Granny Buttons

Boston Stump - love it

I love 'Boston Stump', the tall tower of the church of St Botolph that dominates the Lincolnshire town.

It has a feel of Babel about it. With nothing else around on the flat horizon, it just seems to climb and climb and climb into the sky.  (Here's the home page of the church)

Wherever you are in the town (or even wherever in the Wash - the tower has been a symbol of navigation for 500 years) it's there for you to find your way around, like a monstrous stone compass needle.

The picture above is an aberration.  In reality, the Stump makes me want to break every so-called rule of composition, sticking it in the middle of every picture.

I'll save the best for last:

The disgraceful story of Ben Harp

Even by the sad annals of rip-off boatbuilders, the tale of what Ben Harp Narrowboats did to NB Waiouru is quite extraordinary.

Last year New Zealander Tom Jones (he lives in Australia) set up his blog narrowboat-waiouru.co.uk to record the construction of the dream liveaboard boat he and his wife wanted built so they could spend their early retirement years on the waterways of England.

The Waiouru blog began promisingly last October (here's the first post) and described Tom's commissioning of Staffordshire-based boatfitter, Ben Harp.

The blog described the choices in shell (built by a separate builder) and interior layout, the money Tom laid out on equipment (which he bought online and had delivered directly to Ben Harp's meagre premises) and above all, the boat shell and stage payments, which amounted to tens of thousands of pounds.

Tom did all this from the remoteness of his Australian home, which he was later to call 'the tyranny of distance'.  Nevertheless, he commissioned a reputable boat surveyor to keep an eye on the boat-build.  But, in short, he was deceived, given the run-around and generally ripped off.

This began to be apparent even before he and his wife flew over from Australia, and they started legal proceedings to get back what was already finished of the boat.

In truth, they should have realised from the start how dodgy all this was.  I mean, just look at what you have to do if you want to visit your boat under construction. 

Does this look like an open business to you?

What was so shocking was how nasty the whole affair turned out to be, and how thuggishly Ben Harp behaved (and how his wife Kelly Harp seemed to join in on the fraud).

Harp didn't just try to prevent the owner from claiming his half-finished boat (by which time he'd already paid Harp about £91,000), he theatened him, mugged his friend and began to strip out the interior and steal the equipment already aboard - before finally - and petulantly - vandalising it. 

This is plain bonkers, a man gone off the rails.

But what makes the story really fascinating is the methodical and painstaking care with which Tom stalked this angry animal, and how he eventually took back his property, all perfectly legally.

Tom has carefully written up his experience in a 7,000-word document, Despicable Ben Harp Narrowboat Builders (pdf)

It's a fascinating 25-page tale, and I'd recommend anyone who's having a boat built to read it.  The bottom line is that Tom reckons he's lost about £83,500 on his boat, which includes about £25,000 in legal expenses. 

What he's now got is a shell worth about £25,000, which he's attempting to have fitted out elsewhere.  In short, he's no better off than if he'd not gone to law - but at least Ben Harp hasn't stolen his entire boat. And perhaps his experience sets some sort of useful precedent.

But who is this Ben Harp?  Is he really the figure of Manichaean evil and incompetence portrayed in Tom's account?

Waiouru is not the first boat Ben Harp has worked on.  Narrowbeam Dutch barge Trudy-Ann was an earlier attempt, and  that owner's build-blog also turns out to be a dismal catalogue of problems.

For example, from last June:

I think it only fitting I restart telling my tale of woe and how we are overcoming the problems left by our builder Ben Harp.

... During the time at the marina I went round to see Mr. Harp to see about getting the remainder of the work carried out.

Despite promises on the first visit nothing happened and the second visit I got the order to fornicate elsewhere in his best Anglo-Saxon. At least we now had it confirmed that we could not expect the contracted work to be carried out.

The companies who built the shells also are angry.  It's clear that they want nothing more to do with him.

But there is at least one happy customer of Ben Harp, and that owner also blogged his experience. It's only fair to mention it.  

