Granny Buttons

Midland Chandlers at Mercia nears opening

The new Midland Chandlers building at Mercia Marina is nearing completion. 

In recent weeks there's been rapid progress, (the picture at right, shows it only two weeks ago) and they're now aiming for a quiet opening, sans publicité, on Saturday April 17th. 

The low-profile opening is not because of the problems of stocking up the store or keeping the eager hordes at bay, but simply because sophisticated modern retailing requires smart stock control to keep down costs and prices.  And smart stock control means computers that need to be gingerly introduced, you know how it is.

A 'big bang' opening might test its systems too severely, and the fallout from a queue of overexcited but irritated customers unable to purchase from the considerable stocks immediately on view would hurt their reputation.

I have to say, this building is looking smart and stylish, very 'chalet'.  It's a world away from the clean but functional 'Tesco vernacular' architecture of the  three existing sites, at Braunston, Preston Brook and Penkridge.

The new chandlery building is low-profile, with Derbyshire stone below, faced with cedar above, and - its standout feature - a grass roof.

Technically it's called sedum, and there are different types, but maybe we should just refer to it as a 'green roof'.  Well, it looks brown at the moment, but it's only just been laid, and should green out over the summer.

Architect Darryn Buttrill says it's the first one in the county, although the popularity of green roofs is growing, and you can expect more on waterside sites.

(You can find out more about green roofs from The Green Roof Centre, a site sponsored by Sheffield University, apparently a focus of research on this type of building material.)

Midland Chandlers' managing director Alistair Thomas is really pleased with the end result.  It's the first new branch since he took over the business, and he says it will form a template for future branches. 

But it's not just the building, but the location that makes it really suitable for him.

For one thing, it's got perhaps the largest collection of boats (i.e. customers) in the UK right on his doorstep, and for another, it's got excellent  transport links, so they can get stuff in stock in very quickly and other customers can easily get to it. 

Alistair' holding company Arleigh International, which runs the existing Arleigh holiday chalet supply and MarineMart chandlery businesses, took over Midland Chandlers about four years ago.

At the time he told me that when he was thinking about buying the business, one small influence was my own 2004 post 'What to look for in online chandlery', which was No. 1 in Google for 'Midland Chandlers' at the very moment he was making the decision.

Put simply, I wasn't complimentary about Midland Chandlers then, and he said that my comments helped him decide that the business had scope for improvement even before any extra investment.  That's always a good sign for a takeover.

That might mean he got Midland Chandlers for a song, although I doubt I'll get a discount for helping him! 

Well, from next month the biggest chandlery (and one of the cheapest) is - almost literally - on my doorstep.  That's really handy.  I can just nip out for a spare part for Granny Buttons, as easy as for a newspaper or a pint of milk at the marina's next-door Trading Post shop.

I have to say, it's really refreshing to see timber-clad buildings in a canalside context.  They are as smart outside as many modern narrowboats are smart inside.

Admittedly, behind the gleaming cedar facade there are concrete breeze blocks, but functional and insulating as that is, at least we don't have to look at the grey concrete.

Wallpapers for desktops, to mix my metaphors

When I met Roger of Windsong in the pub the other day, he flattered me by saying he sometimes used my photos for his computer desktop backgrounds or 'wallpapers'. 

I've written previously (e.g. 'What size are my pictures?' and 'Is 16:9 the new laptop screen format?') about the calculations and estimations for producing the best size of image to suit backgrounds.

I'll be honest, I don't really use wallpapers on my desktop (if I may mix my metaphors). They just get in the way.  My desktops are always messy, I'm a terrible litter-bug, dropping files everywhere. 

For example, here's my desktop as I'm writing this post.  It's on my new Dell Studio laptop with a very high-res 1920x1080 (HDTV) format screen, and there's room for 160 icons there.

I've tried myself using wallpapers  but any icons soon chameleonise into the background for me, so I tend not to use them.  Just a soothing blue is what I like best.

But if wallpapers work for you, be my guest.  Here are a couple of my favourite canal pictures which might work well as wallpapers, and I've done them at HDTV resolution. Click on the pictures and they'll pop up as full hi-res images.

The first is the one I took last year near Winkwell at 1am in the snow:

The second is my 'Curious cows near Congleton' from a  couple  of years ago:

Please remember, though, that they are still my copyright, so only use them privately and don't copy without my permission.

Serenity, Windsong, Bobcat, nice photos of yourself, and pub quizzes

I was lucky enough to meet a couple of other bloggers in the Green Dragon pub in Willington last week a few days ago. 

Pip & Roger of Windsong and Karen & Ian of Serenity are two couples living the life aquatic for several weeks each year in a two-boat convoy.

