphere, and definitely no plans for any high-rise or even two-storey buildings.   Yet it has a pretty good mix of features, including two hireboat fleets, a dry dock, and by early next year what promises to be the largest branch of Midland Chandlers.

Mercia Marina is not at all 'country club' in atmosphere, and visiting boats are welcome - not only for pumpout & diesel, but to pull up at the visitor moorings for coffee at the 'tea room' as well.

The marina is so close to my new home that it's even got the same postcode, and having Granny there - five minutes walk away - is almost like having an annexe.  Or a granny flat, if you will.  

Granny's first flat test is this weekend, when my sister comes up, and then Christine (a teacher) arrives for half term shortly afterwards.  I've got somewhere to put them both.

Strange how quickly Granny is starting to feel neglected.  I've not slept on my boat for over three weeks now - the longest the bed has been empty for several years. 

I've only been on one cruise outside The Willage in that time, and that was only to Burton-on-Trent and back.  

Other worries still tie up my life, so I hope you won't mind if I mark time with just a few photos and vapid observations here and there. 

The marina has, I think, twenty-six main mooring areas, and instead of numbers each one is named after a species of bird.  This has led to some head-scratching - and perhaps inventive googling - over how to name them after some of them.  What bird names begin with V or X, for example?   I mean, in the vernacular, not in the Linnaean Latin names.

What bird name would you like to moor under?

 

I can't remember which bird-area Granny is now at, sorry.  Maybe Granny's a bird of her own.  Sui generis, as the Linnaeans might say, or 'one of a kind' in the vernacular.

I often call Christine my 'bird', and she's happy with that vernacular description.  'Bird of Paradise'? No, she's not that; but that's only because the canals are paradise to me and she doesn't come aboard Granny Buttons often enough, sadly.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

One of my main precepts is never to read a book with a colon in the title.  They are usually academic or business tracts, too often written in dry language, and tend not to make good bedtime reading, except to fall asleep to.  And then you wake up on top of it, pages all creased.

I'll make an exception for England's Historic Waterways: A working heritage.  It's a slim, pretty, photo-heavy booklet jointly created by British Waterways and English Heritage, and aimed at people such as property developers eyeing up vacant canalside development sites.

I think the booklet's trying to give them a crash course in why waterside development has a distinctly different set of considerations from your conventional brownfield or inner city site.  It particularly stresses the 'heritage' aspect, and how any development needs to fit in with various types of waterways user.

I doubt it'll be bedtime reading for most developers, but you can't say they haven't been told, even though they might not pay attention.

It's not until page 17, in the 'Use and activity' section, that you get the money shot, a paragraph headlined 'Balancing competing needs': 

Canals and rivers conjure up images of boats.  British Waterways licenses over 32,000 boats across England, Scotland and Wales.   Often brightly coloured, these craft differentiate our canals and rivers from other water spaces and are the reason that many towpath visitors come back time and again.  The requirements of boaters must therefore be integral to any development proposals.

(The bold above is my emphasis, but I wish BW had emboldened it.) 

It was launched at a 'breakfast debate' last Thursday at London Zoo, headlined 'Bricks and water': debating the future of England's waterway past, where they said it was aimed at: 

• Architects
• Developers
• Planning authorities
• Urban designers and master planners
• RDAs
• Heritage sector

I didn't know about the debate until I stumbled on it when searching for the download site for the PDF  (it might have been buried in an attachment in a press release).  I'd be interested to see a summary of the debate, and if any of the attendees came away with the fervour of a new glint in their eye.  An edited podcast would be nice to hear.

The booklet's divided into several vaguely titled sections, including: A working heritage, Use and activity, Public realm, Waterspace and A sustainable environment. 

Personally, I'd like to have seen a section - much larger than all the others - called 'Who uses the waterways?', defining the activities of each category.   And I'd like to have seen it written in a much livelier style, more suited to bedtime reading.  But what do I know about property development and developers? 

One of my photos is used (with my blessing) in the Public realm section.  It's the one that shows Castlefield Basin in Manchester (with a stack of iPhones in the background) taken at midnight on New Year's Eve 2007-8.   The caption: 

Robust natural stone copings and setts - archetypal 'canalscape' showing rich and appealing patina of age.  Castlefield, Manchester.  

I suppose we should be grateful that boats got a mention.  But I think various 'spokes-stakeholders' - NABO, the Angling Trust, the Cyclists Touring Club,  the Ramblers' Association, etc etc, should each have had a page or two to put their case.  Developers ought to be reminded of which sort of people are likely to shake their heads in disbelief at any new development as they go past.

Still, BW are making the effort, and good for them.  And good for English Heritage too.

The headline of this blog post is a nod to occasions (in the computer world) where Steve Ballmer - Chief Executive of Microsoft - goes wild on stage, shouting to stadiums-ful of programmers that Microsoft's success relies not just on the company itself, but the developers who create the programs that people can use on the those computers. 

