Granny Buttons

Full Moon and Full Mars combined tonight

Tonight's a rare and brilliant treat for full moon enthusiasts.  It's "one of the highlights of the year", made more special still by a close conjunction with Mars, says Universe Today:

A full Moon and Mars will be putting on a show, and the pair will be prominently close to each other in the sky. 

Plus, this Friday night's full Moon is the biggest and brightest full Moon of the year.  It's a 'perigee Moon,' as much as 14% wider and 30% brighter than other full Moons you'll see later in 2010. 

What's more, not only is Mars closest to the earth for a long time, but Mars, the Earth and the Moon are 'at opposition', meaning they are aligned with the Sun and the Moon.

It's unfortunate that Rob Self-Pierson, who tweets as @waxingmoonman, chose to end his Moonwalking blog at the last full moon on New Year's Eve.  He could have a treat tonight.  Perhaps he will be having one anyway.  

I'd tempted to go out with my camera tonight myself, only I broke the lens three weeks ago, when I slipped in the snow.  Ouch!  I've been quoted £140 for repair, or £240 for a new replacement.

Meanwhile, I'm lazy and stingy; to save me having to go out again or spend any money here's the most recent of my favourite moonlitscapes.  It's from last September, of Shardlow Lock at 2am, as described in my post How Green Was My Shardlow Lock: 

Perhaps the bonkers no-mooring sign thief is like the furiously pecking parrot

Last autumn a BW 'no mooring' sign was nicked repeatedly from the same post, just outside Barton Marina.

On its own, this wouldn't have amounted to much of a story.

But somewhere nearby, a CCTV camera caught an image on the last time it happened, PC Plod finally had his suspect, and with a picture the local paper finally had a story:

Police narrow hunt for 'flat cap vandal'

Police in Barton-under-Needwood are appealing for information about a man in connection with criminal damage on the Trent and Mersey canal.

Signs along the canal towpath were ripped down and disposed of on Wednesday 30 September.

British Waterways have had around 6 incidents of signs being damaged at this location over the last few months.

The police wish to trace the man pictured in connection with these offences. If you have any information regarding the identity of this man, or about the offence on the 30 September, please call Staffordshire Police non-emergency helpline on 0300 123 4455 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111 and quote crime reference: XA/80570/09

Last I heard, the crime was still unsolved.  When I spoke to the Staffordshire Police press spokesman he cringed when he heard me say the U-word but admitted they haven't yet tracked down the man in the CCTV picture.  He wouldn't say where the picture was taken, but I assume it's from somewhere very nearby and that they had other images to suggest he was the hardened villain they were looking for. 

When Granny was at the scene of the crime, over Christmas, I asked the marina about it.  Apparently it was the 'No Mooring' sign outside Barton Marina (picture shows its replacement), and by the time I arrived the sign was new again.

Why would someone do this? Clearly he must have had a grudge against mooring.  But a boater would surely have seen the sense of not mooring there anyway.  Not with boats turning in and out of the marina entrance and likely to bash any others moored there.  

I asked Barton Marina, and owner Barry Morgan said that it wasn't just that sign.  He'd lost no-mooring signs of his own at the marina.  Perhaps it's a bonkers man who goes mad when he sees a particular word or phrase or instruction. 

It all sounds rather like that video of the furiously pecking parrot.  Well, I'm sure it'll stop when he's hauled up before the beak.

Below is the scene opposite the sign.

Old-style personal survival and new-style someone else's responsibility

When moving house recently, I rediscovered the Personal Survival - Gold Standard  badge I was awarded at school.  It was an award for learning not only how to swim, but how to look after myself and stay alive in the water.

It's from the Amateur Swimming Association and dates back about forty years.

Somewhere along the way I also got a lifesaving award - an important part of my physical education - but I've lost any badge they gave me.

But I've never forgotten the lessons, and I think I'm still a competent swimmer.  Education, as they say, is what's left when everything you learned at school has been forgotten. 

The ASA has changed significantly in recent years.  These days it's about play, about learning, about 'fun and fitness', about 'FUNdamentals' [sic] and 'safeguarding and protecting children'. 

You'll find this in the Safety and Survival' area of the ASA website, where it's tellingly part of the 'Parents' section and is full of patronising language, like "the perfect foundation [course] for any little Olympic hopeful." 