Ben Harp fitted out a boat called 4EverMoore, starting in late 2007, and it went smoothly.

I was following the 4EverMoore blog when I went past the boat a few months later and stopped to chat to Ben Harp.

I also persuaded him to pose for a photograph.

Kevin of 4EverMoore now writes:

Ben is no more the cowboy that people are saying he is than quite a few other boatbuilders that I am sure are out there!

Ben is a good craftsman, but with a bad temper at times, which now seems to be his downfall.  But by no means have we found any of his workmanship on our boat to be anything but excellent.

And underneath that post, Graham Clarke comments

We fully support the views on this blog, as it fully reflects our experience of purchasing from Ben.

We have cruised over 2500 miles in Juniper since her build in 2006 and have absolutely no qualms in endorsing his product.

So can Ben Harp produce the goods? Well, does it matter, now that his reputation is shot?  It's clear that he has a titanic temper, and he stands accused of thuggery and theft. 

And, thanks to the £25,000 cost of Tom's litigation, he is definitely convicted of nefarious business practice and costing a customer over eighty thousand pounds? 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is entrusting their life savings to him. But more to the point, I wonder how he ever thought he'd get away with all this?

The riots gave me a flashback to my own vigilante moment

"Why were you so upset about the riots, Granny? I didn't see any waterways affected."

Well, grandchild, they gave me a vivid flashback to nearly 30 years ago.

It was about 1983, I was working in a bar/restaurant called 'Stars', near London's Putney Bridge, and we had an upstairs balcony bar overlooking Putney High Street and the big glass front of the restaurant.

(It's now a Spanish restaurant called La Mancha, and the balcony has been turned into a conservatory - see right, or click here for the Google Street View).

Late one night a bunch of yobs were chucked out for being drunk and abusive.  I was upstairs on the balcony, and heard a shriek from some girls downstairs, with a commotion at the front door below.

I looked out over the railings, and saw that one of the yobs had picked up a paving slab nearby that had been stacked by the council ready for laying the following day.  He was carrying it over his head.

I could see what what happening almost in slow-motion.  The heavy slab hit the window with a resounding - almost musical - SMASH!, and a diminuendo of tinkles that seemed to continued for several seconds.

In shame I realised I'd done nothing but watch, and knew I should have dropped something on HIM, before he caused the damage.  A row of heavy pot planters, on the balcony, would have offered the ideal missile.

I cursed my inaction.

Then I realised he hadn't finished. He'd gone to get another slab, since no one had yet tried to stop him, and there was still a second window to smash!  

So as he struggled back with the second slab, I lifted one of the heavy pots, and held it over the edge, feeling like a wartime bomb aimer, trying to match the release position with the lurching paving stone fifteen feet below.

But I bottled out of it, I held back. I feared it would maim - even kill - him.  Or just as bad, I might miss him and only anger him still more, turning him and his friends into vengeful bears.

He threw again, and the other window smashed just as spectacularly, though with fewer screams the second time.  I remember that difference.

And then all the yobs ran off, their vengeance satisfied. 

In the end no one was hurt, not even the remaining customers and staff (who'd all quickly cowered at the back when they saw the threat).

I don't remember if they were tracked down or not. Didn't really care.  All I remember, 28 years later, is hating my cowardice at not trying to stop the yob with my pot-plant bomb.  Surely no court would have convicted me. 

I've relived the moment in my mind a thousand times.  You don't often get the chance to kill someone and have an excuse.

"Every Granny post has a waterways reference, doesn't it?  So did the riots affect the waterways?"

I'm coming to that.  In short, NO.  There appear to have been no damage, no vandalism, no disaster anywhere on the waterways. They were apparently left untouched.  Presumably because there's nothing to loot, only to vandalise. No big TVs to steal, no story there, move along now.

"But I can't move on. There's a stoppage on the Grand Union's Paddington Arm."

Oh, yes, I forgot about that. Well, there was one small, half-hearted attempt, but it could have happened for other reasons.  Near Northolt, a fire was started on the wooden Smiths Farm footbridge, which crosses the canal at Marnham Fields.

