Granny Buttons

Snow scenes on the canal

Snow's early this year, isn't it?

Putting together the latest Waterways World (Jan 2011, on sale next week), Richard came up with a corker of a cover photo - a snow-covered narrowboat with frost-covered mooring ropes. Timely as hell.

Nevertheless, he says, it's always tough to find good snowbound canal scenes.  And particularly those with framing in vertical format, suitable for use as magazine covers. 

Get your cameras out this week. Take time off. Don't wait for the sun to come out, but if it does, watch out where the shadows go.  The sunshine, when low, can glance off the trees and brighten the branches.

I was fascinated by this canalside bench, in between Findern and Stenson last February, as the last of the snows lingered.  It looked so strange and lonely there, and I had to photograph it twice.

Arty, landscapy scenes like this aren't much good for magazines of course, still less for covers. It really needs boats and people.

Loxwood photos

Good blogs are either hard work or they are a habit. 

Granny Buttons has become an enjoyable habit over the last few years.  But it's a habit I've dropped out of in recent weeks as I've transferred the enjoyable part to Waterways World.

(By the way, we put the January issue to bed over the weekend, and it's got some cracking stuff in it, fronted by a lovely, frosty, wintry photograph. The photo presaged a cold snap over the weekend, and Granny is now frozen into a berth at Mercia Marina. It looks a lot better on the magazine cover, I can tell you!

It's made me realise that if you want to strike magazine cover gold at the end of each year, get a lot of good photos of frosty, snowy, wintry scenes in portrait format.  They'll always be in demand in November.)

Anyway, where was I?  Ah yes, let me get back in the habit:  Here are nine photos of the Wey & Arun Canal restoration showing the Loxwood section last January, just after last winter's frozen snap ended. 

No particular theme here, just a series of unfrozen snaps, but it'll help me get back in the habit of posting daily.

Firstly, there's the view looking south to Loxwood Bridge:

...a photo taken from the bridge at the tail of the brand new lock, no. 5a. Below, here looking the other way from the bridge, towards the new lock:

...and here looking back at that lock from upstream:

...while here's a close-up of the top of the lock:

Here's a view from Loxwood Bridge towards the Onslow Arms pub on the right:

....And here it is looking back the other way, showing the winding hole on the right:

...while here's the Trust's widebeam electric trip boat Wiggonholt:

And here's a nice little coda to these photos, showing the panel on the side of Wiggonholt.

One day, perhaps this may be just another stop on the way for narrowboats to reach the south coast.

Just a parade of photos, but hopefully enough to shake me out of my blogging torpor.

Granny's buttons being spraywashed

Here are a couple of atmospheric pictures.  They show Granny's bow and stern rope buttons and the tipcat being jetwashed on the slipway at Streethay, the last time my boat was out of the water, about 18 months ago.

The curious plaited thing on the left of the first picture is a turk's head knot which originally surrounded the bow button.  After four years it had finally unravelled off the button and I cut it off following this jetwash.

See how, in the picture below, the jetwash has substantially removed the green algae and soiling from the tipcat and stern button.  The bow button remains obstinately dark because it's dark to start with and because it's partly of polypropylene. 

I think that's what it is, anyway. 

Below is the bow button in better times, although even then it was wearing away.  But the point is that the turk's head knot was still in place.

I love watching spraywashing, and never more than when it's done on ropes and buttons.  The jet heats the water and the water heats the rope, and the rope steams the dampness off.  And the smell freed from the rope as it dries is gloriously organic.

Here's a link to my bow button being made, by Victoria on Vox Stellarum (The Fender Boat) on the Kennet & Avon, over five years ago.  It's held up pretty well.

Kromhout the mistress

Just so's you know I'm not dead, here's a bit of boat porn.

At the Banbury Canal Day a few weeks ago, one particular home-made 'tug' boat made a striking impression with enthusiasts, eager to look inside. 

Seven weeks on I forget its name.  I should apologise, because the owner took pains to show me aboard, stem to stern, and emphasised that almost everything was his own construction.

But what I didn't forget was the engine: a massive single-cylinder hot-bulb diesel, apparently modelled on the classic Bolinder, and taking pride of place in the engine room. 

This one was a Kromhout, a Dutch brand that I'm told later went on to make Gardner engines under licence.

Or was it that they originally made Gardners under licence and then moved on to this variety?

This particular Kromhout sighed and wheezed as if alive, as it idled, and needed regular oiling.  I'd imagine that owning it would be like having a gloriously seductive and very expensive mistress on the side.

Every few minutes the proud owner would tickle it with an oil can and it would giggle and sigh in appreciation.  I could see how a man could grow old tending to its every desire and not notice the time passing. 

