Granny Buttons

Thanks to Waterlily

I've been out of touch for a few days as I took Granny from Willington for a New Year cruise.

At Fradley Junction I met Nev Wells of NB Waterlily (right). 

This was my first meeting with Nev, and a chance to say a big Thank You.

Why thanks?  Because it was in a comment on my post Waterside Properties last May that he alerted me to a house being for sale in Willington.   The house that I now live in.

Thanks again, Nev!  I hope the two treat-sized packets of Chocolate Buttons went some way to acknowledging my gratitude. 

Meanwhile I'll try to update you tomorrow with news of my cruising.

NB Caxton meets and befriends me

Yikes, I've been spotted!

I was at Great Haywood overnight and noticed blogging boat NB Caxton just a few feet away.  I didn't interrupt them - mainly because I wasn't sure if it actually was the Caxton.    I thought I'd check the following morning.

Well, yes it was, and owners Lesley and Joe beat me to it this morning, knocking on my window as I was behind the curtains, wandering round in my underpants as usual.

There's an old saying: There are no strangers, only friends you've not yet met.

Other blogging boaters compile lists of friends they've met and not yet met.  Sue of No Problem, for example, lists all the blogs she knows about on a single page, bundled together, but the friends she's met are coloured in red.  (I'm in red, Lesley and Joe of Caxton aren't.)  

Maffi, on the other hand, isn't colour-prejudiced, but he does practice segregation.  His friends are listed above the strangers, in a column on the right of the page.  In this case, I'm a stranger to him.  He's yet to meet me.

Barton Lock and the Marston's Barton Turns pub

 

Here's Barton Lock in the mist of Christmas Eve morning.

I was chatting to the new publican at the Barton Turns pub  - he took over only this month.  Brewery/owner Marstons continue to do little for the pub, once on the main Derby-Lichfield road but cut off in a quiet 'appendix' road since the big A38 dual carriageway was built in the 1980s.

Since the massive new Barton Marina development opened recently - including its big, slick family-style The Waterfront pub - the Barton Turns must surely have suffered from local trade too.

Boaters can't beat the Barton Turns for location, though.  It's a naturally stopping point, with rubbish disposal and waterpoints below the lock and much good mooring above. 

The new hosts don't plan to change too much, but hope to manage it a bit more sharply than before.  I told them about the usefulness of wi-fi to us boaters, and perhaps that seed will bear fruit soon.  They said that Marstons has mentioned installing it.

Why is it called 'Barton Turns'?   Apparently narrowboats would bring coal here from the Derbyshire coalfields, and 'turn' at a winding hole below the lock - long since filled-in, apparently.   It's strange, because when the winding hole did exist and the boats did turn here the pub was actually called The Vine - and had been for perhaps three centuries.

Or so say the new landlords, who've clearly been briefed about its history.   There's an aerial view of The Vine in the saloon bar, dating, I'd guess, from about 40 years ago.

What a shame Marstons itself can't tell us any of this on their website, marstonspubs.co.uk.  It's really a terrible site, geared only to finding new tenants for empty pubs (read: suckers who'll invest their life savings) and not at all helpful to customers.  Try the 'Search For Pubs' link, search for 'Barton Turns' and see what I mean.  

And look at the login, which says 'Marstons customers only', which of course actually means 'publicans'.  These days canalside publicans need all the help they can get, and it's so sad that breweries don't support them on the web.

The colours of BW licences, 2004-10

Granny's latest licence is here.  Every year is a different colour, presumably to allow licence inspectors to check the licence from a distance.

Since my licence runs from Jan-Dec, I'm always one of the last to have the new colour of the year.  I don't know what next year's colour is - you might already know.  You can see the colours in the order BW has run them from 2004 on the left.

I'd have thought they'd choose a greater variety of  colours, wouldn't you?  Perhaps yellow, vermillion, rose taupe, teal, and maybe even a psychedelic melange of patterns in addition to the colours - the better to discourage fraud and counterfeiting.

