Granny Buttons

Now, Tom, THIS is a knife!

I'm a bit behind with everything.   Working nowadays to a monthly schedule, I don't rush into print as fast as I used to.

So I only just read this piece on Narrowboat World - dated about ten days ago - from 'Victor Swift', the Mr Hyde of NBW's editor Tom Jekyll :

Been bought

It's quite a while now since my old sparring partner, he of the Buttons, Andrew Denny, decided on accepting the filthy lucre of a waterway magazine, as some sort of editor would you believe. Which I must admit was to my amazement.

For, it has come to pass, the money has bought his principles, as the once hard-hitting, and often honest writer of the ways of British Waterways, has sunk into something of a pussy cat.

No doubt a worried editorial policy has him in its grip.

I'm reminded of the scene in the film Crocodile Dundee, where Mick Dundee and his girlfriend are held up by knife-wielding muggers. The girl whispers that they should do as the muggers tell them, but Dundee says "Nah, that's not a knife." 

He then pulls out his own (huge) hunting knife and says, "Now, THIS is a knife!"

What I remember most of that scene, though, is Dundee's relaxed comment afterwards, when he declines to go to the police as his girlfriend suggests:

"Nah, they're just a bunch of kids out to have a good time."

In the same way, when people tell me what Tom's written and say "Aren't you going to reply?", I can't help but laugh, and say, "Nah, he's just out to have a good time."

Five go mad in Staffordshire

Sue of No Problem related yesterday how no fewer than five blogging boaters arrived together at Wheaton Aston in Staffordshire, on the Shropshire Union Canal.

Aside from Sue herself - who began her blog within days of Granny's own online start in July 2003 - there's Poppy, Rock n Roll, Seyella and Moore 2 Life. 

My, this is a change from the early days of waterways blogs, and it's a near-fulfilment of a dream I had when waterways people would use the internet to stay in touch.

Back in July 2004 - over six years ago now - I wrote a short post called 'Nutwood makes it 5 canal blogs'.   I was delighted that another canal boat had taken to the web to record their wanderings, but it was a year after I started and I was privately dismayed that more people weren't doing it.

They are now.  At last count my own blogroll had approaching 200 blogs.  Even allowing for half of them being inactive or moribund, that's a gratifying testament of a 'waterways community'.

The effect of patterns on narrowboat interiors

Canal narrow locks were originally built to accommodate boats a shade over 7' wide.  But so many lock walls have suffered middle-aged spread that the standard beam of narrowboats is now around 6'10".

Subtract a half-inch for steel and another 4" for insulation, battens and lining, that you'll end up with an interior around 6'5".  At most. 

Granny, for example, is just 73" wide at floor level, 76" just below the gunwale and only 66" at gunwale level itself.

Space inside a narrowboat, to borrow a phrase, really is the final frontier.

The magazines are full of articles about neat space-saving ideas.  They show you how to create cubby-holes and niches out of nothing, and how to make quarts of clobber fit into pint-pot cupboards.

But I've not seen too much written about optical illusions and psychology.

I was thinking of this the other night when I put a clean duvet cover on my bed.  I've got this nice little double-sided blue linen one from Asda, and it has small checks on one side - almost gingham-size - with a much larger, brighter check on the other side.

After making my bed, I thought, what would it look the other way around.  So I photographed it, flipped the duvet and pillows, and photographed it again:

The point: to see which pattern gave the greatest illusion of space.  And to me the smaller checks made the bed seem 'larger'.  The big, fat stripes seem to bring the cabin walls closer together.

(But then, that's from the perspective of standing above and outside the bed, which is perhaps not the best place to judge it.)

The principle, however, extends to all soft furnishings in a boat.  Stripes and patterns - on carpets, walls, curtains and even ceilings - can have a major effect on the illusion of space.

As a rule, I'd say narrow longitudinal stripes (i.e. running the length of the boat rather than across the beam) make the interior feel 'longer', which is a crafty way of deceiving the mind that the whole room is wider. This might be why wood veneers and scumbling is so popular as well, since it usually gives this striped effect.