(In fact personal survival is downplayed everywhere by the ASA, especially for adults, and you won't find it by using the website's 'search box'.  It's there, but hidden away.)

Anyway, my Personal Survival badge was one of my only two achievements at school sports.  The other was the Purple Singlet, which boys got for running 100 miles in races in a single term.  Both were achievements of essential loneliness, of looking after yourself, of facing no competition except your own limits.

I've been thinking a lot of this lately as I ponder the issue of lifejackets, and of 'staying safe near water'. 

Recently I asked British Waterways if there was any requirement of BW staff to have some sort of qualification, a Personal Survival Award of some kind, before they were allowed to work on or near the water.

The answer, depressingly, is no, according to a 'safety representative' (I didn't get his name):

We don't require that [BW] employees are able to swim. I'm not sure of the exact numbers (I can find out) but a large percentage of those who drown can swim.  It is being able to swim that makes them think they can survive in the water without a lifejacket.

The upshot is, there's nowadays no need for BW children staff even to be to be aware of what will happen if they fall in the water accidentally.  No training, no personal survival lessons, nor tips on, for example, climbing out.  Nanny will take care of all that. 

(There's a famous picture from the 1930s of a group of London bobbies jumping into the Thames in training, all wearing their full uniform, with coats and helmets, and cork lifejackets on top, to accustom them to the shock of falling in cold water.) 

This is why these days I give a quiet cheer to youths who lark around 'irresponsibly', on and in the water, gaining valuable personal survival experience (when they do survive).  And that includes on ice.

This 'personal survival in the shock of cold water' issue, by the way, is something that Chris Ayriss touches on in his book Hung Out To Dry: Swimming and British Culture, a book with a colon in the title that I quite enjoyed and will write about again soon.

RCR treats a severe case of the bends on the Trent

River Canal Rescue has quickly published on its blog a report of a night-time rescue it made last weekend on the River Trent:

Late on Friday 21st Jan a 57ft narrowboat and its crew left Torksey lock to travel to Newark using the river Trent which, although swollen, was navigable. 

The crew hoped to make it to their destination before dark.  However, approximately 45 mins in to the journey, and having passed under the A57 bridge, they headed to a tight S-bend in the river.  They navigated the first right hand bend successfully but as they reach the second bend they lost drive and suddenly found themselves grounded.

They were in relatively deep water and there were no signs of an obstruction but try as they might they were wedged tightly and could not escape.  As time went by they realised that the tide was going out leaving them even more stranded.  As the river dropped it revealed a submerged wall to be the unknown obstacle.

Naturally, when I read this, the first thing I wanted to do was look at that particular river bend on Google Maps (link here):

View Larger Map

All praise to River Canal Rescue for living up to its name - even though the boat/boat owner wasn't a member of RCR.  There's almost an element of macho challenge in that  - I wonder who got billed for RCR's time, and how.   By the way, that's a splendid example of where you can sometimes need MORE than just a breakdown service.

But I couldn't help wonder why the boat went aground in the first place.  I wonder if the boater hugged the inside (see map above) too tightly?  The report doesn't say, and that's unfortunate.  If there's a submerged wall which is a danger even when the river is swollen, we need to know about it.  Or was it a wall?  Perhaps it was a drifting sandbar?  

I'm guilty of hugging the inside myself too often.  Inside bends on any river can be deceptively shallow, but especially the tidal Trent. 

And yet, it's easy to misjudge an outside corner too.  Last year, while coming up the same area in convoy, Granny Buttons encountered another boat which had gone aground on the outside of a bend, and was busy trying to reverse off, together with getting help from a boat in front:

In retrospect you can see the problem.  It was caused by a shoal, where a tributary brook comes out into the bend.  That's not always something obviously visible, and often only experience and knowledge of the area can help.

In that particular case, it took the combined efforts of all three of us to get Winifred off the shoal.  And in helping to pull off Winifred, my own bow swung out into the path of a boat coming downstream.

Of course,  you could say that last piece of peril was my own fault.  Maybe I was too busy taking photographs.  There were plenty of near-misses on that trip that I wanted to capture, featuring boats going upstream and down, all fighting for the deep water on the bends.

Keeping water in the track

Why the UK’s Victorian canals rely on IT - CIO magazine

Business technology magazine CIO gets it nearly right in its case study this week on computer technology at  British Waterways, and its 'Head of ICT', Richard Walsh. 