And what about a 'roses and castles' series, showcasing popular art of the waterways?  Maybe Rosie and Jim, or even personalised ones that you could print off yourself, with barcodes for bankside licensing staff to scan? 

Hey, how about a tartan version for British Waterways Scotland?  Each year, a different plaid.

It'd then only be a short step to licenses bearing corporate sponsorship.  Boats must display their licences, so it would be a very sought-after form of advertising for companies.  You might not thank me for planting the seed of the idea in cash-strapped BW's head! 

Hung Out To Dry - what happened to public swimming in Britain?

A quick plug for Hung Out To Dry by Chris Ayriss. 

Chris sent me a review copy of his study of the history and place of public swimming in British culture a few weeks ago.  However, I confess I've not yet got around to reading it - I'll try to do so on my coming week on Granny Buttons.

It looks charming, and the fnarr-fnarr cheekiness of the title and cover photograph promises something more than a simple, dry sociological study of why public swimming became so frowned-on, and mostly now confined to small indoor pools.

British swimmers once filled the lakes, rivers and canals of England. How did these sportsmen, the pride of the nation, find themselves chased out of the water, rounded up and confined to indoor swimming pools?

Discover how pride turned to prejudice as a nation of skinny dippers sparked the development of the unique British culture of prudery. Discover religions role in our changing culture, and visit the city of Leicester; Swim City, as the swimmers past is revealed.

One thing that's very interesting - even before reading - is how Chris has published this himself, on Lulu.   Self-publishing is becoming very respectable now, and a far easier way for such quirky, specialist subjects to read the mainstream.

The book is supported by a companion website - www.hungouttodry.co.uk, naturally - although it's slightly lighter in content than I'd expected.  A tab on the site, called 'Swimming Clubs', led me to expect a guide to joining such clubs or learning to swim, but it's actually only instructions on how such clubs can order the book with a discount.  However, the site's still worth browsing to get a flavour of the book.

(The book has a strongly local flavour, explaining a lot of the story in terms of Chris's home city of Leicester.  I found this interesting because of all the cities I've boated through, Leicester has the greatest proportion of kids 'free-bathing' in the canal.  Maybe it's something in the water, so to speak!)

He's also compiled two slideshow-style YouTube videos to promote the book - I like the one embedded below the best.

Bosley Locks - the perfect spot for a boat portrait

I remember when I paid nearly £5,000 to have Granny Buttons painted, seven years ago, and for months afterwards strangers would ask "Oh, is it new?", and I felt so proud. 

At the time I thought I should have a professional 'portrait' taken of the boat's new livery, but the desire foundered on indecision about where to take the boat.

I've often thought, in the years since, that the bottom lock at the Bosley Locks flight, near Congleton, would be the perfect place.  (Google Maps location here, with the view looking almost directly south.)

December's Waterways World cover has a photo by Robin Smithett with the ideal vantage point for such a photograph. 

The disused railway bridge just above the lock allows you an elevated position showing the whole lock and your boat nested within.  A winding hole just out of sight of the camera allows you to turn the boat to present either end to the camera - very handy if you arrive from the wrong direction or want to photograph both ends.

And then there's a splendid vista with the mountainous Mow Cop Bosley Cloud looming in the background. 

The photo here is tweaked a bit to show an artificially darkened sky.  That's fine - a little artifice works fine in portraits.

If I was a professional photographer I'd be approaching all boatbuilders and painters offering my services to their customers.  Two or three hundred quid for a portrait session would be small beer compared to the pride it would bring the boat owner in later years.   I don't know why no one's yet done this.

But, but, but ...  the scene here really needs landscape management.  There's simply too much vegetation; I think trees here should be cut down and undergrowth cleared away to improve the vista.

Landscape management in this style is a forgotten art.  Trees are now seen as a good thing in themselves, with no thought of placing them in a landscape.  In short, estate managers now can't see the view for the trees.  That's not always their fault.  Often it's the dunce-eyed environmentalists who are to blame, with no sense of landscape aesthetic. 

