Granny Buttons

Granny does the Four Counties

Granny has begun a week's tour of the Four Counties Ring, setting off from Burton-upon-Trent today, and returning next year.

(Sven Latham has an excellent account of the Four Counties Ring from a week's trip he did back in 2007).

There's a sense of change in the air for me. This is the longest voyage I've taken in 18 months, and the longest one Granny has been on since it returned to Willington last year.

I'll endeavour to return to a daily blog. You know, the way Granny used to be. The good old days.

30 Canada geese in a row on the Isle of Wight

Did you ever see my photo of Canada geese at Windmill End, south of the Netherton Tunnel?  I took it in a cold, rainy dusk at the end of 2006, counting up to 18 birds, and at the time I asked if anyone had seen a longer line of such birds on the water.

A year or so later - as I remarked in Yes, 23 in a row is a record - Neil of nb Herbie said he'd seen 23 'Canada goslings' following a single parent.

Alan Weight wrote to me last week: 

I was sorting through my father's photos last week when I came across one he'd taken when out sailing off the Isle of Wight and thought you might be mildly amused.

I can count 30 geese in the pic (taken on APS film) but as you can see, they continue off either side of the pic, so who knows how many there might have been!

 

Any advance on 30?  What surprises me about this is that they are on salt water.  I know there's a lot of coastline in Canada, but I hadn't realised Canada Geese were also seabirds.

Max Sinclair completes the dream

I've been running back in my mind through the special things that have happened this year.  One of my favourites is accompanying Max Sinclair and his family up the newly reopened Droitwich Junction Canal on September 3rd, two months after the full route was officially reopened to traffic.

Max has campaigned for over fifty years to get the Droitwich reopened.  He started, he told me, with a letter to the Birmingham Mail in 1959, protesting at plans to close and fill in another stretch (I forget which,  but his sharp mind will tell you if  you ask).

Assorted work parties laboured casually during the 1960s to stop the route being completely overgrown and squatted-on by local farmers, who'd grown used to extending their fields into the line of the canal. 

Finally, in 1973 the Droitwich Canals Trust was established and restoration, rather than just protection of the route, began.

Read the history of the restoration on the Droitwich Canals Trust at www.worcs.com/dct/newhistory.htm, but it doesn't mention those first fourteen tough, lonelier years for Max. I'm not sure if there's a website that chronicles his own personal struggles at this time.

Sadly, his wife Jocelyn,who helped so much in the early years, died a few years ago, before BW committed itself to finishing the restoration.  But it must have been gratifying for him to have the rest of his family with him, and to complete this journey on her behalf.

The slideshow here hosts a selection of the photos I took, including operation of the sideponds on the top locks. When

I think this is the first time sideponds have been opened for public use on the UK canals in many years (apart from the Foxton and Watford flights), and may set a precedent for reopening many of the others around the country. I'd never seen these sideponds in operation before and was intrigued.

When the Droitwich Junction Canal opened in 1854 it must have felt like a demanding and thirsty cuckoo to the longer-established Worcester & Birmingham Canal that fed it. 

This is because the first three locks are twice as deep as the W&B's locks above. 

So it was inevitable that BW had to bring the sideponds back into operation, setting a precedent for all the others around the country.  As ordinary boaters learn to use these useful lock 'extensions' and more are brought back into use, it might help ease the water problem around the rest of the country.

Above: The side pond starts to fill at Lock 2 of the Droitwich Junction Canal. Note the boat still high in the lock.

Below: And - voilà! - the boat is almost gone from view, as half the water drains from the lock into the pond, ready to be reused to half-fill the lock again when the next boat comes up.

This allows almost half-a-lock of water to be reused for each filling, reducing the canal's thirst.

Anyway, such a pleasant and rewarding day for Max and his family.  They cruised on Horik, a boat that Viking Afloat granted to Max for a long weekend in tribute to his efforts.

Fish slapping dance location

Teddington Lock in winter dusk, on 30th December 2008. Monty Python fans make pilgrimages from around the world to this site, to honour the location of the legendary Fish Slapping Dance:

A Farewell To Knees

After I wrote about Remembrance Day, I was driven to thinking of A Farewell To Arms, the Elizabethan poem by George Peele (not the Hemingway novel which used its title.)

