Granny Buttons

Red Wheel plaque at Standedge Tunnel

The Transport Trust has put up another of those 'Red Wheel' plaques that celebrate the role of various important transport elements in the industrial history of this country.

The latest one is at Standedge Tunnel, and it was unveiled by Jason McCartney MP last weekend.

Here he is (left) with James Dean (Standedge Visitor Services Manager), Judy Jones (heritage advisor for British Waterways), Rob Shorland-Ball (Transport Trust) and Peter Stone (Transport Trust).

Red Wheels are like the Blue Plaque scheme marking houses where famous people dwelt in the past.

Except instead of celebrating the life of anyone in particular, they are marking the relevance of various sites to industrial history.

That's great!  I think it's nice that such prominent and eminent places should be honoured like this.

Only, all is not well here.

I've not seen other Red Wheels closeup, but I did check this one, and was dismayed!

Look closely - very closely - and you'll see the length of the tunnel measured in kilometres.

I mean, what is the point, what is the blessed point of going to all this trouble, extolling the past, when you are going to trample on it ignorantly like that? 

You might as well go the whole hog, cater for the future, and emblazon all the words in Esperanto. 

I don't know whose myopic idea of heritage this is.  Could it be Judy Jones ('Heritage Advisor'), or it could be one of those two Transport Trust blokes (Rob Shorland-Ball or Peter Stone).

Either way, I bet you could dig up the corpses of any of the various engineers in the project, and find they'd be spinning so fast you could set them to work drilling whole new tunnel themselves. 

They'd do it in furlongs and chains, of course.  Just the way they measured out the original tunnels were measured out, 200 and more years ago.  Go through the tunnel now and you'll still see many of the original chain markers, marking out the distance to the nearest portal.

(See below, where I photographed them when Granny went through in 2004.)

Not that you'd ever find that out from the Standedge item on www.transportheritage.com [sic].

Grrrr.

My salubrious moorings

When I arrived at my new mooring in Horninglow Basin about six months ago, I made a casual remark that my:

...surroundings here are less salubrious than I'm used to, sandwiched as I am between a BW sanitary station and the concrete wall of the A38 above me.

The 'salubrious' was almost throwaway, and referred to the change from the posh 'country club' surroundings of Mercia Marina.  It was also sandwiched within comments that made it clear I was glad to be at Horninglow Basin.

At the time I didn't mention that the basin's water is an undredged soup of mud, and that when I first arrived there was almost a miasma of sewage coming out of the water where I was moored.

Not to mention the regular appearance of dog dirt (pictured here on Saturday, albeit that the dirt is normally cleared up within hours). 

However, that "salubrious", that S-word, fired up a nearby moorer. He took offence and made anonymous, catty comments on this blog. 

(Normally on Granny you can comment freely without registering.  You don't have to leave personal details if you don't want to.  You don't even have to enter those silly characters.)

I didn't know who took personal offence at the 'salubrious' remark; he never owned up publicly.  After several snitty comments I ended up blocking that particular IP address out of exasperation.  How can you argue with a neighbour who snipes at you anonymously?

That's the problem with anonymous comments; it makes you suspect everyone. The anon accuser ends up by default co-opting everyone else into his argument, even if they don't want to be part of it.

Indeed, it could well be ALL of them, just like in the famous Agatha Christie whodunit. 

(No, not The Mousetrap. That's just an excuse to use this picture.)

Anyway, I went to Streethay Wharf after just a month, to have assorted work  done, and ended up staying there four months. 

Never mind all that.  A couple of weeks ago I returned, and am happy to be here again.  It's a good time to be back, what with the IWA Waterways Festival starting in ten days time.  I couldn't ask for a better mooring. 

Even if it's not as salubrious as I'm used to.

Don't come dine aboard with me

Don't ever come to dine with me. Not with any great expectations anyway.  A good dinner, in a social sense, is the product of organisational skill as well as culinary expertise, and I have neither.

I don't have a telly, so don't ever come to watch the popular TV programme Come Dine With Me either.

Seems like almost every episode of the show these days runs in parallel with a slew of scornful comments and #CDWM hashtags on Twitter. 

And being a Twitter addict, I do get to see those. 

Prepping and serving dinner in the confines of a narrowboat kitchen surely compounds the problems.  So I guess the producers of the ITV programme thought it would make compelling telly to have a canal boater become one of the guests making dinner for the other participants in the show.

Researcher Jonathan Hancock writes:

Come Dine With Me sees four contestants battling it out by hosting the best dinner party in order to win £1,000.

I am currently looking for people in North West London to take part. We especially would like to hear from boat owners who are willing and able to host a party for four on their boat.

I was wondering if you would be able to help us with our mission by circulating the attached information to relevant members?

Our casting process is ending soon and filming begins on the 8th of August so anyone interested should call me on 0207 157 4828 as soon as possible.