Unlike another well-known two-boat convoy (No Problem and Moore 2 Life), Windsong and Serenity are a matched pair, both boats being made by Beacon Boats and very similar in construction.  You can see inside Serenity here and Windsong here.)

Quiz nights are great opportunities to meet people.  The uncertain conversation of with strangers is helpfully punctuated by the need to share your knowledge - and you get to know each others' areas of knowledge and expertise more quickly.  

I wanted to take photos of the evening, but Pip hinted that I should delete the one brief photo I did take.  I took the hint. 

What a pity, I thought. 

I really hate seeing photos of myself.  My appearance revolts me.   But I've learned that the only way you can see photo of yourself that you like is to have LOADS taken, and to pose for them wherever possible.  That way, a few of them are bound to look at least passable. 

So I never got that photo of the pub quiz that I wanted.  I'll have to look back in my files to see a photo of a canalside pub quiz ...

Ah, here's one: The Dog & Doublet, near Sandon Lock, September 2009.

That quiz had a clever denouement: The quizmaster made the winners endure a homespun final round of Play Your Cards Right.

Talking of getting photos of yourself that you like, and of meeting other blogging boaters, I'm neglecting the other person I met that day - the nice lady who does the blog about NB Bobcat. 

She - I didn't catch her name, sorry, and it's not on her blog - had been down to Willington to pass time while waiting for her husband's hospital appointment, and she spotted me. 

She wrote about it in her post Willington Welcomes.  And it turns out that I appear in the photo she took of the canal bridge for that post.  I never got a chance to pose, so all you can see is my ugly, bald rear view. 

She should have shouted Coo-ee! and waited for me to turn around and face the camera.

You can see the whole photo here.

How many pooping days until Christmas?

Kudos to the Upper Calder Valley Renaissance Project for a terrific publicity stunt today - the Dog Poo Tree.

They wanted to highlight the problem of thoughtless dog owners bagging up their dirt and then flinging it into the nearest bush, there to fester for years. 

So they festooned a tree at Todmorden Lock with purple plastic bags, each one looking like it held a little doggie gift.  Indeed, so many bags - I lost count when up to nearly 200 - that there's be almost one turd for every day up to next Christmas.

It all makes for a very disturbing Anti-Christmas tree. 

I do hope they cleaned up afterwards.

Said Louise Harrison, project coordinator for Upper Calder Valley Renaissance:

"We are pleased to support British Waterways in their appeal to dog owners across the country.  Here in the Calder Valley we have some of the nation’s most beautiful countryside and it is barking mad that people insist on spoiling it in this way.

"Hopefully the shocking sight of a beautiful tree entirely decorated with bags of poo will remind pet owners just how silly it is to discard of their dogs’ mess in this way."

Oh, did I get it wrong?  Was it British Waterways' idea all along?  And did UCVR just come along for the walk?  Sorry.

A press release from BW came with a headline that was just as eye-catching:

Dog walkers asked to take a lead by cutting the crap

It's a growing problem, and we are all getting exasperated with it.  (Dog dirt in plastic bags, I mean, not BW publicity stunts and cheap puns, although I know what you mean.)

The genius of the picture here is that the bags are all pretty in pink and imperial purple, and of course there's added impact in the sheer number of them.

This is far more effective in PR terms than my doggie-bag effort at Leamington Spa four years ago (below). 

My shot relied on one lonely black plastic bag and a glaring collie, and the only purple was a single anorak.  All of which might warm dog-lovers hearts but won't catch the eye of editors.  Although at least it had my beloved Granny Buttons in the background, which is more than you can say for the official picture.

I Spy Granny pictures count for more on this blog.

[The main photo was a PR one, sent out with the press release and not given official credit.  However, I notice the jpeg has the name of photographer Bob Collier embedded inside, so let's give him a nod for an arresting image, eh?]

Making a monkey out of British Waterways' canal arms

The big news for me in today's budget is the rise in duty on cider.  And not just in the tasteless 'industrial ciders' such as Strongbow, Ice White and Magners, but in the quality craft drinks too, the ones that actually taste of apples.  [Sob]

The far bigger news for the rest of the waterways today is the Treasury document headlined Reforming Arm's Length Bodies (pdf). 

With a name like that you could be forgiven for thinking that it's all about British Waterways.  ('Canal arms', geddit?)

I'd not noticed the phrase 'Arm's Length Bodies' before, but it seems to have officially taken over from 'quango'.  

(Arm's Length Body indeed!  A body that's only as long as its own arm is stunted, or else it's a knuckle-dragging simian, and perhaps that's the government's objective - to make a monkey out of British Waterways!)

But although it's about far more than just British Waterways, this document does start with our favourite quango.  In fact, in the very first page (Executive Summary, page 7) it's the only quango mentioned.