Where Remembrance Day is about the 'glorious dead' (and is usually filled with war poetry),  A Farewell To Arms  is perhaps its reverse.  It answers the question 'How should those who survive conduct their lives?' 

The answer, says George Peele, is generally in thinking about the present and the future, not the past.  His poem is about an old soldier, a retired knight, who puts aside thoughts of youth - he wants to spend his time serving his queen (or 'goddess'), who still lives:

  A FAREWELL TO ARMS

  His golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd;
  O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
  His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurn'd,
  But spurn'd in vain; youth waneth by increasing:
  Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
  Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

  His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;
  And, lovers' sonnets turn'd to holy psalms,
  A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
  And feed on prayers, which are Age his alms:
  But though from court to cottage he depart,
  His Saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

  And when he saddest sits in homely cell,
  He'll teach his swains this carol for a song,--
  'Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well,
  Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.'
  Goddess, allow this aged man his right
  To be your beadsman now that was your knight.

The beadsman (or bedesman) is someone who prays for the soul of others.  The dictionary says 'paid to pray', but the poem suggests it can be someone who does it for simple duty.

George Peele was addressing Queen Elizabeth I, so this is not a poem for republicans, except where the queen is a metaphor for those who survive. 

I rather like the lines:

  Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
  Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

and

  A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
  And feed on prayers, which are Age his alms:

Of course, eventually doing anything on your clapped-out knees is an impossibility, but you get the metaphor.

Here's my father's last visit to Granny Buttons, at Loughborough in December 2006, with my sister.  His knees were too far gone to come aboard, sadly.

"How are you, Daddy?" we'd ask.

"All right above the knees!" he'd reply chirpily.

Remembrance creep

I call it 'celebration creep'. It's the tendency for public holidays and ceremonies to grow and grow and grow in duration.  Les Dawson once remarked that he knew it was Christmas because the shops were full of Easter eggs.

I've been scornfully accused of not caring about the  modern Remembrance Day because I'm now moaning about seeing 'poppies' on lapels all through October, and it can't be far off before we all start sending each other greetings cards to mark the event. 

It's not true that I don't care. Whenever I'm in a village new to me, especially when on the waterways, I love looking at the war memorials and gravestones, and seeing the poignant roll of names, and the stories they evoke. Especially when there are several similar surnames.  I remember.

That, for me, means far more than a sheep-like wearing of a poppy for three weeks, and I bet few other people bother to do it.

But I was thinking yesterday of my father (always an old soldier, not a 'veteran'), who died about three years ago and would wear a poppy on the right occasions.  The only picture I have of him wearing a poppy was the year before he died, when he'd just turned 90. 

I forget the exact circumstances, but it was the Sunday before Remembrance Sunday in 2007, and he had hosted a luncheon drinks reception with other old neighbours and was bidding them farewell.  My sister appeared at the door just as I clicked the shutter. Looking at the picture now, it's a kind of valediction by my father, and we put it on the front of his memorial service. 

A poppy was appropriate for Corporal Denny, who saw action in 1940 in the retreat from France, and lost half his platoon.  He sported the poppy on Sunday 4th Nov 2007 for church and his reception and he wore it again the following Sunday for the Remembrance Day service.

As a colonial policeman he had his share of further 'action', particularly in the Kenya after the war, and the terrorism of Aden in the 1960s, which was worse for him.

He spoke little about the war or the atrocities he witness later - not out of trauma, but from an old-fashioned sense of duty.  You did not spend your life worrying about the past or grieving, you merely did your job and got on with the next job and didn't moan. 

Any remembrance was done in a very ceremonial sense, and the poppy was part of a dress uniform, like the bow tie. I think his bigger bravery was faithfully nursing his second wife through her last two years of senility. 

His own final words, on 4th July 2008, were "I'm fine."