I'd never heard of Kromhout until that day, and when searching for the word 'Kromhout' on Google just now I was intrigued that the only advert that popped up alongside was for Tangent Engineering a specialist in Gardner restoration, based near Belfast.

Curious cows revisited

Three years  ago I published Curious Cows, a post about getting stuck in the Macclesfield Canal mud outside Congleton, and having a herd of cows mosey over to stare at me.

The picture  has proved unaccountably popular, and it's been used as a stained glass window in America and for a cattle organisation in Australia, amongst others.

Yet I've never been properly happy with it.  It was a snatched photo, about 5.30pm on a late September afternoon, and I often wondered what could be done to improve the technical quality and 'atmosphere'.  Here's the scene, looking back as I left and the cows slowly ambled off:

Here's the original of the main picture as it came out of the camera:

So while my initial adjustment helped, there's more in the photo, I know it.

A few weeks ago, when I was talking with Anna Lovatt of NB Maggie Anne about her new Heart of the Water podcast, she let slip about how she used Photoshop extensively in her design work.  So I mentioned Curious Cows, and she gamely agreed to see what she could do with it.

Yesterday Anna showed me the first results. 

And I am astonished.  She's done several variants, but perhaps the most impressive is the one below, which dramatises the foreground, discovers unseen (or maybe introduces) clouds, and bathes it in new, more saturated colours, almost painterly in their effect.

There's also a more straightforward one which attempts simply to catch as much detail as possible, as neutral as possible:

The lesson: there's often a lot of detail and character in almost any picture.

You can 'cheat' a bit, as Anna has done in adding clouds and vignetting the foreground to fool the eye into thinking there's more detail in the shadows than is actually there.  I think that's fair game. 

I didn't know what I was doing when I stepped off the boat into that field three years ago, and the cows started to mosey towards me (below), like gunfighters spoiling for a duel.

But it worked out fine, with the help of a professional.

Guardian travel article calls it a 'barge' throughout

My sister last week sent me a clipping of a recent Guardian travel section article about a short break on the Kennet & Avon Canal.

On the waterways of the West Country is a fairly conventional widith article describing a beginner's attempt at renting a conventional narrowboat. It's a pleasant-enough article, but it doesn't start promisingly, and it doesn't describe a narrowboat:

You're public property as soon as you set foot on a barge. There's something about the slow pace and proximity to walkers, cyclists and even barge-dwelling locals, that has people offering help, information and advice.

Ouch!  There's that B-word again, the one that betrays that the writer is a novice to the waterways.  In fact, almost every mention  in this article is of a 'barge' rather than a 'narrowboat'.  Writer Helen Ochyra even rounds off her article:

"no longer novices in need of guidance, we can handle our own barge now." 

To be honest you can't blame her.  Her long weekend afloat is punctuated by trips to the Barge Inn at Seend, so what was she supposed to think, except that that's what the boats are all called in that part of the world?  

But for those who follow in her footsteps, please be advised that a 7ft-wide canal boat is NOT a barge, but a narrowboat.

It's something the sub-editors of the Guardian should have noticed.  After all, it was Granny wot wrote the Guardian's style book entry on the subject, as I explained last May in my post When is a barge not a barge?

I notice that Steve Haywood touches on this subject too, in his Canal Boat magazine column this month. He's on our side in the matter. A man of style, is Steve.

Moving from my country pile

This house-moving business is harder than I thought.  At least, it is now that I'm moving from a house to a boat.

Mainly because I've got nowhere to go and I can't think of what to give away, sell or put in storage for a couple of  days.

Anyway, that accounts for the quietness on Granny's front this last week or two. 

I'll think of another excuse for my quietness next week.

In the meantime here are a couple of pictures of the canalside allotments outside my house, taken last spring.  The allotment holder had taken a special delivery overnight, and for a moment when I came out of my front door I thought the car had done a whoopsie.   A great big steaming pile.  It's lovely living in the country.

WW webchat with BW bigwigs tonight

The Waterways World home page is hosting a webchat this evening, Thurs 11th Nov, starting at 6:30pm.

BW Chairman Tony Hales and marketing director Simon Salem will answer your questions, moderated by editor Richard Fairhurst. 

Kick-off is officially 6.30pm, but you might like to come on a few minutes early to do any registering, tweaking, adjusting your trousers, etc.

If you can't make it, the transcription will be published tomorrow.

Richard did one of these earlier this year, but it's the first time I've been involved with one.  I don't know that I'll do much other than just watch, seeing as I'm the new boy.

What difficult questions can you ask?  Moorings issues?  Strife between boaters, anglers and cyclists?  Residential problems or dredging?

Overshadowing it all, as you'd expect, is the move to a charitable trust, and the sticky issue of what will happen to Environment Agency waters, particularly the River Thames. 