To quote Lancelot Brown, perhaps the greatest of natural landscape designers, Bosley Bottom Lock has capability. 

You can just let trees grow up where the seeds fall, and you'll get a luxuriant and lovely scene - as in my photo below, taken from the lockside itself in 2007 - but as often as not it'll actually HIDE the vista that deserves to be seen.

Christmas cruising plans take a knock; Harecastle Tunnel closed to Granny Buttons

At a late stage I'd decided to continue my ten-year cruise up the Trent & Mersey Canal and around the Four Counties Ring, with a New Year detour to Manchester. 

But now it looks like I can't get through the Harecastle Tunnel.

Harecastle is the bottleneck for any Trent & Mersey Canal trip.  A claustrophobic, narrow 3,000-yard tunnel with gates and ventilation installed at one end and with keepers monitoring boat passage, it requires booking during the winter, normally with 48 hours notice. 

Because it's coming up to Christmas, I rang the new BW Manchester/Potteries office early last week to ask how much extra notice I needed to give for a passage next week, before the New Year.

"You'll need to book before Christmas", said the lady at the other end.

Because the canals were started to freeze over last weekend, I left it until the last moment - this morning - to make sure there'd be a thaw.  I didn't want to book and then find I couldn't make it.

Things now look good, with the ice thawing.  So this morning I rang the office again - only to learn that "before Christmas" meant Tuesday 22nd.  Despite the fact that the BW office is staffed today, Christmas began three days before, for office administration. 

I asked:  Could I go through with another boat if it's already booked through?

"Oh, no!  You must be pre-booked individually. They are very strict about that."

This sounds daft to me.  Surely it can't raise costs to have, say, three boats going through in a convoy instead of two?  And after all, it's not as if they are charging tolls.

Or is there another, more annoying and more bureaucratic reason at work here?   Based around administration rather than bankside staff?

Personally, I think a toll or surcharge for out-of-season passages would make sense on occasions like these.  I think I'd be willing to pay a surcharge for travelling through the tunnel over Christmas, to cover the extra cost of BW overtime.

Indeed, while it was laudable for BW to abolish tolls for the Standedge Tunnel and Anderton Lift five years ago, I think it makes sense to reintroduce them in places, in these straitened times. 

Meanwhile I'm trying to decide whether to turn up anyway (either on Monday or Wednesday, the two days when boats are currently booked) and see if they'll mind if I tagged along.  I'm sure the tunnel keepers aren't bribable, but perhaps they are amenable to a little, um, Christmas spirit?

It'll be an awful gamble to go all the way there and then have to turn tail at the behest of a jobsworth.

Granny is now at Barton Turns, south-west of Burton, and only lightly iced-in.  I'd hoped to set off earlier, but now plan to resume tomorrow, Christmas Day.

It's a near-repeat of exactly three years ago, when I 'christmas-eved' at Willington and spent the whole of Christmas Day on this same stretch to Fradley Junction.

Dammit, if you are alone at Christmas anyway, there's no better way to spend it than at the tiller of a canal boat.  But I'd like to have a destination in mind.  And a city destination for the New Year.

Canal barge enthusiast falls to death after slipping through sheet ice into freezing water on Leeds-Liverpool canal near Ormskirk

Liverpool Echo story here.

It's a rare time when a local newspaper says pretty much all of the story in the headline.   If you aren't a friend or relation of the poor guy concerned then you won't need to know much more.

Except that it happened near the Ship Inn at Haskayne on Sunday, the unfortunate man apparently slipped from his boat - presumably moored - and and another boater nearby is quoted as saying that the ice around there was four inches thick.

'Four inches thick' is surely enough to walk on, though perhaps not enough to bear the weight of portly middle-age plunging feet-first.

It's a time when stout boating boots with good treads are very useful, and perhaps I should stop wearing my no-tread crepe soles.

Bloomin' liberty - do you want a 99 with that?

Maffi of NB Milly M has got very cross. 

In his post last week called Liberty No. 6 he complains that the nearby boat Anapai runs its engine at 7am, a bit earlier than the official 8am-8pm that British Waterways sets, and he wants it to stop.