It's seen above in the bird's-eye view of Bing Maps. Link to the Canalplan gazetteer - where it's known as Bridge 17a - here.

Below, BW staff are seen inspecting the bridge.

But this was an amateur crime.  It didn't go far, and the only effect was to close the bridge and canal for a couple of days while BW checked it and arranged for the council to repair it.

 

Luckily the local council built this footbridge, and luckily for us it's their responsibility to repair it.

So the waterways got off almost scot-free, it seems.  We might not be so lucky next time, not least because the yobs might be ready to drop pot plants on us as we go underneath.

[closer pics kindly supplied by BW press office]

Mystery death on the Stratford Canal

Warwickshire police put out an appeal last week for information, after the body of Adam Lobb was found floating in the canal near Stratford-upon-Avon on August 6th, and an initial post mortem put the cause of death as 'unexplained'.

They issued a fuzzy photo of the 28 year old (right), showing him looking handsome and confident in the snow, wearing a beanie hat and camouflage clothing.

He seems to have been living for some time on a small, scruffy cruiser near the bottom of the Wilmcote lock flight.  They want to hear from anyone who was in the area in the week before his death and might be able to give them some clues.

To help jog memories they also put out a photo of the boat, and it's this that marked it out for me as interesting.  The police said the photo came from British Waterways, and it comes with a load of data imprinted in the top left and clearly shows a 'Section 8' notice tied to the canopy.

The data suggests the photo was taken on August 5th, only the day before Lobb's body was discovered in the canal. 

And I presume it was taken by the licence patrol officer who tied the notice to the boat, with the geodata embedded to prove that he/she had been there and delivered the note.

My mind slipped into a ruminative gear, wondering if he was still alive at that time, if he was nearby, if he was perhaps hiding or asleep on the boat, or if he was about to come back and discover the notice.

Or even if he was watching, from a distance, as the officer tied the notice to the boat.

Whatever happened, I'd imagine the patrol officer is now rather sweating!

I entered the coordinates given in the photo (052.2068, -001.7367) into Google Maps here and Bing Maps here, and they do indeed correspond with a location halfway up the towpath to Wilmcote Bottom Lock.

These notices are the equivalent of parking tickets.  I can't know what was in the note attached to Lobb's boat; however, mostly they can be quite benign, often simply stating that the owner has overstayed his welcome in a particular area, and demanding that he moves his boat.

That's the circumstance of the envelope (below), and the note inside it, which I discovered on an abandoned and sunken boat on the Grand Union a few years back. 

Sheer nosiness curiosity made me look inside the envelope, which was unsealed, to examine and photograph the notice, before carefully replacing it (see below; I've obscured the identifying information).

I thought to myself:  'How stupid to put a note like this on a sunken boat!  How are they going to move it anyway?

A 'brasso' for the inner city

I do the 'Boats & Pieces' pages each month in Waterways World.

It's a compilation of new products and services of potential interest for boaters, and it's not just the usual grind of chandlery stuff. 

I try to include things that boaters might find useful for a variety of offbeat but practical reasons.

One thing I included in the June issue was Graffiti Safewipes, which promised to "wipe away unwanted graffiti as easy as 1,2,3".

(Adding the graffiti in the first place is as easy as 1.  So it's no surprise that it's harder work to remove it.)

Boats & Pieces doesn't normally test the products.  It's enough just to say they are new and available.  I don't want to know what's good, just what's new.  

However the Safewipes idea intrigued me.  There's no way it could tackle the entire canvas of the city, but perhaps it could help get rid of spot-scale graffiti.  Does it work?

So when I went for a walk down the Farmers Bridge flight in Birmingham earlier this year I took a sample pack with me, and tested it out on a couple of signs. 

It's a two-wipe answer.  There's a disposable orange wet cloth impregnated in citrus-smelling biodegradable solution, and a damp 'afterwipe' to absorb the painty gunge that comes off.  Also included in each pack are a couple of blue 'latexy' gloves.