It's worth looking at the five bullet points of the summary (my bold):

• The Government will save £500m by 2012-13 from ALBs. The number of ALBs will be reduced by over 120. The Government will mutualise British Waterways to give waterways' users greater involvement in management of this asset. In addition, the Government will consider proposals to introduce a Bill at the earliest opportunity to enable further obsolete bodies to be wound up and functions to be stopped.
  
• The Government will create a new hurdle that departments must overcome in order to propose a new ALB. A new ALB must be absolutely the last option. The justification for new ALBs will be published so that the public can hold the Government to account for the decision. There should be a presumption that any legislation creating an ALB includes a ‘sunset clause’ to make sure it does not outlive its useful function.
  
• ALBs will face new restrictions on using lobbying or PR consultants.  Duplication of any function between ALBs and departments will be cut;
  
• To enable the public to see how efficiently ALBs spend public money – and the proportion that goes on staff costs and back office functions – ALBs will comply with new requirements of transparency.
  
• The Government will ensure all ALB boards have the right skills and composition to drive value for money and challenge performance. There will be tough sanctions for failure at board level, including potentially extending the Company Directors Disqualification Act to ALB Chairs and Chief Executives.

All this - and particularly the very last sentence - will have Allan Richards, over on Narrowboat World, slavering.  For months he's been carrying out a one-man guerrilla accountability campaign, questioning the competence of BW board members and questioning the veracity of their statements.

The bit that matters for the waterways is in Section 2, with a whole 'box' devoted to "mutualising British Waterways". 

It seems a bit cold and vague to me, but the Inland Waterways Association is all hot for this document. 

In its official budget response the IWA  highlights three bullet points in Reforming Arms' Length Bodies , including the one that sums up the whole thing:

• To put the waterways on a long-term sustainable footing while reducing the ongoing cost to the taxpayer.

For the IWA, this means a single waterways conservancy body to control navigation (see their Inland Waterways Conservancy Proposals). 

And for this, BW is only the first step.  The next one is the Environment Agency.  While the EA is vaguely mentioned in Arm's Length Bodies, the navigational aspect (i.e. boats) doesn't get a look-in, still less the idea that BW and the EA might merge in some way.

So the budget promises a new dawn, but who knows what the weather will be like.

Dear me, all this politics is making me tired.  I can't wait to get back to flippant stories and pictures about the canals. Here's my favourite dog-sniffs-dog's-bottom picture:

UK Waterways Ranking: Never mind the quality, feel the hits

Like most many some one or two other waterways bloggers I'm irresistibly drawn to Tony Blews' UK Waterways Ranking Site.

Halfie's weekly Top Thirty Waterways Sites chart rundown last weekend showed that for the first time CanalPlanAC has overtaken Granny Buttons in the rankings.  I've dropped one place, like a pop hit that we've all got bored with.

That's as it should be.  In truth, I'm a bit embarrassed about being ranked so high.  It's just a blog, you know?  A one-column online magazine, without the advertising, news or useful features.

Maybe a better guide is to look just at the UKWS blogs-only list. 

Except even that isn't much of a guide.  For example, very lucky to be No. 13 this week is boatingbreakhols.co.uk, which is a sorry shop window for Hoseasons, just a load of cheesy ads.  I don't know how this got listed as a 'blog'.

And there's stuff like CanalCuttings, which is now snapping at my heels in the general chart but seems to be an equal pile of, well, ads.

I counted three dozen(!) on its home page alone, and no discernibly useful content.

I suppose you'll say that what I need is an old-fashioned web ring, like Ken Fairhurst's venerable and friendly UK Canals.  But click through to there, and the first thing you get is a blast of midi music.

OK, this is where I come clean and admit I'm still in thrall to charts in some way.  I guess we all are.

Maybe what I'm hoping for is some sort of voting system, buttons on each entry whereby we could all 'vote' for a few sites that we think should be higher in the rankings.  Never mind the hits, feel the quality!

If I'm going to be Number Five, well straight away I can think of four blogs that contribute more than Granny Buttons and deserve to be higher than me.

One solution might be to have a chart for ad-free websites.

I still wish NarrowboatWorld would join us, but Tom Crossley's really not a joiner at heart.

Nosmo King and the smoking ban

Boating blogger Maffi was on good form last week, outraged about an unnecessary no-smoking sign underneath a bus stop canopy in Deddington.

I'm on his side. 

I've never liked smoking.  In fact I have 'anti-smoking fascist' credentials.  I remember in my youth refusing to buy cigarettes for people, and even pulling them from men's mouths in non-smoking compartments in trains.  I even did it at a tube station platform not long before the 1987 Kings Cross fire.

Why didn't you punch me when you had the chance?   

But I've not only mellowed but become more libertarian with age too. 