I'm sure interior designers have written themselves into exhaustion about this subject, and you'll probably send me a large number of links.  But it's new to me.

Incidentally, I find most narrowboat 'bedrooms' rather claustrophobic, particularly (and paradoxically) when open. 

One thing that sold me on Granny, all those years ago, was the way the original owner created a sort of 'four-poster' effect, with 'lacy' curtains on one side and at the end.  While this in theory 'encloses' you, when you are snug inside you get the feeling that outside the curtains is a much larger room than it actually is.  I like this effect.

Dances with cows

Hmm, yesterday's 'cow on the ice' story wasn't as unusual as I thought.  Here's one from Oklahoma only last week:

News helicopter pilot rescues calf from frozen pond - Daily Telegraph

In this case it was just a calf.  But being America, they had a helicopter at their disposal - and they used the downdraft to blow it to the bank, its little legs dancing pathetically akimbo.

The calf had become stranded in the middle of a frozen pond, with ice too thin for the owners to attempt to reach it.

Mr Dunn used the downdraft from his helicopter's blades to push the calf back to shore where it was able to scramble back to safety.

The incident happened near Watonga, 60 miles north-west of Oklahoma City.

It finally burst through the ice near the edge of the frozen pond, but it was able to struggle ashore under its own desperate efforts. 

Thankfully it lived, presumably to make a tasty steak or hamburger in a year or two.

Old cow walks on Bridgewater Canal ice

Woman captures cow on Bridgewater Canal - Runcorn & Widnes World

'Captures' in this sense means 'photographs'.  I mean, the woman didn't actually round up the cow and drive it back into its field. 

At least, I hope she didn't.

The paper quotes her:

“My husband said: ‘Don’t be silly’. He said cows weigh half a ton and there was no way that they would get across the ice.”

However, the couple went for a walk along the same towpath the next day and came across the brave bovine again.

Only this time, he was actually wandering on the frozen canal.

Mrs Moorhouse, said: “We followed the cow for a while and then it just wandered back up on the path. ”

For Mrs Moorhouse's own sake it's a good thing she didn't ring the emergency services for advice.  Can you imagine their response - and worse, how she might take it?

"Don't go on the ice yourself, madam.  It's not safe - it might not withstand your weight."

River swimming as aid to fitness

An interesting New Year newspaper article describes four women who each 'came to adopt radical new attitudes to health and fitness':

The shape we're in: Women who transformed their fitness regimes - Daily Telegraph

I was especially interested in the approach of one of them.

Kari Furre 61, is a sculptor. She lives in Devon and started open-water swimming in her fifties.

She describes her adventures in open water swimming:

In 2002, when I was 52, I did a course with Steven Shaw who uses the philosophy behind the Alexander Technique to teach swimming. That opened up a raft of possibilities.

I found a company called SwimTrek and did a couple of their holidays swimming in the Mediterranean. One was in the Cyclades and every day you'd swim from one island to another - up to two miles.

... Then SwimTrek had another event in the Thames, swimming from Lechlade to Oxford; we swam along with a narrow boat chugging along behind us.

... Some people do think I'm mad. People are always telling me how cold water can kill you or how I'll catch Weil's disease from rat's urine. Then there are currents, undertows. But there are very few deaths from people doing open-water swimming.

This is the first I'd heard of 'swimming holidays', but it seems SwimTrek do indeed offer such a holiday, swimming down the upper reaches of the Thames, a two-day 10-mile trip from Buscot Lock to Tadpole Bridge, camping overnight.

I do rather like Kari Furre's comment in the last paragraph -

"...but there are very few deaths from people doing open-water swimming."

This is hardly the sentiment you'd hear expressed by British Waterways or other official bodies, whose attitude is usually geared to protect themselves against being sued at all costs.  For a bureaucrat, one single death can overrule the pleasure of twenty million.  (And, more importantly, his pension.)

They'd rather point you to cautionary stories like the recent death of Olympic rower Andy Holmes who died a month after rowing down the River Witham in September. 