In fact, few of Britain's canals are Victorian in origin.  Most are Georgian, or Regency at a push.   Even the last two major projects, the Shropshire Union and Macclesfield Canals, were completed before Victoria's reign.

Two paragraphs seem to highlight a U-turn in British Waterways policy:

Soon after Walsh joined British Waterways the organisation was decentralised following a strategy review.  "It was needed at the time to re-energise [British Waterways] and make it a lot more commercial," he says looking back to the 1980s. "It was extremely successful. It got lots of energy into waterways, integrated all the business strategies and played a part in reinstating the waterways network."

A quarter of a century later, times have changed; British Waterways has progressed and a number of functions are being centralised [again?].  Chief executive Robin Evans has called for the body to maintain investment in the waterways themselves and reduce spending elsewhere, and with £10m to be trimmed from costs, IT efficiency has a role to play in meeting Evans's demands.

I also noticed a piece of BW jargon:

...today everything is managed through SAP, from project management to 'keeping water in the track', British Waterways-speak for keeping the canals flowing.

Keeping water in the track - is this a longstanding phrase?

The article ends with a lyrical flourish that portrays Richard Walsh as a waterways enthusiast.

As I leave, I remark that I often travel on the West Coast Mainline rail route which hugs the Grand Union Canal between London and Birmingham; Walsh recounts the entwined history of ownership between the canal and the rail line, happy to share his love for this often overlooked tranquil silvery thread of our national landscape.

That seems to me more like a history of takeovership, not ownership!  But he's only doing what we all do, which is get nostalgic for the hardship and ruthlessness of earlier generations.  What people now call 'heritage' is just a form of scar tissue.

Walking on water

A history of walking on water - New Scientist 

Here's a great little potted history of "Professor" Charles W. Oldrieve, the world's pre-eminent "aquatic pedestrian".

Meanwhile, how many times have you just wanted to nip across the canal without untying your boat, when there isn't a bridge nearby and you don't have a coracle?  This video gives a few scientific ideas about developing water walkers.

 There are other water-walking videos around, some of them suspiciously staged as if they are walking on pool coverings - witness 'Legendary North East hedge diving stuntman The Magical Mr G performs his latest death defying stunt'. 

Meanwhile, the YouTube video 'Jesus walks again' shows a water-walking stunt in a swimming pool in what looks like a tropical setting - until the last few seconds, when you see ... well, I won't spoil it for you!

My local MP writes to set the record straight about my blog posts

My MP, Mark Todd, wrote to me twice last week following my comments about icebound boats. 

(See: My MP, They Work For You, and continuous cruisers trapped in ice.)

The first letter thanked me for drawing his attention to the issue of trapped boaters.

The second letter was presumably after he'd looked for his name on Granny Buttons, and he wanted to set the record straight on some of my other comments.

1:  About my comment "...Mark Todd MP hasn't ever uttered the word 'canal' in Parliament", he replies:

While a simple search of the word "canal" may suggest that I have not raised a matter related to the canals in my time in parliament, you will find that one single word is a poor indicator of interest in the subject.

While I wouldn't claim to be prolific on this (to be honest relatively few people contact me concerning canals) I have pursued matters relating to British Waterways and maintenance issues on the stretch of the canal through South Derbyshire fairly regularly through direct correspondence. 

The most recent exchanges (in the last three months or so) relate to the replacement of the Long Horse Bridge at Shardlow and the repair of the closed bridge south of Sinfin.

[Personally I think how often an MP mentions the word 'canal' in Parliament in 12 years - or on his own personal website - is a good rule-of-thumb guide to how interested he is in the subject.  Especially when the constituency includes 12 miles of the historic Trent & Mersey Canal from Shardlow to near Burton and he lives in Findern, a village that's a mere dog-walk away from the canal and is mentioned in Tom Rolt's Narrow Boat.]

2:  Mark Todd also commented on my mention of him in my post on the proposed massive new Willington power station.  An excerpt:

I wouldn't have suggested that the architects should make it more 'impressive' (whatever that means).  I did have a discussion about its scale since the company promoting the project has increased the size of the proposed station from the original proposal.

I may also have remarked on the clever pictures which represented views of the site from Findern - they included trees in full leaf concealing parts of the station.