Yes, it works as advertised, although you'll be rubbing quite hard.  You'll need about as much elbow grease as with heavily tarnished brass.

It's not designed for brickwork or large surface areas - just the occasional bit of yobbery on small signs.  And, as with brass, it's really difficult on relief surfaces, such as the BCN 'cycle' signpost shown here.

(I didn't have the patience or time to rub inside all those little letters, and unfortunately it didn't remove the metric measures.) 

When I came to the larger BW sign (above), my energy was flagging, and I couldn't do the whole sign.  One wet wipe had enough liquid to dissolve the lower half of the sign; then after several vigorous minutes my right arm was, frankly, pooped out. 

Rather like brass-cleaning, this graffiti-wiping is a young man's game.  (As is putting the graffiti on in the first place, I suppose.)

Perhaps BW could do all its signs in brass, so that we boaters would be more inclined to clean them as we went along.

One problem I hadn't expected at the end was where to put the rubbish.  The box, the wipes, the torn sachets and the discarded blue latex gloves looked like the abandoned nest of some urban hatchling.

(Oh, of course I picked it all up, what do you think I am?) 

But as I walked away I passed an electric control box nearby, and my heart sank.

'What is this wonder product?' you might now be asking.

Safewipes are impregnated with terpenes, chemicals that come from the rind of citrus fruits such as oranges - hence the pleasant, aromatic smell.  

I'm not sure what's in Safewipes, but it's likely d-Limonene.  Here's a factsheet about d-Limonene from one particular supplier. 

The packs make it easy for occasional use, although I suppose you can buy the liquid in bulk - like Brasso - if you take your graffiti as seriously as you take your brass cleaning.

Simpsons jacket - me want!

The recent riots took me back to a moment in Birmingham city centre a few years ago.

I had just arrived by train from Norfolk, rushing to rejoin Granny, moored up in central Birmingham near the NIA for the week, and I was dashing past a boutique on my way to the boat, when I just happened to glance in the window. 

And there it was...

ME WANT!

I forget the price.  All I remember now is, I couldn't afford the price asked, modest as it arguably was (I think it was about £85).  I quickly took out my phone camera and made this photograph in lieu.  And I had a boat to get back to, one that had been moored unattended for the week.

So while I can understand the urges of the rioters last week, I know that I, myself, managed to resist the urge to smash the window and grab the jacket.

If I had succumbed to the temptation, it would have been quite reasonable for the authorities to have thrashed my life out of me.  But what a masochistic punishment, what a way to go, wearing that jacket, eh?

Ah yes, I remember it well. I wonder who's wearing it now.

And yet: Strange how memory plays tricks.  According to the data in the image, I took it on 7th Jan 2006 at 2:20pm in the afternoon.  According to other evidence, I was simply window shopping at the time. Heaven knows what evidence I could give the police on my movements at the time. 

My camera tells me that just a couple of hours before I took the picture above, I was photographing the IWA boat Jubilee, in winter sleet. 

At the time, IWA volunteers Mike Rolfe and Ivor  Caplan were bravely manning the boat at Birmingham's canalside Brindleyplace, hoping to tell passers-by about the wonders of Britain's waterways.

So I must have gone shopping - or window shopping - shortly afterwards.  Later on that day I took night time photos around the canals, and the following day I took Granny to Hockley Heath. It's amazing how much of a notebook a camera can be.

By the way, today I learned that canalside Birmingham was even emptier last weekend during the riots than it was on that lonely and frigid January weekend five years ago. 

But more about that later.

Lock overspills with and without flash

I was descending central Manchester's 'Rochdale Nine' locks when I was captivated by the overspills in the locks.

There are no bywashes in the 'Nine' locks, so every passage is accompanied by a waterfall - a cascade - of the excess water as it seeks to join you in the journey downhill. 

There's something hypnotic about watching these overspills.   You can photograph them in natural light or with a flash.

The convention is that the blur of a slow shutter speed makes the water look 'wetter' and more energetic. 