See some of these extraordinary clips here. 

You can laugh at Steve Ballmer, but he's laughing too, and probably harder than you.  I think what the waterways really needs is/are are a Chief Executive who can dance and shout DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! in public like Steve Ballmer.

The DEVELOPERS! might or might not do what you want, and of course they aren't the ultimate users, but you've got to inspire their interest in the first place before you can get something the users can actually use.

[PS: Originally in this post I hinted that I was disappointed at not getting a credit.  Actually, looking back at my emails, I clearly asked the booklet compilers if they'd NOT give Granny Buttons a credit on the photo, since, as I said at the time, "...don't bother to acknowledge me.  I think photos are much classier when they don't have acknowledgement." ]

Birthdays, doilies and clouds

It's my birthday today.  I feel like Harry Potter, who wishes himself a quiet and lonely but happy birthday in his cupboard under the stairs.

Hours after I returned from a couple of days' work in Norfolk on Thursday night my brother-in-law phoned:  Could I come down with him today to Portsmouth and collect his daughter's stuff from her flat, and store it in my garage for a while?  (She's just flown back out to Kenya to get married to someone she met a few weeks ago there while on holiday.  As you do.)

I was planning to celebrate by taking Granny Buttons out for the weekend, but what are relatives for, if not to help out?  So that's my birthday taken care of.

Yesterday I drove over to the sorting office and picked up a packet that didn't fit through the letter box.  It turned out to be four porthole doilys/doilies for Granny Buttons, carefully crocheted by Sheila of NB Sanity. 

Sheila has developed a talent for crocheting these round doilies. When she passed Granny a few weeks ago and was curious about the 'web' pattern of Granny's own porthole doilys (which came with the boat when I bought it.)

Could she have a photo of the porthole doily to try to replicate Granny's pattern, she asked. 

I sent her one of the original doilys, now stained with 12 years of sun, dirt and fumes of the boat's diesel heater.  To my delight she returned four new ones, superbly crocheted, pretty much IDENTICAL, except sparkling clean and ready to brighten up Granny's bedroom.   Many thanks, Sheila!

(Link: Sheila Napier's doily page.  If you want one, expect to pay a bit more than she charged me!   Unless you, too, have a doily pattern that piques her curiosity - and a birthday coming up.) 

This is a somewhat rambling post with no great theme.  I just wanted to say happy birthday to myself.  I'm on the way down, feeling more tired and achey every day, and this birthday is a milestone for me - for the first time in my life I FEEL old.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's that, Sooty?  You want another of my photos to end the post?  Oh, all right, just this once.  

At the end of July I went down the Nene in the company of old college friend John Dalgarno and his wife Jackie. 

Somewhere downstream of Rushden we encountered this extraordinary cloud formation, roiling overhead and threatening rain (it never did rain that day), but just beyond, a clear blue sky, and the sun struggling to shine through the blanket of cloud.  It was quite extraordinary; the light was most theatrical.  I half-expected a UFO to appear from behind it and abduct us.

Can any member of the Cloud Appreciation Society please identify this for me?  

 

I took several pictures of this scene in various angles, but I wanted one with the boatiest theme, and this is it.  I always say you don't photograph scenes, you photograph light.  And the light can come at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places.

Tigers Parachute Display Team drop in with the Union Flag at the IWA Festival

An enjoyable feature of the IWA Festival is the militaristic demonstration.   This year they had the Tigers Parachute Display Team, part of The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment.

The bloke pictured above was the first to land, and he streamed the Union flag, which was fine. However, subsequent jumpers paraded flags of other (presumably lesser) nations.

I think it's great when part of the British Army (preferably one with Royal in the title) puts on a show, although I cringe when a Union flag is paraded ahead of Johnny Foreigner.  It seems so ... well, so jolly impolite!  Surely the Union Flag should come down last, if at all?  Usher the guest in first, and blush at our flag, I say. 

The Union Jack was designed for flying out of embarrassment, because all the other countries'  flags had been destroyed or captured.  Or to ask the conductor to repeat Rule Britannia at Last Night of the Proms.  We don't really do flags, do we?

In America I'm sure they'd have no truck with such paraded ceremony.  It would be the Stars and Stripes all down the line, no room for any other flag, and their muscular style would awe.  Maybe the next IWA festival could have a USA skyjumping team, perhaps from the US Army's Golden Knights or the Air Force's Wings of Blue?

[At the IWA Festival the only problem would be the confusion, once they'd landed, between them and all those burger vans who also love to fly the US flag.]

(Thanks to the nice lady of the US Parachute Association who told me about the Golden Knights and Wings of Blue.  I was going to ask about the US Navy equivalent, but I figured they might have water wings instead.  Which would be more boaty but less respectful.)