And they certainly wouldn't mention the enthusiastic mass-swim of the Blue Sky Swimming Club in the same river three months before, which I wrote about here. 

(See also my post in 2009 about the book Hung Out To Dry, a paean to open-space swimming by Chris Ayriss.)

Granny trying to escape the ice

I don't think I've ever had a duller, more miserable Christmas period, trapped in ice at Mercia Marina.

An oh-so-slow thaw in the past week has made it worse by tormenting and teasing me with the possibility of escaping and making a short New Year voyage.

It wasn't to be.  On Wednesday night I tried reversing out, and spent over an hour breaking 2-3" of ice with my boat hook and sharp thrusts of propellor wash.  I managed to get Granny a boat's length out from my mooring, before sliding back in again, exhausted and with blistered hands.

Then on Thursday morning I tried again, with two hours of banging the ice on the sides and gradually turning the boat around.  But I came up short, just a further boat's-length away.  At least I was able to reverse back in.

On Saturday, New Year's Day, I tried again.  This time, with the ice covered by a light layer of meltwater, I hoped for better. 

I hoped too much. Underneath the surface the ice was still impassably thick, and Granny ground to a halt halfway across the main marina lagoon.

When I reversed back in to my mooringg, a scattering of icy shards marked the limit of my escapade.

The most humiliating part was having all the other boaters stand by and stare.  Boaters-turned-gongoozlers, all no doubt thinking "I told you so."

In the marina office this morning, manager Robert Neff said "If you make it to the fuelling point, all the others will follow you."

Heaven know what it's doing to Granny's hull, but there's satisfaction in feeling I might be a kind of pied piper.

Walking on ice

Teens dice with death on frozen Leeds and Liverpool Canal says the Burnley Express this week. 

The story  in the local paper (right) shows an 'astonishing' picture of three youths hamming to the camera. 

Of course, it's  hardly alone with this. You haven't been able to open a single paper in the last several weeks without warnings of the dangers of dancing on ice.

But what are the real risks?

Seems to me that there are nothing but warnings and scare stories.  What's missing is the tragic stories. 

Of course, no sooner do I say this today than one turns up from the Erewash Canal at Long Eaton:

Missing dog-walker, 42, found dead in canal after slipping through ice - Derby Telegraph 

Roy Simpson, from nearby Sawley, walks along the path every day and said it had been heavily frozen over for some time.

He said: "When we have had temperatures of -7C, the water has been completely solid and people have been able to walk and play on it – I've even seen them lying down on it, making angel shapes in the snow.

Yet even that explains a reason: 

"Recently we have had much warmer temperatures and the ice is not as thick and strong as it was before.

Just before Christmas the Manchester Evening News ran a story called Chancing on ice: Warning after walkers take shortcut across frozen canal. 

This showed two men walking across Castlefield Basin, in what would be a wonderful dress rehearsal for an 'Abbey Road-style' photo-op.

The only local precedent the paper could quote for a canal death is someone who died one full year ago, after going on the ice to rescue his dog.

Well, I'm sorry, but how daft are you to venture on ice if your (lighter) dog falls through?  Do you really think it's safe to go after them? 

What's clear to me is that we are raising generations who lack the folk experience that can judge when ice can support your weight and when it can't. 

Instead, the papers just parrot the views of jobsworth officials who are more concerned with protecting themselves from being sued.  For these people, *any* ice is unsafe.

I've come to this conclusion after a month of Granny Buttons being trapped in ice and unable to break free, and with my own memory of skating on lakes and canals in my youth.

What's really needed is official guidance on how to tell when the ice is 99% likely to bear your weight and let you take your own risks - but modern officialdom won't permit that degree of imprecision.

Here's a great video of youths playing on the ice on a full lock on the Rochdale canal from last January.  Bravo for them. 

(But remember, kids - these are Failsworth yobs, who've had a whole childhood of training themselves on the Rochdale Canal by taunting boaters. Don't try this at home.)