The 'liberty' he means here is something that someone else does that he wants to stop. 

As in "It's a bleedin' liberty, that is," the sort of thing that old-world Fred Kite trade unionists used to rail at.

For John Stuart Mill, George Orwell and many other great philosophers and essayists liberty was an aspiration, not a limitation.  Maffi does praise 'freedom' (see right), although I'm not sure if he means the same as Mill's 'liberty'.  But I digress.)

But Maffi follows it with a slew of other complaints.  In this case, I think running the engine at 7am instead of 8am is small beer compared with some of the other points, which are more serious.

People often elevate small niggles to be the headline - the 'poster boy' as it were - of the dispute, particularly when they are technical, provable points and the other allegations are disputable or complex. This is how neighbourly disputes often escalate.

One serious allegation Maffi makes is that the man is a foreigner.   Another is that "he runs a greasy spoon near the station in Oxford."

Hey, Maffi, is the 'greasy spoon' comment technically accurate?  The phone number on the side of the boat Anapai turns up in an application to Oxford council to sell ice cream from a solar-powered ice cream van. 

And here's an irony:  The application says:

He [the man applying for the ice cream sales licence] visited the department in January 2009, and gave a presentation of his intentions to provide a vehicle with a solar powered ice cream display and storage compartments.

It will not be necessary to have the vehicle engine running during the working day.

Of course, ultimately Stephen doesn't take his blog too seriously.  As he points out:

I do hope his atagonistic neighbour doesn't either, and they can all get together over a beer, an ice cream and a laugh, as boaters should.  (Not at 7am, obviously.)

 

Cressy pilgrimage 2010

'IWA plan Cressy cruise re-enactment', says the press release from the Inland Waterways Association:

2010 will be the Centenary of the birth of Tom Rolt and as part of the IWA’s celebrations, Ron & Mary Heritage from IWA Oxfordshire Branch will attempt to re-enact the iconic “Cressy” cruise, leaving Tooley’s Boatyard in Banbury at mid-day on 24 April 2010 in their narrowboat “Heron”.

Many people have consciously done that very voyage, certainly in the last 20 or 30 years as continuous cruising and the liveaboard lifestyle has become more common. 

"Attempting to re-enact the iconic Cressy cruise" is perhaps missing the point, because what was iconic was not where Rolt went, but his 'design for living', the name he gave to his attempt to  live afloat permanently, become a writer and observe life on and off the waterways.  I get the impression he was the first liveaboard, the first continuous cruiser.

I recently began reading Narrow Boat again, and had forgotten that it's not just about the voyage.  I remember it as the first cruising log published by the first canal 'leisure liveaboard'  - but now it seems to me how much of it is really a discussion on the state of England at the time, and the general culture of the boat people rather than a simple cruising log. 

Indeed, the cruise itself doesn't start until a third of the way through the book, and unlike most continuous cruiser travelogues it roams far away from the canals at times.

Several people have followed L.T.C. Rolt's lead and written books observing England from the tiller.   Steve Haywood's 2004 book Fruit Flies Like A Banana was updated and republished this year as One Man And A Narrowboat to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Cressy voyage, while Nick Corble's 1999 book Walking on Water remains another favourite of mine.

(Another commercially successful one was The Water Road by Paul Gogarty, but I disliked that as much for its newspaper travel supplement style as anything.)

The Heron voyage sounds like it will be more of a hoop-la cruise, raising publicity for the waterways as they are now, rather than quietly trying to observe England as it is now or noticing how the country might have changed since 1939.

“Heron” will be decorated appropriately during her travels, promoting the Rolt story and the IWA.  Any boaters or other enthusiasts who may wish to join Ron & Mary for all, or part of the journey would be most welcome.

'Decorated appropriately during her travels'.  Oh dear.  Does that mean the boats will be painted brightly and traditionally with canal art in the style of the Tooleys and Frank Nurser, or will they have banners and bunting, folk music blaring from loudspeakers and display panels at each stop? 

