Granny Buttons

Neil publishes his Herbie blog as a colour 'keepsake'

For several years, one of the most practically useful of all canal blogs has been Neil Corbett's Herbie.

He has not just kept a cruising log or diary, although it's one of the best of its type.  He has frequently given step-by-step details on the practical problems of boat owning. 

Or in the words of the blog title: 'Journeys on our narrowboat and the trials and tribulations of maintaining her'.

For example, Neil devised the manual Canalometers, that give the approximate times for cruising between points on certain waterways. 

He recorded his attempt to design and build a folding cratch table.

And for those thinking of repainting their own narrowboat, he recorded his experience of repainting the entire upper-hull of Herbie in 2010, starting with Planning the big paint. 

It's all great stuff, since it helpfully answers the many DIY questions of other boaters.

Now Neil has written How to print your blog,  a post about how he had the first three years of his blog printed as a book.

Next time I have to fill in a form declaring my occupation I shall put 'Author', for I have finished a book.  The problem is:

a) only one copy exists, and

b) you have already read quite a bit of it.

He used the service Blog2Print, which try to make the process as simple as possible. 

All you do is, give them the name of your blog and it’s URL, select the dates you want printed, choose a cover etc. and press a button.  After a short wait, the book appears on screen and you can leaf through to look it over, then order the print and pay them quite a bit of money.

The quality of the binding, paper and printing is very good, and there is a useful index giving the page numbers by post title.

There is just one snag.  It is not cheap.  Not even a bit cheap. 

He's bashful about admitting how much the first three years of his blog cost to print.  But if you are practised at staring at taxi cab meters, you can probably work  it out yourself.

The meter starts ticking at (US) $25 for a hard cover including first 20 pages, with 35c for each extra page.

Herbie 2006-2009 is about 270 pages, so that's about $112, which is not far shy of £80.

Neil says that overall, he's really pleased: 

I thought it was worth it as a keepsake, and I have enjoyed browsing through, as have the friends who have seen it.

The book took a while to arrive, and when it did, there was water damage to the packet that affected one corner of the book. 

The water damage is visible in the top corner of the picture below, and Neil says Blog2Print have agreed to a free reprint. However, he didn't notice - until I pointed it out to him - that the page he opened at random was headlined 'Splash and grab'!

Is it worth it to get your blog printed like this? Well, it's a record of a life aboard, and represents less than £30 a year, and I think that's a small price to pay for immortalising your experience in a library.

Plus, think of the cost of a computer consultant in trying to recover an accidentally deleted blog.

Of course, you've got to put the effort into writing the blog in the first place.  And to make it as interesting and useful as  Herbie.

Colour or B/W?

Neil says it's a lot cheaper if you choose black & white for your blog print, rather than colour - perhaps only a third of the cost. 

How much colour is there in your life?  For Neil, in the first volume of the Herbie blog, clearly a lot.

However, he may change his mind about the need for a colour blog when it comes to Volume Two.  In April 2010, as  the repainting of Herbie neared completion, in his post 'Paintfest day 7 - we glimpse the real colour', he wrote:

So, now we see the main colour of the sides of the boat, a dark graphite grey which will be surrounded by a lighter grey border.

Harecastle Tunnel breakdown 2008 - an update

I was reminded of the power of blogs last weekend when I took a daytrip from Horninglow up to Mercia Marina and back. I'd just gone for a pumpout and a quick shop at Mercia Marina.

On the way back I stopped to fill with water at the Willington sanitary station, when a fellow on a boat opposite politely accosted me.

"You don't know me", he said, but I've got a bone to pick with you."

Uh-oh.

"Well, not with you as such..." he said. "It probably wasn't your fault, but you reported something on your blog that wasn't true."

He rolled out the story:

Back in June 2008, in Harecastle Tunnel breakdown, I relayed a story  reported in the local Sentinel paper about a boat that broke down in the tunnel, and alerted its distress by sounding the horn, as it was supposed to do.

The paper recorded that when the fire brigade turned up, they were prevented from entering the tunnel by BW staff. 

Apparently (reported the Sentinel), they weren't allowed to do so for some sort of 'health & safety' reason. I wrote:

It's astonishing to read the reported refusal of the firemen and BW tunnel staff to go into the tunnel to investigate the problem – despite the boaters saying they sounded their horn and followed all the rules.

If the reports are correct, what is the point of all the preparatory safety rigamarole - of BW staff wearing pointless lifejackets, of tunnel boats, of the sheet of instructions they hand you in the event of breakdown, of all the fearsome warning signs at ever piddly little tunnel over a couple of chains long – if no-one investigates?

On the other hand, you know what newspaper reports are like.  The local BW staff might well have a reasonable excuse.

It turns out that the local BW staff did have a reasonable excuse.

My interlocutor, David Fern, said that he was the BW tunnel operator on duty that day, and for three years he's been burning at being misrepresented by the local paper ... and by Narrowboat World, and by a host of other sources that took their facts from the local paper.