I took my comment from the Npower representatives, when I said I wondered if it could be more exciting, more glamorous, more spectacular, for example with extra decorative twiddly bits to make it more more 'impressive'.  The power company rep said that Mark Todd had asked the same sort of thing.

3:  Finally, Mr Todd points out that his successor as candidate isn't 'anointed', but chosen by local party members. 

[I meant it figuratively in that he gives his successor his 'blessing', but perhaps I got it wrong and he doesn't approve of his successor.] 

So now you know.  Happy to set the record straight.  I do hope Mark Todd gets a chance to pay tribute to the Trent & Mersey Canal in Parliament before he steps down at the next election.

Painted Boats - the original water-road movie - now on DVD

Two treasured and important old canal films - you might call them 'water-road movies' - are finally being issued on DVD by Optimum Releasing:  Painted Boats and The Bargee.

The 1963 comedy classic The Bargee - featuring a pre-Steptoe Harry H. Corbett - is being released on March 15th.   I'll keep my powder dry on that.

Meanwhile, Painted Boats is available now on DVD from Amazon, price £9.98.  This classic wartime film was the first of  a very short oeuvre.  Veteran reviewer Philip French in the Guardian gives the DVD release the merest dusting of praise:

A quieter affair, both realistic and lyrical, about life on England's canals and a romance between a boy and a girl from rival barge families.  Poet Louis MacNeice wrote the eloquent commentary, the graceful photography is by Douglas Slocombe.

Sweet but short.  Philip French doesn't mention that the original research and commentary for the 1hr film was by the great Tom Rolt, and it was set in the very places he suggested, including the Grand Union from Stoke Bruerne to Braunston and several locations on the BCN.

To Rolt's chagrin his own commentary was rejected and MacNeice's was an afterthought. 

The film critic of the Observer at the time - Philip French's predecessor, ironically - felt (along with Rolt himself) that poet's contribution was a bit intrusive and pretentious.

However, in Landscape With Canals Rolt says he was satisfied with the result, but was stung at the end:

We thought it pretty good.  At least our practised eyes could detect no glaring errors.  But I was somewhat chagrined to discover that, after all my efforts, I had not been given a screen credit.

The close-up and boatman's cabin scenes in the film were made in a replica mockup of the butty Sunny Valley, and that film prop now sits in the Waterways Museum at Stoke Bruerne. 

It would be very interesting, 65 years on, to have a new version of this movie with Tom Rolt's commentary overlaid.  You could hardly describe such an act as artistic barbarism, after all. Does the text still exist, I wonder? 

A fuller review of the DVD is from 'Parky at the Pictures' in the Oxford Times.  (You'll have to scroll down the page a lot.)

There's also a good review of the film on Amazon from 'Silver Fox'.

This all makes me realise that a new waterways film is long overdue.  I don't mean a travelogue.  I mean a water road movie.  Maybe I could research and write one, and do a commentary that would be rejected in favour of words of a nobler literary figure.  If so, I'd not ask for a screen credit.  It would be an honour to follow in Mr Rolt's wake!

Career identity: Novice plonker

Boat owner says he is a 'plonker' - Northampton Evening Telegraph

This poor guy's luck didn't hold last weekend when he tried to get his narrowboat through the 13thC bridge at Irthlingborough.  The Nene, swollen with floodwater, swept it against the side of the bridge, and it took thirteen firemen three hours to pull it out again.

The Northampton Evening Telegraph editor was quick to seize on his embarrassed and self-effacing description of himself as a 'plonker' , which inevitably ended up in other headlines, including (mercilessly) Narrowboat World. 

(The Cambridge News is kindlier in its story to Andrew Furnival, calling him a 'novice boatman', and showing a set of photos that includes fourteen firemen in lovely tug-of-war mode.  Hey, they look like they were having a great time!)

The next time I take a gamble and it doesn't pay off, I'll learn from his two mistakes. 

One mistake was of navigation, of getting stuck.  The other was of narration, of what he said about it. 

We all make mistakes of navigation.  It's how you learn best.  But then he made the mistake of narration. He called it as he saw it; he said he'd made the steering error.

I guess he did right to be modest.  It was unfair of the Telegraph to do him down.  If you publicise his self-effacing "plonker" quote, you're not giving the next person the incentive to be honest.  I think we should praise Andrew Furnival for his candour.  And his modesty.  And even more, his experience.   Because the next time he's going that way, I'd trust him to take my own boat through the narrow and ancient Irthlingborough Bridge.