It's a summer-only affair, running from April to August non-stop, without any of the long pauses, privations (and cosiness) of winter life afloat that was a large part of the appeal of life aboard Cressy.  It's likely to be a pilgrimage or a crusade, rather than quietly emulating Rolt's original quiet path through 'Jerusalem'.

No new chain gangs under the sun

'Chain gangs' to be used to restore Montgomeryshire Canal - Powys County Times:

CONVICTED criminals will soon be used to reconnect the Montgomeryshire Canal. Chain gangs were regularly used in America to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment, now a similar initiative is to be rolled out across Powys to maintain the Montgomeryshire Canal.

(Oo-er, that's a bit fierce for what is, in effect, a prisoner skills training program.)

There are no new things under the sun, as Ecclesiastes points out, and there's rarely something on the waterways that someone hasn't tried before.  For example, prisoners were employed on the Stratford-on-Avon Canal restoration in the 1960s.

To ensure that episode wasn't forgotten I added a comment about it on the County Times story.  I quickly got a ticking off from 'DrRobG', who sarcastically said how he 'loved' my 'negative' comment and concluded:

So get off your high horse and in future only comment on something if you have something constructive to say!

Read the story and comments thread to see how I responded.

But all this does give me excuse to wonder about the prisoner work scheme that master-restorer David Hutchings arranged back in the 1960s.  Has it been used since?  The official IWA history of the canal only says:

The resoration of the canal continued at a rapid pace in 1963 with the Royal Enginners and prisoners from Winston Green augmenting the regular volunteers.

The Stratford Canal Society refers to it in places as well.  The largest reference is in the society's Historic Bridge Threat page, where it campaigns against the impending removal of the footbridge in Stratford's Bancroft Canal Basin, built by prisoners from Wormwood Scrubs.

(The canal society website says the Bancroft Basin bridge was installed by prisoners from 'Winson Green Goal', so clearly the bridge is a 'keeper'!)

I also wonder about prisoners working elsewhere on the waterways.   The IWA says they were recently employed as bricklayers on the River Gissing Gipping (the Stowmarket navigation) in Suffolk.

But going back in history I bet you'll find other occasions of prisoners helping the waterways.  Italian POWs were used on the Droitwich Barge Canal in WW2 (the young Max Sinclair recalls sharing their luncheon sandwiches).  And I seem to recall that Napoleonic War prisoners helped out in building the canals - although I suspect the terms there truly were closer to American chain gangs. 

Emma's a paragon of blogging

I'm really taken with Emma's 21st birthday year blog. 

Last September on her 21st birthday, Emma challenged herself to post a picture every day for the coming year:

I love taking photos and I wanted to do something to document my 21st birthday year.  I'll probably get to October and forget about it but fingers crossed, I shall go through the whole year, uploading one photo a day.  It is going to be a tough decision to chose one picture to sum up a whole day but hopefully, it will end up being quite interesting!

She started with a charming picture of her birthday presents, and three months on she's still doing it every day.

Four things about this blog which together make it remarkable:

1. The theme, the rhythm.  It's a simple idea with a pattern, it's a steady heartbeat and you wait for the next one. 
2. The brevity.  She starts with a picture, then adds no more than one single paragraph about something that happened to her today.  She never outstays her welcome.  
3. The vivacity and positivity.  It's about what she likes, what's right with her life.  It's not what she hates. 
4. The focus.  It's all about the subject of the picture.  She doesn't wander into any other part of her day and get lost. 

I don't know who Emma is, but she sets a wonderful example.  By being so brief and only writing about one thing per post you get a much greater sense of her life than if she went into detail.  And what's more, she's got a great record of her final year at university to look back on in her old age, better than any box of unsorted pictures or rambling angst-filled diary.

I wish I had something like this; all I have of my studenthood is a few disjointed and unreliable memories that will die with me.