[Incidentally, every time I see a 'no smoking' sign, I think of the music hall/variety entertainer Nosmo King.  He's of his time, and your jaw might drop when you see his 'blackface' act - watch it here on the wonderful British Pathe archive.  One or two good jokes that you might plunder for a modern stand-up act, but mostly as funny as - well, nothing.  I suspect quite a few people would want to ban him now!]

Anyway, all those Nosmo signs aren't really about protecting the health of other people.  They are about social engineering, about changing society to suit your own beliefs.   

I think the Nosmo ban has had a terrible effect on communities, particularly on the English pub.  It won't 'destroy' England, any more than the Dissolution of the Monasteries did, or any more than the loss of the canals would have destroyed the countryside.

It just changed England and - like the loss of the monasteries - whether it was for the better or worse depends on your 'religion'.  My religion now is very libertarian, and my chapel is the pub, and I feel there's no question that the inability of people just to nip out for a pint and a drag has changed the nature of the pub. 

It's not just the number of people who are going out, but the nature of the pub; that it's not as much the focus of the community that it was.  Pubs are turning into restaurants; they are places that you go to eat rather than to socialise.  It's not happened overnight, but the Nosmo ban has accelerated it drastically.

Maffi's piece reminds me of when the ban came into effect in 2007.   I remember stopping to use a rural phone box when my mobile wasn't working.

And there, in the phone box, already introduced for the ban that week, was one of the new no-smoking signs.  The phone box was decrepit and dirty and the phone inside didn't work. (see right). 

But the new no-smoking signs were already in place.  Well done, Britain. 

Recommended reading: George Orwell's classic essay, The Moon Under Water, published in the Evening Standard in February 1946 - just as Tom Rolt was preparing to meet Robert Aickman. It was the aftermath of the Second World War, fought to protect our long-cherished freedoms.  Including, of course, the freedom to stink out the pub. 

For Orwell, the perfect pub included a "florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke." 

This is not something produced overnight by an interior designer at the command of a pub company following market research.  It takes years. 

Why is it important?  Precisely because  it takes years, It represents tradition and history, and this makes it beyond the whim of a manager in a company - and perhaps more significantly, beyond the intolerance of a politician.  They can't make this; they can only destroy it.

Tom Rolt, an inveterate chain smoker, eventually died from those ghastly cancer sticks, though not until he was 64.  I wonder what he'd have said if he'd known the risks?  Would he have thought it was all worth it?  I mean, at the time he wrote Narrow Boat, when he was about 30.

It's ironic that it was the former civil libertarian Patricia Hewitt who introduced the nosmo kingban.  See her They Work For You page, although it doesn't say how much she charges to work for you.

Bill Bryson, CPRE, Towpath Tidy and my 'Bryson' story

There was a good article in The Times on Saturday where Bill Bryson talked to the party leaders about countryside issues.

Bryson is very generous and uncritical of the three politicians in his interviews.  It reads more like a Style-section profile.  He's no Paxman, and he leaves his barbs for more general points in the article, outside the actual interviews themselves.

But he's President of  the CPRE, and what excellent barbs! What points! he makes on their behalf:

"... the inescapable impression conveyed is that this is a government that sees the countryside as a slightly alien and underutilised resource, and wishes to fill it with houses, marching ranks of electricity pylons, and giant wind farms.

John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, last year famously declared that the country was endangered by “squires and gentry” who opposed the erection of giant turbines in pristine landscape because it spoilt their “chocolate box views” – bizarrely turning an admiration of beauty into a kind of deviant act.

As befits an American anglophile, Bryson describes the beauty of the English countryside in a way too many English politicians can't:

Nothing – and I mean, really, absolutely nothing – is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside.

Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilised – more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines – and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent.

Wherever you are now, you are almost certainly no more than an hour away, if that, from the heady smell of dung and hay, and the glory of a landscape that is sumptuous, productive and divine. You are the luckiest people in the world to have that.

Luck, alas, won’t be enough to keep it.

It reminds me of the great English explorers such as Thesiger and Burton, who could admire what was great about Arabia or Africa in a way the natives themselves rarely understood.

And Bill Bryson concludes his Times article even more passionately:

The countryside is the happiest accident in British history. No one intended for it to be lovely. It just turned out that way. But what a miracle it is, and the most miraculous part of all is that it is there right now. It doesn’t have to be created because it exists already.

It just has to be saved. Surely that’s not too much for any electorate to ask.

You'd think, therefore, that Bryson would be a friend of the canals.  Indeed, in the run-up to this year's Towpath Tidy his name was co-opted liberally - for example see: 'Help clean up our canals, say Bill Bryson and British Waterways'. 

