Granny Buttons

Canalway Cavalcade

Here's a sight you don't see very often: The Marie Celeste owners' boat gathering.  Anyone who's been to that peoplefest will know how it heaves with bodies.

Where are they all?

If I was more paranoid, I'd take it personally that everyone at the London Canalway Cavalcade this year tried to avoid me. 

There's an episode of the original Star Trek called Wink of an eye, where people get 'hyper-accelerated'.   They move and vibrate so fast that you can't actually see them. All you can sense is a sort of vague buzzing, like a midge in your ear.

To the accelerated people, on the other hand, time feels normal and the only difference is that ordinary people are stationary, or moving very, very slowly.

Like treacle in the fridge.

Kirk is one of those who's been hyper-accelerated, of course.  He has to be, or no plot. )   Of course, being Kirk, he never used the opportunity to buzz around and undress any one of the glacier-slow 1960s dolly birds in the episode, which is where the programme became unrealistic for me.

Tom and Jerry

I'm not dead yet!  Not quite.  But a fortnight without a post might lead you to wonder otherwise.

So just to keep my hand in, here's a little amuse bouche.

A week or so ago I was photographing Nick Wolfe of NB Aldgate picking up a carrying cargo at Armitage. 

Nick has a cat, called Kat, and I managed to catch the moment when Kat - doing his job as the boat's rodent control operative - chased the mouse off the boat.

When it comes to cameras, I don't look for megapixels or light sensitivity or light weight.  I just look for a camera that clicks as fast as it needs to.  Even here, it was too slow.  It would have been a better picture if I'd photographed this a split second before, when the mouse was on the light-coloured concrete.

A couple of seconds later, and the mouse was (alas) in Kat's jaws.  Look, Tom & Jerry is NOT REAL, alright?

Ocado deliveries to the boat

Yesterday I was busy doing my household chores ("What chores?"  "Oh, mine's a pint, thanks.") when outside my kitchen window I saw a yellow-jacketed man begin to set down a series of boxes containing plastic bags.

It turned out to be a delivery from Ocado for the man in the boat next door.

This was blog manna from heaven; I've long wanted to write about supermarket deliveries to canal boats. So I quickly nipped outside with my camera and asked if I could photograph the process.

They were initially nervous, the boater more so than the delivery man, but I promised I wouldn't identify my boatyard neighbour.

Ocado was the first big online grocers in the UK, and has a different model from Tesco, Sainsbury's  or Asda.  Those big chains pick their stock from local stores, and you may  find substitutions.

Ocado operates from a central warehouse store in Hatfield, Herts, and every delivery is packed there and delivered via big lorries to satellite 'spokes', from where it's transferred to smaller vans. This particular delivery would have been packed overnight in Hatfield and then transferred to the spoke in Coventry.

I'd always thought that Ocado was a brand of Waitrose, but a quick google confirmed to me that it's an independent business that simply sources most of its products from Waitrose.  (The John Lewis Partnership, who own Waitrose are said to own 29% of Ocado.)

My neighbour said he used to order his groceries via the Waitrose website, but found it 'terrible, really hard to use', and that 'things would go lost'.  He blamed the website, not Ocado itself, and said that since switching to the official Ocado website he'd had no problems.

He refuses to order from the main supermarkets, and particularly Tesco, on ethical grounds - citing their 'bullying' of their suppliers.  Nevertheless, he adds that as a vegetarian he finds Ocado cheaper too.

I was surprised to  find my neighbour getting his groceries delivered, but I shouldn't be - it's increasingly common.

And not just at boatyards, but in the middle of nowhere.

Perhaps the most active user of supermarket deliveries is Sue of nb No Problem.  For several years she's relied on 'Mr  Tesco' to deliver wherever she is on the system, provided it's close to a road.

It's not completely straightforward, so Sue has created a page (Home delivery from Tesco) explaining what else you must do to get Mr Tesco to deliver to a nearby canal bridge.

You might want to investigate all the implications of taking a delivery like this. Here's a horror story of a Tesco delivery man suing a couple after slipping on their driveway while making a delivery.

(For a more critical view of Ocado read this post by Chris Green, and subsequent comments.)