It's a hell of a spot to get through at the best of times, and I wonder if it needs better signposting for plonkers novices.  Picture of the bridge here, showing how you have to do a dogleg under the newer bridge to get through it.  

Actually, this boater made a third mistake.  In the Evening Telegraph story he's described as 'unemployed', which I presume was a word he himself fed the journalist. 

Never, never, never call yourself unemployed.  At the very least, you are employed in looking for something else to do with your life, right?

When you ask many people (especially young 'uns) what their job is, they often cough into their hand and mutter "Well, actually I'm a <jobtitle>, but that's not what I normally do."

I doubt that this 'novice boater' thinks of himself as professionally unemployed (although he might be).  He should have said what he wishes he were doing, had he had a job.  After all, there's nothing wrong with being a novice at boating, although it would be nice for the paper to have the chance to describe him as an expert at something, at least.

It's what I call 'career identity'.   Don't ask someone what they do for a living.  Ask them "What's your career identity?"

Glorious mud attached

Good news by email from the Norfolk Broads press office:

The Broads Authority has exceeded its target for dredging removal for the second year running by excavating 50,000m³ of sediment---over 10% more mud than planned. Please open attachment.

<<Broads Authority beats dredging target.doc>>

Keira rents East End boat during West End debut

Keira Knightley's houseboat home - Monsters & Critics

Keira Knightley is living on a 'houseboat' in London's East End while she stars in a West End play , says a report. 

A nearby resident added: "They spend most weekends on it, brewing up pots of tea. They're a very sweet couple. They regard their houseboat as their sanctuary."

(She's also reported as living on a barge, but I presume they don't mean she's greedy for two boats at once.)

Immediately speculation will ignite about where, and what type, and indeed which boat.

There are a limited number of candidate places on the Regent's Canal.  On the one hand you expect a star to live in luxury on a big 'floating pontoon' such as at Little Venice, while on the other maybe she'll seek the privacy of an off-towpath quiet gated community. The talk in this report is of the Hoxton area, such as at Kingsland Basin.

I'm now bracing for a new flood of visitors to my various 5-year-old 'narrowboat for rent' blog posts, which seem to have become a veritable bazaar of requests about where people can rent a canal boat in London.

How did Keira do it?  She could probably just knock on a window, and flash a winning smile and a chequebook, but for most people it's near-impossible.

But I'm most interested not where she lives, but where she cruises, if indeed she moves at all.  To me a boat isn't just something that floats but that moves, that goes places, that travels from A to Z, winds, and returns at least to B.   And that's much harder for a celebrity to do, because you're a sitting duck for the media.

See also:  Celebrity boating in plain sight (2004).

Drake Equation ducks issue of how boaters find each other

Love in London is as rare as finding aliens - Reuters

A couple of years ago economics student Peter Backus wrote a jokey academic paper, "Why I don't have a girlfriend", using an existing scientific rationale:

The Drake Equation is used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilisations that might exist in our galaxy. 

I have used this approach to estimate the number of [my] potential girlfriends in the UK.

The results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.

This sort of story is catnip for editors, but catnip can be hard to find.  Which is perhaps why, when Reuters sniffed the story this month, the big media jumped on it.

The ensuing publicity has shortened his odds dramatically.

Reuters journalist Rebekah Curtis mentions that Peter Backus lives on a canal narrowboat in London, and concludes:

But love can still defy the odds right on your doorstep. Since writing his paper on the equations of finding love, Backus has started dating his neighbor Rose. She meets his age requirement, has a university degree and also lives on a boat.

This appears to hole Peter's theory - or at least his initial assumptions - below the waterline. I mean, what are the odds that a lovelorn but fussy (he's only attracted to 5% of the women he meets) economist just happens to fall for the boater next door?   That she also lives on a boat is a far more important requirement than her educational level, I'd guess.  Whatever floats his boat probably floats hers, too.

Yet boats don't feature in Drake's Equation. Nor does wit, something that's likely very rare in the universe but which Peter Backus has in abundance.

This story must have been catnip to Rebekah Curtis for another reason.  For she, also, is a canal boater, in Little Venice.  And she's already appeared in Granny Buttons - see last May's Reuters covers Hadar at the Canalway Cavalcade.