However, for Bill Bryson Towpath Tidy was really about monomania for litter - what he himself admits is his "overweening obsession" - and anyway was probably just a PR lady from CPRE putting words in his mouth.   As a PR person myself I know how it's done.  I can picture him now on the phone, taking a call from the BW PR department:

"Towpath tidy?  What's that, oh, clearing litter from the towpath?  Oh, litter, yeah, absolutely! Draft up something, run it past my secretary, I'm all for that." 

Certainly he's said nothing about canal restoration, or its raison d'etre, boating.  I get the feeling he'd be happy for canals to remain just overgrown, un-dredged linear walking parks - or in Tom Rolt's saddened phrase, 'reedy stagnant ditches' - so long as the litter was picked up.

I wrote to Bill Bryson twice last year asking if he'd write something about the canals for the waterways magazines, and if he'd ever taken (or would consider taking) a canal holiday.  Never got a reply and I'm not surprised; he can't reply to every fan letter.

But I shouldn't be too churlish. He's made it both respectable and sophisticated to be a countryside boy. 

Did I ever tell you my story about when I was a student in 1973 and I shared a room in a boarding house one week with a bearded backpacking young American?  He was freshly arrived in the UK with a very dry sense of humour. 

Well, one night I came home drunk, and I remember waking up in the morning with a hangover, half-dressed and still with one shoe on.  The wry American laughed and called me 'Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John'. 

I remember that morning so well.  Looking back, I can't help but think it was Bill Bryson, who later wrote about his wanderings in England at that time in his book Notes from a Small Island'. 

An apology about an apology about 'Painted Boats'

Oh dear, I seem to have posted that 'An apology about Painted Boats' piece twice.

Bruce of Sanity (and Even More Sanity, you can never have enough Sanity) quickly spotted it and asked if I'd had a day as bad as him.

No.  I'd simply spotted an error, and then thought I'd improve it slightly.   And it accidentally got reposted instead of edited.

I'm of the school that thinks it's fine to edit something, provided no one's yet commented.  Of course, sometimes I get caught out!

History comes back, allowing Bridgewater Canal Company to bite landowners on the backside

Canal that opened great age of waterways 'an obstacle' to broadband - Daily Telegraph

What an irony this story feels to me.  The  Bridgewater Canal Company is demanding extra fees and ongoing rent from the Geo Networks company for the right to lay another cable under the canal. 

Geo already has one cable under the canal at that point (see its fibre optic network map here), and  argues that it shouldn’t have to pay extra for a second cable. 

The judge ruled that Geo should pay extra, but acknowledged that the issue isn’t clear, and gave leave to appeal.  He said:

"The Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761 and engineered by Joseph Brindley, ushered in the great age of the canals.

"It was built to give citizens of the growing city of Manchester access to cheaper coal from the Duke of Bridgewater's coal mines.

"Now, however, what the citizens of Manchester want is access to broadband and fibre optic cables.

"Far from facilitating access, the Bridgewater Canal is now an obstacle.''

… "It does not seem to me to be fair that an operator should have something for nothing."

[But] he said David Elvin QC, representing Geo, had warned him against allowing those in control of linear obstacles extracting ransom payments.

This all feels ironic, because the tables now seem to be turned. Few (if any) canals were built entirely on one landowner's property, hence expensive Canal acts had to be passed in Parliament to (among other things) force landowners to cede control.

In the case of farmers who had their fields severed, the canal companies had to build expensive accommodation bridges down the line of each canal to ensure the landowners didn't lose access to their land on the other side of the unwelcome canal. And this would incur considerable expense for the canal company.

So, the tables are now turned.  In the early days of the canal, the landowners were themselves the original obstacle.  Now, the 'newcomer' canal is itself an obstacle.

I guess that 250 years on the Bridgewater canal company has itself no corporate memory of the hoops it had to jump through to get it route through the Cheshire and Lancashire countryside.

And it must at times curse the strictures forcing it to maintain expensive 250-year-old accommodation bridges just for the occasional tractor.

British Waterways apparently makes a tidy sum from rent paid for fibre optic cable buried under towpaths up and down the network. 

But Geo Networks doesn't use the canals.  It says on its website:

Our national network tracks the gas mains pipeline, therefore is physically diverse, deeper and more secure than other providers.

Now, there's a dig at those who paid to put their fibre optic cables under the towpath!  No wonder that the Bridgewater Canal Company wants to extract another pound of flesh.

Somewhere I've got lots of pictures of fibre optic cable inspection hatches in the towpaths to illustrate this post. But I'm on my new computer today, and can't find them, sorry.

Never mind, here's a photo I took from Granny Buttons of ponies and traps crossing a Bridgwater accommodation bridge back in, ooh, I think it was 2004, but it could have been 250 years ago.