I don't know why they specify NW London.  Perhaps all the contestants need to be within a short taxi-ride home.  The choice of waterways there is limited, mainly confined to the Grand Union between Rickmansworth and Watford - although I suppose the Regent's Canal could count.

What are you waiting for? If you sign away your anonymity for a fifteen-minute faustian pact with the reality TV devil, do let me know.

Incidentally, if you want to take part, don't get suckered into calling CDWM's official 0871 line.  You'll be charged an answering fee of 12.5p, plus 10p a minute - and that's just from a landline. 

"Mobile and other network rates will be higher", as always.  Instead, call that nice Dr Faustus, on 0207 157 4828.

Canal tunnel airshaft conveys hope

I had a nice email last month from a chap producing videos for a church in Illinois called The Chapel. 

He'd seen a photo I snatched of a ventilation shaft in Preston Brook Tunnel and asked if he could use it in a video for the church with the theme of 'Hope'.   Of course I said yes.

He spotted the original photo on my post 'Brook Bond', dating back to early 2008. 

While going through Preston Brook tunnel that year, when looking up the ventilation shafts I was reminded of the 'roving sniper sights' in the opening to James Bond films and wanted to catch the effect. 

I think it works pretty well, too. Notice the grill at the top of the shaft, serving as the 'crosshairs' of the sight.

However, The Chapel wanted to evoke a less profane image, showing, perhaps, 'the light at the end of the tunnel', and conveying an image of a state of grace and hope, so the grill doesn't show.

And while I don't want to feel too much sinful pride, I think their use of the image works pretty well too!

The image prefaces a talk/sermon by pastor Jeff Griffin on the theme of HOPE:

Our world is filled with hardships and disappointments. It is very easy for these discouraging realities to pull us down emotionally.

In this series, we will discover how to have hope and joy in the midst of very dark circumstances - how to focus on the beautiful reality of God as opposed to the dark reality of our circumstances.

I've got a soft spot for anything with the theme of hope.  For, without hope we have nothing, but with hope we still have everything.   It's the most important thing in life.  One of my favourite tombstone inscriptions is on the grave of William Beckford in Lansdown, near Bath.  It says "Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of heaven - Hope'.  

(Not everyone likes hope.  There's a scene in the film Clockwork, written by Michael Frayn, where someone tells the lead character not to despair.  He says "It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ")

This is not the first time one of my pictures has been in a church-themed setting.  A couple of years back, the image 'Curious cows' ended up in a stained glass window in a church in New England.

Now, I wonder if I can find an image the canal-travelling Boater's Christian Fellowship can use?

Lastminute.hotelboat

Hotelboat pair Snipe and Taurus set off yesterday from Stourport for a week's cruise to Gloucester. 

If all goes according to plan, at the moment they should be on the Droitwich Canals, which reopened last week to a grand opening ceremony.  I think they will be the first hotel boat pair on the waterway.

Yesterday owner Corinne Thomsett, reported that they had a spare cabin or two for last-minute guests, for next week's cruise, from Gloucester to Stratford upon Avon.

She reported it via twitter:

I suppose conventional businesses might put up their 'late space' on via the various websites that specialise in late-space deals. 

However, marketing late space deals can be tricky with small and rather specialist businesses. 

For example, a quick search on lastminute.com drew a blank for searches on 'hotelboat' and other combinations of such phrases - even just plain word 'narrowboat'.

A small business like a hotelboat pair is hardly likely to be geared up to reselling space in such a commercial way - and at very short notice too.

So I think Corinne was pretty smart to tweet it out.  It attracted my attention, and now, since you are reading this, it's obviously attracted your attention too.

Initially she was coy about discussing last-minute rates, but here's what she calls a special 'Late Granny Exclusive' offer:

Gloucester to Stratford-upon-Avon (via Saul Junction) -  Special 'Late Granny Exclusive' £350 for single cabin for a week.

This Late Granny Exclusive is a very good deal for an all-found holiday in the English countryside (assuming you aren't expecting to send your late granny on the trip, although even that would be a pretty cheap send-off). 

If you haven't got time for the full week, you could perhaps negotiate a part-rate.

But be warned that joining a hotelboat in mid-week can be a tricky affair and you'll need to arrange both ends of the rendezvous yourself when joining or jumping ship mid-way through a week's hotelboat cruise.

Also, contacting a hotelboat pair by phone when on the move is tricky. They'll probably be mid-manoeuvre, like in this picture showing Corinne bowhauling butty Taurus through Marton Locks on the Llangollen canal a while back.

(You can browse the Flickr photos here.)

At this point I'd probably point you to Corinne's remarkable cooking skills.  Last year I seem to recall she was blogging or tweeting her daily recipes, and they sounded delicious and very sophisticated - but she seems to have stopped doing that now.  I'm amazed she finds time to tweet at all.