But I  hope someone comes up with quirkier, less predictable questions too.

Two narrowboats share a mooring ring

Sharing a mooring ring should be such a natural thing to do, but it's surprising how often boaters are bashful to do it.

Maffi has mentioned it often before, most recently last March, in his post Mooring:

If you are going to moor it might be polite to moor and leave no space between you and the next boat, therefore eliminating those annoying spaces between boats or at least double up on rings/bollards.

These boats seem to have the right answer. The other guy on the ring won't mind and if he does, tough!

I have moored in a number of places where if this was the norm an extra two or three boats could have easily fitted in.

Leaving 10 to 20 feet between  boats is inconsiderate and selfish. Why is that space so necessary?

True enough.  But Maffi's example is perhaps unfortunate, because it shows boats literally nose-to-nose. 

This is a Bad Thing.  Why?  Because boats will swing at their moorings as other boats go past, and cannon into the adjacent boats.  Ideally you should leave a little leeway.

Of course, in the example shown here, the boats are never going to do that anyway, not only because they are well spaced, but because they are locked in ice.

By the way, the picture below is identical to the one at the top, except in one small but significant respect: I've altered the colour balance to make the snow truly white, and warmer in the afternoon sun. 

On clear, sunny days the sky tends to colour the snow blue, which is why the picture at top is so washed over with blue. But our minds override all that.  

I guess we don't notice the colour balance as much as the sensible sharing of rings.

Faint praise from Maffi for BW's Isis Lock

Maffi has done a huge amount of useful reporting recently.  And especially on the work going on at Isis Lock in central Oxford, where the canal joins the Thames. 

In a 16th September post called Well done, BW! Maffi started with praise for a new floating pontoon below the lock, designed to make it easier for boats coming off the Thames:

I can't quite see why it needs to be floating.  If the river rises enough to warrant it being a floater boats will not be moving on the water.

But never mind it has been long overdue and is most welcome. 

They are still working on the bank edge, but the finished article will, I am sure, be very aesthetic and, more importantly, practical.

(I love Maffi's last sentence above.  It reminds me of when I helped to open a rustic-looking restaurant in Putney about 25 years ago.  A few months after it opened, my 4-yr-old niece dropped by with her mother to say hell0.  As they left, the little girl, impeccably polite, said "Goodbye, Uncle Andrew - we'll come again when it's finished.")

It's obvious why BW, even though cash-strapped, felt the need to install a pontoon below Isis Lock.  Maffi himself admits the easiest way to work the lock single-handed is to nestle the bow of the boat against the bottom gate and put the propeller in gentle forward thrust to keep it there while you work the locks.  This method is an official no-no, not least because it needs to be gentle if you are not to risk damaging the gate, but I've also done it myself in the past.  But then, I'm as experienced as Maffi. 

The photo below, taken in 2006, shows Isis Lock from the bottom end, looking uphill, with an Oxford Narrowboats boat coming down through the lock.  I don't have any photos of the site as it is now.

But Maffi's praise turns out to have been faint indeed.  Last week he followed up with a post titled Isis Lock, which says:

It is only in the cold light of day that what seemed like a good idea at the time suddenly becomes a nightmare. 

The lock mooring at ISIS LOCK is a needed facility. Given time it may work but now I have come down the lock and and tried turning (both left and right) I have to say it is an accident waiting to happen.

Listening to others who have tried to use it and now having done the turn round out of the lock myself, I say it is probably the singularly most  ill-conceived ‘improvement’ I have yet to see on the canal.

Maffi goes on to explain in words and pictures - in both the post above and a second post called Isis Lock 2 - how he believes that while the whole project might have been honourably conceived, he thinks it's been poorly designed and shoddily executed.

What this project needed was a good edge with bollards. what we got was a bad edge no bollards and a pointless floating pontoon. So in fact BW spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a white elephant.

Aside from the pontoon itself, new pillars have also been installed, midstream, to hold a new barrier, and this, Maffi argues, is actually going to make it harder  to turn a longer boat into and out of the lock.

British Waterways have put the boating public in danger by failing to consult the proper people before installing this pontoon and poles. I cannot believe that any thinking person would have done anything so utterly stupid.

The minimum requirement now is for BW to remove the poles. No arguments, just get rid of them, then everyone can all sit down to look at this ‘improvement’ and see what can be salvaged.

In a further post, BW Farce, he draws attention to unlicensed boats which are already tying up to the pontoon for convenience without using the lock.

I don't think I've ever seen such a splendid example of faint praise that ended up as such damnation.

Maffi is not alone.  Mortimer Bones also has stern comments about this project - see her illustrated post What on EARTH possessed them?, where she concludes "it looks incredibly dangerous".  Boat safety inspector Mark Paris added a comment to her post:

The best bit is BW were told before they put the posts in that they were in the wrong place but they still put them in.