I don't necessarily agree.  To me, there's arguably more 'kinetic energy' in the flash photos.  I feel they show the water suspended in mid-air, hanging there, in the words of Douglas Adams, in exactly the way that bricks don't.

But make up your own mind. I presume you don't need me to point out which is which.

BCN canal mileposts back to being kilometre posts

I commented last week on the new Transport Trust 'heritage plaques, and how the new one at Standedge describes the tunnel's length in 'km'.

And I asked if this was really heritage in action, or 'heritage inaction', where public history functionaries displayed little knowledge of the history they were being asked to remember and describe.

Martin Howes commented:

Perhaps it will be 'rectified', in the same way that many BCN signposts on the way into Birmingham on the main line have been, by concerned enthusiasts.

Most of the distances have patches over the metric figures and now show imperial.

[Martin uses the conventional terminology of 'Imperial measures', but I prefer to use 'traditional', since there are still other types of such traditional measures that technically aren't Imperial - e.g. Troy for gold, and the American 'customary' system.  And I'm an annoying pedant.]

Well, Martin, it's true the BCN posts did have 'traditional' measures posted over the metric ones, but that was several years ago and they've mostly been cleaned off now.  So we are back to Square One.  Or perhaps Metre Zero.

I wrote about the subject five years ago in ARM gets feet back on BCN Canal Signposts, and reading my original post, it still reads pretty well on the subject.

So here it is again, tweaked slightly to read better, but the facts unchanged (I haven't checked the links to see if they are still valid) - my original post from 4th January 2006:

 

ARM gets feet back on BCN canal mileposts

When I first cruised the Birmingham Canal Navigations (BCN) in 1999, I was startled and disappointed to see modern distance markers specifying distances in kilowhales and gasmeters and such modern measures. 

'How could they mutilate the old signs like that?' I thought.  'Isn't there a sort of moral heritage barrier to stop them?'

Mark me down as an unreconstructed traditional measures man.  I had metric measures dunned into my head in school, for sure, but I absorbed the customary measures through my skin.  I ate, drank and breathed them. And I'm old enough to remember when shillings and pence turned into 'pee'.

I lived with metrication and decimalisation, rather than embraced it.  I think most of us did; still do.

It's not a point of of practicality or ease of use - although I can marshal all the arguments in that direction if you want. 

No, it's a matter of poetry, of variety and charm. It's about local dialect and colloquialisms versus the unbending grammar of Esperanto. It's the country lane versus the motorway.

Or in this case, it's the winding Brindley contour canal versus the merciless direct march of the Fens drain.

So I was delighted when I returned to Birmingham in November 2005, after a gap of 18 months, and found many of those execrable gas-meter measurements pasted over with miles, fractions and yards.

I thought hooray!' British Waterways has seen the light and the metric police are backing down. 

But no... 

Looking closely I saw a sticker on one of the distance posts explaining that it's actually a guerrilla movement called Active Resistance to Metrication, a sort of provisional wing of the British Weights & Measures Association. 

I phoned the number on the sticker, and spoke to a guy called Derek Norman, who's the BWMA Liaison Officer (email address: 'rebeldel@...').

He told me that this has been going on for some months.

He also said that the signs are technically illegal, since - by law - all UK road signs must be in feet and toes, as opposed to kilohertz and gas meters. 

On the BWMA website they call it 'direct action' and explain they've been doing it all across the country. They've 'successfully legalised' a large and growing number of these signs on the BCN.

So I rang the local British Waterways office for their view.  A spokesman told me that in theory BW disapproves of it, but frankly there are more pressing problems of canal maintenance to tackle, not to mention the rash of obscene graffiti.

And besides, he pointed out, there never were BCN canal distance signs in the old days and the existing ones were installed by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership about 20 years ago as an amenity when the BCN canals were opened up to pedestrian access. 

A DEFRA document explains:

The regeneration process was kick-started in 1983 by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership (Birmingham City Council, the former West Midlands County Council and British Waterways) which drew up a programme of physical improvements that have continued to this day.