Narrowboat World wrote, months later:

IT was last year that the front boat of a convoy of five boats broke down in Harecastle Tunnel on the Trent & Mersey Canal, and Staffordshire Fire Service and British Waterways were criticised for standing helplessly by, doing nothing, reports Alan Tilbury.

The fire service did not have the right equipment, and the British Waterways boat that is kept at the entrance, as shown in the photograph, for such an emergency could not be taken in as the broken down boat engine was smoking, and as it was believed there could have been a fire, and the staff were not trained for such an emergency.

All of them, said David, got the story wrong!

What happened was that although the fire brigade arrived quickly, they spend so long going through their preparatory checklist (up to 20 minutes), that in the meantime it became evident the broken-down boat was slowly edging to the exit anyway, being pushed by another boat behind it at a snail's pace.

David said the boat was within a couple of hundred yards of the tunnel portal by the time the fire brigade were ready. 

"I said to them: 'Don't bother, they look like they are coming out anyway'", he told me. 

"I never said they shouldn't go in.  I just said they didn't need to go in - the boat was on its way out!" 

For three years he's been burning at being misrepresented by the local rag and by Narrowboat World.

Unfortunately the two stories I linked to on the Sentinel website have disappeared, as has the original Narrowboat World report.

However, Granny is still No. 1 on Google for 'harecastle tunnel breakdown':

No wonder Dave Fern has burned with indignation these last three years, and no wonder he sought me out.

Many boats coming out of Harecastle tunnel looks like they are on fire. There must be a lot of false alarms. For example this cruiser in September 2007, smoking like a gauloise:

On zooming in to this picture I was tickled to see the steerer looking like he was gagging from the smoke:

Mad dogs and English canals

When I posted a picture of a dog confronting a canal swan yesterday, as my suggestion for an official mascot of the new Murray Popoff was quick to suggest an alternative:

No!!!! You had a photo of a "Crazy" looking dog with a big stick awhile back. I'm sure you will remember it. That should be the choice!

Thanks, Murray, I think  you are referring to 'Bruno', who confronted me on the Llangollen Canal some eight years ago.  Yes, it's my favourite dog photo too. 

I was coming up the Grindley Brook staircase, and he was bringing sticks to passing boaters, dropping them at their feet (or boats) and imploring us to throw them for him.

The image I captured here was taken when Granny was well down in the lock (hence the low angle).

I'm not sure of the sentiment the photo promotes as a representative of canal doggiehood. Bruno actually was a real softie, sweet and gentle, and it's only the on-camera flash and consequent redeye that makes him look rabid.

But sadly, Bruno passed over to the great kennel in the sky several years ago (said his owner, who runs - or ran - the nearby lockside @29 lockside store and cafe.

Thoroughly modern canal dogs

British Waterways is to be superseded by the more-encompassing 'Canal and River Trust' next April.  And along with the announcement of the name change came the launch of a new logo.

It's actually a clever revisioning of the old logo, redolent of the Georgian humpback canal bridges that dot the English countryside. 

But instead of the bulrushes (or reedmace, as David Owen-Roberts pointed out), they've come up with a swan, to better represent the waterways network.

And the word 'waterways' has been dropped, since they say the public does not often think of a 'waterway' as a navigable thing. Furthermore, they've used a more ornate serif typeface to give a sedate feel to the labelling of signs.

We can now expect a host of PR exercises to draw attention to the launch. The first is a PR exercise competition to find the nation's favourite 'canal canine'.

British Waterways’ search continues to find a ‘canal loving canine’ to front up a marketing campaign for the national charity being set up next year to run the nation’s waterways.

Your four-legged friend could be in with a chance to be the canine face of the new Canal & River Trust, which takes over British Waterways’ responsibility for 2,000 miles of waterways in England & Wales in April 2012.

Or rather more euphemistically announced on Twitter as:

We're looking for Britain's next top dog model to become the canine face of Canal & River Trust. Enter your pooch here   

I don't have a pooch, so I couldn't be expected to (ahem) 'enter' it. 

Never mind, here's my candidate dog, seen at Hall Green Lock, Macclesfield Canal:

This dog, if memory serves, lives in the adjacent lock cottage, but the photo was taken four years ago.  

However, judging by the Canal and River Trust's new logo, it was a prescient image.  The swan is a far more widely recognised image of both rivers and canals than the bulrush. 

[Reedmace, Andrew, reedmace.]

And I love the way the cob swan and dog are warily eyeing each other up, perhaps pointing to the future of the new charity.

But BW won't like that symbolism.  I suspect they want dogs and dog owners who reflects cooperation. Like this dog and owner I met at Leamington Spa a while back:

The dog here seems obedient, faithful and watchful, standing firmly at his owner's side. Meanwhile the owner responsibly has collected his 'doings' to take home.

(Or at least to fling in the bushes when no one's looking!)

Meantime, the cyclists and Granny Buttons in the background show our own position in the scheme of things.