What's this to do with waterways, you ask?  Well I love the format, it's so readable for a boating blog - one day, one picture, one subject, one paragraph.  I stopped writing up my cruising logs because they got so long-winded they bored even me.  I mean, how many times did you want to hear of me passing through locks or filling up with water?  And in years to come, will the fact that I did so many lock/miles on each specific day really mean anything to me in my old age?   We relive our lives in flashback, not in real time.

Emma has inspired to start again, more concisely this time, allowing me to remember my boating more readily.

Update: I said 'four remarkable things', but Emma's 21st Birthday Year has a fifth, less definable virtue:  The 'voice', the individuality.  This is often something that just comes with practice, but I don't know how to teach it - or write about it.

Granny is still here, and headed up the Trent and Mersey Canal

No posts since Friday, but I'm still here.  I haven't gone away. 

It's strange, but now that I'm close to Granny Buttons and have more free time, I'm finding it harder than ever to post new stories to to the blog.

It's not a lack of things to write about.  I've got reasons for writing spilling out of my head and onto the floor.  Excuse me, I need to get the mop.

The good news is Granny is continuously cruising again, after a couple of months of marina fever, and I'm off up the Trent & Mersey Canal.   This should help me get started again.

The bad news is - well, nothing, really.  Even the likelihood of being iced in over Christmas could be good for Granny - although I'm hoping to get to Manchester for the New Year.

Terrorist thwarted from blowing up Merchant Square, Paddington Basin

Here's a disgraceful story of how an Italian student was last month interrogated and eventually arrested by a couple of play-policemen (PCSOs) who were trying to check if she was up to no good:

Italian student tells of arrest while filming for fun - The Guardian

What brings this into Granny's orbit was that the events happened in Merchant Square, Paddington Basin, one of the jewels in the crown of the British Waterways property portfolio.  

The video is  bad publicity for both British Waterways and European Land, the developers of the site, as well as King Sturge, the agents charged with attracting tenants to what might turn out to be a white elephant of a development. It suggests that the site is not an ideal place to relax.

These two PCSOs in this video are like the Pet Shop Boys, in that only one of them speaks.  He chews gum and puts his hands in his breast pockets - always a sign of cocky arrogance in any public official - while the other one maintains his silence and looks away - or possibly he was looking for accomplices to the terrorist student. 

So it was a bit rich of the 'Neil Tennant' officer to accuse the student of cockiness herself.  I'm not surprised she was unresponsive to him.

I said earlier that these men arrested her.  They didn't do the actual arresting, but Neil Tennant summoned a squad of proper policemen.  They then wrestled her to the ground, bruised her, arrested her (presumably taking her DNA) and imprisoned her for five hours, only releasing her once she agreed to accept an £80 fine for "harassment, alarm and distress in a public place."

This is a modern version of that scene in Wind in the Willows where Mr Toad is hauled up before the Beak, and given an extra fine jailed for the crime of 'cheeking the police'.

For me, Granny Buttons is about pictures as much as words. But generally the pictures come first.  What I see inspires my writing.  So you probably already know I'm right behind the 'I'm a photographer, not a terrorist' campaign.

When Granny was at Paddington Basin, last Christmas, I wandered around the site at night myself with my camera and tripod, and experienced no problems. But then, when I see policemen and security guards I tend immediately to go up to them and bombard them with information about myself.  I talk continuously, and I even proffer my Granny Buttons cards and tell them to look me up on the web.  They always get bored and go away very quickly.

But I found this video depressing.  It shows how laws that seem important to big Parliamentarians end up being abused by the little men empowered to enforce them. 

The man in this video says he's stopping the student under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and then when she asks why he thinks she's a terrorist he says 'I never said that'.   But what is the Act for, if not to act on suspicions that someone could be a terrorist?

I think this trainee should be publicly identified and given the chance to blush and say "Yes, I admit, I fouled that one up."  He could redeem himself yet.

Next month there's a mass photo gathering in Trafalgar Square to protest about this trend. Should be fun.

Meanwhile, here's an excellent terrorist's scouting video of Merchant Square, Paddington Basin, that the gum-chewing policeman somehow failed to prevent being made. Lots of bomb targets here to choose from.