They have embraced heritage and conservation initiatives, improved pedestrian accessibility, canal-related economic activity, increased tourism, signage and interpretation, recreation and nature conservation.

Corridor Studies were also completed by British Waterways, guiding canal improvement, and setting the context for development.

Where this leaves ARM, legally, I don't know, since the towpaths are mostly still BW's private property, and the signposts are not technically public distance-posts, so they don't have to be in traditional measures. 

The BWMA, in short, don't know their ARM from their elbows!

But I'll still give them a quiet cheer.  More power to ARM's elbows, to their little white squares and black magic markers, and adhesives.

I'd consider giving them three rousing cheers, were it not that I'm uneasy on two other points. 

ONE: The traditional way of measuring canal distances, as I understand it,  was in miles, furlongs and chains. 

For example, a distance of 240 yards would have been expressed as about 1f 1ch, for example, or perhaps colloquially 'a furlong'.  It would surely not be '240 yards'. 

Halfway down the Aston lock flight there's one of those new (but old-looking) signs at the Waterlinks office development (see below). 

Significantly, it features distances in miles and eighths of a mile (i.e. furlongs). 

It's the only one of these signs that does it even halfway authentically, and congratulations to the Waterlinks people for doing it thus.  (Location here on Google Maps)

TWO:  The BMWA's resistance, as far as I can tell, doesn't seem to come from love - or knowledge - of the old measures. Instead it appears to come from the hatred of the imposition of laws by central government.  And more specifically, from the government of the new United Europe or EU. 

This second point seems to be the nub of their argument.  It's why I can't really cheer too loudly. 

I'm a Briton and a big-world Empire/Commonwealth loyalist (I really am).  But I want the charm of my darling, characterful poetic measures to reappear for their own sake, and not as part of some political turf war.

The nice picture in my attic

As you'll see here, I've got a new avatar for my blog and social networking. Well, it's quite an old one, but with a caricature who's to know? 

It was done in 1995 by Sheba Cassini, professional caricaturist, who - 16 years on - still makes a good and steady living doing them for events and parties.

(See her website, www.bitterandtwisted.org, shared with her husband and fellow-caricaturist Simon)

I stumbled across it the other day when sorting out a box of stuff I'd brought on to the boat from my attic. I had a beard then, and owlish granny-glasses.

She drew me at an official opening of a new branch of the (then) Midland Bank. They had recently been taken over by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), and they wanted an excuse to invite in their humble customers to be awed by their marbled halls and golden counters. 

Sheba was hired for the day to draw anyone vain enough to pose.  Which I was.

We ugly people are understandably sensitive about having our photo taken. I always say, if you hate your appearance, the solution is to have your picture taken MORE OFTEN.  That way, you'll be more likely to end up with a photo you like. It's why celebs look so good.

I contacted Sheba today to ask about her approach to drawing uglies, and she said "Ha-ha, I'll make the warts BIGGER!"

And that's fine. In caricature we see our flaws exaggerated and know we are better-looking than that.

Famously, Dorian Gray had a magical picture hidden in his attic - one that absorbed all his increasing character flaws, getting yearly uglier and more monstrous while he himself stayed unchanged and beautiful. I'm relieved to see that the picture in my attic has been moderately kind to me.

I remember Sheba herself as a remarkably beautiful young woman, and the photos on her website shows that sixteen years have been most kind to her.

Perhaps that's what she and Simon mean by 'Bitter & Twisted' - get your bitter and twisted inner Dorian Gray out of yourself and onto paper, and stay young and beautiful in your own mind. Although their own publicity cartoons (right) are quite flattering - perhaps because nobody wants to invite Quasimodo to draw them.

Every Grannypost is supposed to have a waterways link, so I was pleased to see that the Cassinis are based on the beautiful Eel Pie Island on the River Thames, in the charmingly named The Love Shack.  That's my waterways link for the day.

I'd hate to see the pictures in their attic!