Canalside ain't wot it used to be

I mentioned earlier about the Globrix property search engine, and how you can specify to only find houses that are ‘canalside’.

I set up my own search alert to tell me when property comes on the market that’s right by the canal.  And it lists a lot of canalside property (see the 'canalside' property listed today - right).

Unfortunately it’s not as useful as I’d hoped.  Property is often marked as ‘canalside’ when it’s actually a good dog-walk away at the least.

For example, Globrix lists a ground-floor flat for sale in Rosebank Road, London W7 as ‘canalside’ when the flat is actually several streets away from the bottom of the Hanwell lock flight.

And up in Warwickshire there’s a big £1.3 million mansion that’s described as ‘canalside’ near Lapworth, but that’s over 1/4 mile away from the lock flight (see map below). 

(If you are going to spend well over a million pounds on a house, it's probably reasonable to expect them to build a private arm to the nearest canal.)

The result is that Globrix is listing dozens of houses on the market that are not only NOT canalside, but that don’t even have a canal view.  And I’m getting deluged by alerts - 15 properties today alone - few  of them genuinely 'canalside’.

Of course, that’s estate agents for you. They are really saying 'potential for canalside walks'.  Far from being location, location, location, it’s the property equivalent of spam, spam, spam.  Globrix really ought to tighten this up, because - used properly - the canalside tag can be wonderful.  

For example, Globrix also alerted me this week that Mafeking Cottage, on the Lapworth flight of the Stratford-on-Avon Canal, has just come on the market.  At £465,000 it’s not a snip, but you can’t criticise its glorious canalside location. 

Unlike the WAG mansion above, Mafeking Cottage is genuinely a canal cottage, and you are probably paying a premium for that appellation.

If  you’ve ever pass through the Lapworth locks (Google satellite view right) or over the evocatively named ‘Cricket Club Bridge’, you’ll know that this house has one of the most charming summer conservatory views on the waterways.  It is the apotheosis of ‘canalside’.

Indeed,  I remember, the first time I went past back in the mid-summer of 1999, how we watched a dinner party in progress in the conservatory, and it looked fabulous. 

If you’re the host there and your cooking isn’t up to much, your guest will be too distracted by the view anyway to care. 

Choose the right evening for your dinner party and they’ll even see the last few wickets of a village cricket match.  And as you gongoozle the passing boaters, they can gongoozle right back at your dinner table.  Or you could work up a thirst and an appetite by jogging down to the bottom of the lock flight and then back again.  Glorious.

By the way, if you can afford to buy Mafeking Cottage, and you do, I think you could be forgiven for keeping its name. 

After all, if I could afford it and I bought it, and someone asked 'who owns that place?', I've proudly trumpet:  That's Mafeking Cottage!

An apology about 'Painted Boats'

My post yesterday about Painted Boats was one of the longest and most picture-heavy of all.  But if you don't like reading big posts, then you'll be even more sorry to hear that today I expanded it a lot and added yet more pictures. 

I wonder if the company which now owns the copyright to the film will send me a stiff letter, full of po-faced legalese, demanding that I remove all those stills from the film?  Or will they send commission for any extra copies of the DVD they sell?

Had I more courage, I'd have put a snippet of the film on YouTube - probably the part about the legging through Blisworth Tunnel, or the cat-sat-on-the-plate dinner scene, where Dad Smith excoriates the motor-boating Ted Stoner.

The weakest part of the film?  I think it was Louis MacNeice's script for the voiceover, some of it really naff, such as the funereal 'must be done, must be done' during the legging sequence.  He must have taken his cue from Auden's (much better) semi-documentary poem to accompany the film 'Night Mail'. 

And the reading by James MacKechnie didn't do it any favours either.  It didn't sound like Mackechnie had ever himself legged a horseboat through a tunnel or burned his fingers on a rope while bowhauling a butty through a lock.  

I would LOVE to read Tom MacRolt's original script that was rejected in favour of MacNeice.  I would buy the DVD all over again, just to hear that. 

And there would be no shortage of canal-boating actors to read it, with David Suchet and Timothy West probably at the head.  But fellow-narrowboater Timothy MacSpall would be a good candidate - a much underrated and characterful voice. 

Watch and listen to a short interview with Timothy Spall here. 

I'm a great fan of 'received pronunciation', as I've mentioned passim.  Trevor Howard and David Niven are the twin apotheoses of spoken English, for me.  When they speak, they sound like God's word made flesh.

But Timothy's London accent, combined with his clear, rich baritone, would be much more suited to a voiceover about the canals in the old working-boat days.  And he's a canal boater himself.  If he's not actually done the legging, he'll have been through a canal tunnel.  You need a voice that sounds like it's bin there, dun that, got the emotional scars.