(I was going to mention that Peter Backus is in the fourth year of a PhD, but I couldn't find an uncontrived way of putting Drake's Equation and his ducktorate into the same sentence, sorry.)

Winter canal works behind schedule bollards

Icy weather affects engineering works - Waterscape.

The recent spell of cold weather has caused well publicised disruption across the UK, including on British Waterways’ canals and rivers where an estimated 90% of the network froze.

In particular, scheduled engineering works as part of BW’s winter stoppage programme have been adversely impacted.

See also:

Guess what I saw today - Caxton
Three men and a lock - Caxton (with photo)
First stupidity of 2010 - Allan Richards, Narrowboat World
3 Vans, 3 men, 3 Bollards, 3 Loads of B******s - Contented Souls

Cadbury Kraft Chocolate Buttons

What are we supposed to think of the Kraft takeover of Cadbury? 

Pundits talk about the chocolate kingdom 'losing its independence', but it's been through a rash of pick-n-mix identities in recent years, such as 'Cadbury Trebor Bassett'.  What is independence but your own - definitive - identity?

For me as a boater, what matters most will be how they treat the Worcester and Birmingham Canal at Bournville.  The factory itself isn't one of England's glories (although an American family who came on Granny Buttons ten years ago said the factory's Cadbury World visitor centre was the highlight of their trip).  Rather, to me it's the village community - the whole environment - which makes it special. 

Cadbury originally located to Bournville because of the canal, which allowed it to get in the ingredients easily, including milk from Worcestershire, and the half-made chocolate 'crumb' from canalside factories elsewhere.  Eventually the company had its own on its own fleet of cargo narrowboats - and it was their bright red signwritten panels which inspired those on my own boat.

In recent years the company seems to have turned its back on the canal, as the Bournville workforce shrank to a third of its peak size and ingredients came in by road.

The area became 'bandit country' for the new breed of leisure boater, and poor moorings alongside Bournville Station made it impractical (and risky) for boaters to tie up and visit the factory - or even just to stay overnight.  So the area went downhill, and a new-laid towpath was little more than a cycling track to whizz through.

Five years ago British Waterways opened a new protected visitor mooring for three or four boats, although without any facilities such as a water point.   Granny Buttons was the very first boat to stop there (above), although it was empty and unexciting overnight.

The official Cadbury Bournville Walking Tour (map pictured below right) doesn't mention the canal and only shows it as a feature on the very left of the map.  I do hope the new owners can once again embrace the waterway, installing all sorts of waterside facilities and encouraging boats to stop.  A welcome addition would be a waterside pub, wetting the notoriously 'dry' alcohol-free area.

Granny Buttons is named after my mother.   She acquired the appellation because almost every time she came to visit her grandchildren she's bring them packets of Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons.   That's why my boat advertises 'Bournville' as its 'home wharf'.

For many years, Cadbury Chocolate Buttons were synonymous with a cute little cartoon of a little girl - herself called 'Buttons' - who had Zebedee-like springs for legs.   She'd bound across a field of chocolate, cutting out the buttons with her feet, and her shock of yellow hair reminded me for some reason of Christine's platinum-blond bob.

When Granny was repainted and signwritten in 2002, I had a special red panel painted on the side making space for an image of little Buttons.

I rang Nina Leijerstam, the then newly appointed marketing manageress for chocolate buttons, about the possibility of using 'Buttons' in my signwriting and getting an image of the character for the signwriter to use. 

'Oh, we're discontinuing that character' she said. 'We're taking the product to a more adult market'.  

It all sounded a bit mechanical to me; marketing by numbers rather than by the heart.  Surely the childlike name and nature of chocolate buttons is half the appeal to adults. 

But no, buttons lost its Buttons, the product went downmarket, and as far as I'm concerned that marketing manager was ENTIRELY responsible for Kraft taking over at Bournville.  I've been sore about Cadbury's ever since!  

So, apart from lovin' Bournville's canal again, the best thing Kraft could do to Cadbury's is to bring back Buttons.

And that's my cogent and comprehensive contribution to the cacophonous Kraft and Cadbury chatter.

A plea:  Can anyone recommend their favourite links on the web about Cadbury's history with the  canals? 

See also:  Granny Buttons - Kraft Chocolate Buttons (Sept 13th)