I don't know where Mark got his source, but if he's correct, there are questions to answer.

Is this Isis Lock project on a parallel with the 'bollards' controversy of a couple of years back?  As I recall, BW still feels it made a good call on that issue but concedes that it should have consulted and executed better.

Update:  Mortimer Bones blogs: :

BW say it was in collaboration with the EA and the EA say it has nothing to do with them. I can quite believe it has nothing to do with the EA because the EA are quite good at lock landings and flood control and the works at ISIS lock look as if they are a million miles away from EA engineering.

Joule's Stone Ales building

Last January I took a lot of photos outside the old Joule's brewery at Stone. I posted a couple, earlier this year and earlier this week of swans waddling ungainly on the frozen canal. 

The Trent & Mersey through Stone is a lovely stretch, and it was a most enjoyable place to get iced in.  I can't resist the images of the old brewery itself, both at 2pm in the winter sun (above) and at 2am in the morning in the winter moon (below).

It's perhaps saying something about last winter that the two photographs above are taken not just 12 hours apart but with a gap of three weeks. Granny was frozen in for the best part of a month, and I enjoyed being trapped there, on one of the waterways' nicest and most convenient 24hr moorings, but within walking distance of all facilities.

It's sentimental to me that this scene - this very location - is exactly where Tom Rolt's Cressy spent a year or two rotting at its mooring before finally being broken up. 

A couple of men locally still remember that time.  The owner of the nearby chandlery remembers going on the derelict Cressy as a boy, while former Wyatt employee Len Worrilow, who still lives in retirement close to the Newcastle Road lock just around the corner, helped to dismantle and burn it.

A snowy winter afternoon feels black to me

A snowy winter afternoon at Stone in Staffordshire, just outside Granny Buttons last January.

No  particular reason for posting this, except the extraordinary feeling, when staring into the sun, that the snow and the skyline of trees was so dark. 

I mean, winter scenes are supposed to be white, right?

OK, look more closely and you'll see the snowflakes white against the darkened trees, and of course I've tweaked the contrast/balance of this picture to alter the appearance. But it's how it felt to me at the time. Snow sometimes look black one's mind.

Never mind the quality, feel the artist

Mick Day, of Kingfisher Narrowboats at Trent Lock near Nottingham, is using Ebay to sell a pair of traditionally painted narrowboat door panels: 

Hand painted roses and castle narrowboat door panels.

The starting bid is pretty low - just £5 (see picture, nicked from Ebay, right.) 

He says they are over 30 years old, and are "ideal for hanging on a wall in any waterside location."

Who's the original painter?  He doesn't say.

I think that if there's one thing that can increase the value of folk art, no matter how primitive, it's provenance.

Granny has such panels, on both the back doors and on the side hatches, and do you know, I've NEVER got around to photographing them. 

Wait a minute, where's my camera? Ah, here it is!

These are Granny's side-hatch door panels:

I've been told that my panels are by Kevin Worthington of NB Confederate, a boat engineer/painter who worked on my boat about 1996-8, when it was called Jessel, before I renamed it Granny Buttons.

One of the clues to Kevin's work is that he always flew the English St George flag from his castles.  I've no idea if he's still around, but I'm happy to hereby attach his name to my boat.

To me, it doesn't so much matter who the artist actually is.  It matters that I know who he is. Never mind the quality, feel the provenance.

The same goes for all the canal folk art on Granny Buttons. I'm slowly collecting examples from canal artists. 

For example, ever since I've had Granny, I've had a traditional back cabin door panel with a blank space that's just itching for an example from one of the leading canal folk artists.

It's like the empty 'fourth plinth' in Trafalgar Square, it invites commissions.  Any recommendations?  Whom would you ask to fill this space?

Or would you recommend I leave it blank, on the principle that dreams are the greatest form of art? 

(My own feeling is that this is what they should do with Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth - leave it empty, in honour of the Unknown Artist.)

But I'd really like a good canal artist to do my cupboard panel so I can boast about it in years to come.  

Maybe I could even sell it on Ebay, too.

Swan plays peek-a-boo

Another photo of no great consequence; a filler.  A swan peeks over the gunwale of a narrowboat at Stone last January. 

I'm always attracted to compositions of simplicity. Here, the peek-a-boo pose strips out the complexity of  the whole bird. 

I've mentioned before that swans are buggers to photograph whole. The brilliant body plumage overwhelms any picture with its pure, shiny whiteness. A swan's head is often rather dirtier and easier to capture if the body isn't dazzling the camera.

I've never learned how to manipulate exposure or lighting to overcome this, although occasionally circumstances accidentally control it.