Painted Boats released on DVD

I've been watching the latest DVD issue of Painted Boats, the historic 1945 film about the canals.  What a treat.

(IMDB entry here, buy it on Amazon here)

This film was made just as Tom Rolt achieved success with Narrow Boat, and arguably on the back of that success.

Rolt describes in his autobiography (Landscape with Canals) the role he played in researching the film, setting its locations and writing a narration (which was never used - the producer or director chose another script).   And he also mentions ("to my chagrin") how he didn't get any screen credit.

The film is a documentary about the history of the canals in England and their role in cargo-carrying, interwoven with a fictional story about the competition between two boating families.  One family - the Stoners - has a motor narrowboat and butty, and the other family - the Smiths - uses a horse-drawn boat. 

Young Ted Stoner, now an adult and in charge of the motor and butty, was keen to get a schooling, and he's demanding about his little brother getting an education too.

Old father Smith of the horse-drawn boat is scornful about the idea of boat children going to school.  He also resists the switch to diesel engines and blames 'moty boats' for damaging the canals.  He spits bitterly about Ted Stoner:

"All he's learnt is churning up the mud and knocking down the banks.  And that's all he will ever know, I can tell you that."

(It's a refrain familiar even today, although perhaps delivered to a different set of people - mainly hire boaters, rather unfairly I think.)

Along the way there's an excuse to show almost every aspect of the lives and work of the boatmen of old, from childhood to courtship, marriage and death, from backbreaking toil to pub leisure, and from the country idyll and the charm of the boatyard to the filth of industry.

It's filmed mainly around Stoke Bruerne and Blisworth, with a few diversions to some points on the Birmingham canals and assorted stock footage.  Experienced canal lovers will have an enjoyable time spotting the locations.

It's a film of its era, made almost like a B-movie, full of the stilted 'ecting' and clipped 'eccents' of the 'perry-yad'. It all feels a bit amateurish and naive in our more sophisticated age, where we're used to naturalistic ways of telling a story, but there's great charm in its gawkiness.  

But where it's especially fascinating is in the footage reflecting real working boat life, which smacks of authenticity. 

For example, the legging through Blisworth Tunnel (top), or the life inside the boatman's cabin, with the kitten walking over the dinner plates as they happily tolerate its presence (dogs, cats and caged birds were all popular on the working boats), or the wife folding away the bed (note the Edwardian wedding photo on the cabin side): 

... or the Boat Inn at Stoke Bruerne, where all the beer glasses are 'jugs' [with handles], fags hang out of every buccal orifice and the music in the pub is by squeezebox, not jukebox:

 

The language of cinema has changed in sixty years, but for all the stiff acting and delivery of speech, this film feels so authentic, especially in its depictions of the horse-drawn boat that was renamed Sunny Valley for the film.  Tom Rolt says that was a ridiculous name for a canal boat, but it bore the name for the rest of its life.   

Special praise for Bill Blewitt, the one who plays father Smith in the film, and who for me is the real star.  His voice is very non-actorish, and with his bearing and his rakish earring he looks, speaks and carries himself like a real boatman. 

(Or at least, like my imagining of a real boatman.  I don't know what accent the working boatmen of old had, but his Cornish burr passes muster.) 

A Guardian article of last weekend profiles Bill Blewitt as 'Ealing's salt-of-the-earth film star', and says he was a postman in Mousehole, Cornwall, before turning to films by being picked out as an early 'reality star' in the groundbreaking GPO documentary The Saving of Bill Blewitt. 

Incidentally, I'd love to see that documentary; not only was the legendary John Grierson a producer, but it featured music by Benjamin Britten.  When it's my birthday you can buy it on DVD for me here, thanks! 

Bill Blewitt's movie career was short-lived: he made only one more film after Painted Boats, says IMDB, before vanishing from the internet. 

You'll enjoy spotting the difference between Stoke Bruerne yesteryear, almost like a Constable painting...

... and the same location today.

I heard that the close-ups and interiors of the butty Sunny Valley were filmed in a mock-up, the very one that now sits in the Waterways Museum at Stoke Bruerne, although the last time I was there, nothing was on display that hinted at the mock-up's role in the film.  

I love the presence of pets and children, and the way the children - uneducated as they are - are so free. Even the little 5 year old girl prances on the cabin roof without a lifejacket, something that would reduce a modern safety bureaucrat to apoplexy:

.... and there are little signs everywhere of the minutiae of boaters' lives - for example the boating boot dangling from the rope, so that the blinkered horse thinks the boatman is still following him:

... while the tired boatman washes his face in a dipper while still holding a pipe in his mouth, only removing it to swig back his pint-mug of tea:

Little things like this are evidence of Rolt's involvement, since he goes out of his way to mention them in his books.

Meanwhile, there are intriguing shots of now-dead-and-gone waterways scenes, such as the flash lock on some unnamed river:

... and the way heavy industry (Shelton steelworks?  Northwich?  Tipton?) overhangs the canal:

A thread of the story is how the canal runs down to the open sea, or at least to the Thames beyond Limehouse Docks.  That's something the film's heroine Mary Smith has apparently never seen but yearns to do so. 

Well, without wanting to give too much away, the film ends clumsily; she achieves her dream of seeing the Thames but with no great drama and no resolution of the romance.  The most notable part of the ending is how they go on the Thames with a fully-laden narrowboat with just inches of freeboard - and wearing no lifejackets.  Life was safer and love was tougher during the War.

But perhaps we expect the drama in our films nowadays to be more orchestrated and the storylines to be more neatly tied up as the credits roll.

Or perhaps director Charles Crichton was saving up the suspense for another episode, which never came.  Oh well, since I'm clearly so well informed, it's up to me to step into Rolt's and Crichton's big boating boots and write the sequel. 

It would be called Rented Boats, and would take up the story where the Smiths and the Stoners leave cargo carrying after the big freeze of 1963 and start up a pleasure-boat hire business.

[Excuse the length of this post, and the number of pictures.  I felt the subject justified it.]

[Update: Thanks for kind comments on this post, but it had a lot of typos and other errors when published yesterday.  Today I've corrected them, and considerably expanded it with extra information and photos.]

Top Lock Marple: bungalow, marina and training business for sale

After yesterday's post about how to find canalside property, I realised that I myself wasn't subscribing to any specific property alerts.  So I asked Globrix to let me know when any property comes up for sale bearing the tag 'canalside'.

And - bingo! - on the very first day up comes an alert for a £1.1million property in Marple, at the junction of the Macclesfield and Peak Forest Canals:

Marple, SK6 - 5 bedroom bungalow for sale - £1,100,000 

That's a lot to pay for a bungalow, albeit with five bedrooms and beautifully stone-built, converted from old stables. 

But you aren't just getting a bungalow - you're getting a thriving waterways business too - including a whole 32-boat marina and the well-known narrowboat boating 'school' Top Lock Training.  What's more, you're even getting what used to be a 'granny house'.  I want!

True, your millionaire purchase isn't getting you the lovely two-storey Victorian stone house alongside.

But when you stand on the original, beautiful, Telford-era roving bridge opposite, and gongoozle, you'll almost feel like you are master of a whole canal junction and lock flight, complete with its own heritage society.  

The current owners are quite wistful, as they summarise, on the estate agent's website, what you'll be buying and why they are selling:

During the 32 years we have lived here we have built Top Lock Bungalow from the old stables, firstly as a 'Granny House' then as a holiday cottage, maintained the marina, increasing the numbers of berths, built an extension to the house to give our growing family more room, run a restaurant boat for 23 years also a day hireboat, and we have fitted out and repaired boats from the workshops which we re-built in 1994 ( these had been demolished when the boat building trade ceased in the late thirties).

Top Lock House, with such a lot of history in its walls, has been a wonderful place to live and work and to bring up our family. The work we have done here has brought us into contact with a huge number of people, some of whom have become good friends who regularly visit us while travelling the canal system on their boats.

However, it is time to move on to our semi-retirement with happy memories of half our lifetime spent at Top Lock.

It's rare that such an opportunity comes up.  Marple Junction feels like it's got everything in a canal.  If I was an indulgent Arab sheikh and had a spoilt teenage son who'd got canals in his head after a single boating holiday, I'd buy it for him immediately for twice the asking price.

Actually, it's not quite got everything.  It's not got broadbeam locks.  But who needs those?

One of the joys of the Marple lock flight is the steep, deep, regularly-spaced locks, which provide a terrific workout for fitness freaks and make a superb 'multigym'.  You get the aerobic exercise from running between the locks, and the 'weights' from working the locks themselves and bow-hauling the boat in between.  Sixteen sets of reps.  All you need is a properly worked out exercise program to ensure you work the right muscles at the right pace in the right order. 

I once photographed a famous boxer in a nearby gym, and spoke eloquently to his trainer about using Marple Locks as a healthy, refreshing outdoor gym.  He said, "Tell you what, after we've got this next fight out of the way, call me and maybe we can set up a physical training program for your boaters".  

I've never followed up this suggestion.  Lazy me.  But an enterprising purchaser of the house, grounds and marina could make a thriving summer fitness business out of Marple Top Lock.  You could call it Top Lock Training, there's a thought.

Some great pubs nearby, too,  to undo all your good exercise.

Homeward-bound gongoozlers at Marple junction, pub closing time, Oct 2007.