I'm not sure if my dislike of this new month-long public remembrance obsession is inherited from my parents culturally or genetically, but we are the the sort of old-school family who consider all these roadside flower shrines a bit, er, foreign and un-British, and we don't like the new industry of public grieving. 

Anyway, if month-long poppy wearing is your sort of thing, Happy Remembrance Day!

Whatever your view, though, if you are interested in the subject, I recommend Remembrance, an hour-long programme broadcast on Radio 4 last Saturday and available this week to listen again.

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.

Explaining rainbows

Headed down the BCN main line to the Black Country Boat Festival last weekend, I was delighted to catch a really vivid rainbow in the few minutes during (and after) a brief shower in between bright spells.  You don't 'chase' rainbows; they follow you. And what you see is mainly luck. 

But more significantly, this time, the occasionally-seen 'second rainbow' was visible, something which I've never managed to catch on camera before.

You can see spots of rain in the picture, caught by the camera's flash.

I also photographed the complete arc, using several pictures from right to left, and could in theory 'stitch' these together for a panorama, except they wouldn't produce an interesting image. The scene on the left wasn't all that interesting. 

There's no technical mystery about the rainbow, especially with the Wikipedia entry on rainbows to hand. 

But I prefer the less scientific, more prosaic, explanation in 'Rainbows for the artist', on Don Jusko's 'Real Color Wheel' site:

Your head is always in between the sun and the center of a rainbow circle, the sun is at your back. 

A normal rainbow has a lighter area of sky under it. White is the reflected color under the rainbow.  Dark, or no added reflected light is over the top of the rainbow, over the red. Yellow light is in the middle of a rainbow. 

A warm magenta is barely visible on top of the red on a strong rainbow, it's stronger at the cool bottom of the rainbow.  Also, yellow will appear again under the magenta on a strong rainbow.

If you make your own rainbow, with a small spray of water, you don't see the green; white will take its place. This happens in the middle band.

Red is on the outside of the main rainbow and on the inside of the second rainbow, the second rainbow is separated by 15 degrees and would have a darker band between them.

The third rainbow's color progression is the same as the main rainbow, ad infinitum.

He doesn't blind you with optics and tell you how it occurs; he just tells you what you'll see.  This is to optics as JK Rowling is to magic.

Night at Windmill End

I paid a brief visit to the Black Country Boat Festival over last weekend.   As promised, I went out for a nocturnal stroll, around 2am, and managed to avoid getting arrested.

The full moon did put in an occasional appearance.  I've said before how the moon can give a 'stage set' feel to nocturnal photos (for example, at Shardlow Lock a couple of years ago).

Unfortunately this time I found it hard to get good views around the festival site, since the delicate wash of moonlight was overwhelmed by the site's security floodlights.  Above is the motor Nuneaton in the foreground, with butty Malus behind it, and the old iron bridge over the Boshboil Arm behind that. 

Careful positioning was needed to avoid the floodlighting dazzling the camera, which meant that the viewing angle wasn't ideal.

Slightly more success came from the other end of the festival moorings, on the bridge next to the Bumblehole branch (see above.) Here, the floodlights weren't dazzling the camera. However, it was a duller view.

I enjoyed the stretch towards Netherton Tunnel (below).  You can see how the moon (behind my right shoulder at this point) fills in some of the detail on the right bank.  But it wasn't enough, so during the 30-second exposure I used my pocket torch to 'paint' the shadows, particularly of old BW workboat Atlas on the left, and the black cloths of the Narrowboat Trust's butty Brighton in the right foreground.

Try another view of Windmill End Junction below, where the little 'white cruiser' Hilda May provides a variety of colour.

Turning around at this point to face towards the moon, I photographed GUCCC Woolwich narrowboat Sagitta (below).

I cursed the festival site's floodlights here too, because their brilliance prevented me from going higher on the nearby bridge for a better view of the boats. 

Nevertheless, even from this low view, you can still see the 'glistening' effect of shooting towards the moon, whose cold light brings lines into sharp relief. Look at the gunwales of Sagitta, for example, which reflect the light brilliantly, or the path edges.

At this point I've again filled in the shadows with my torch, waggling it particularly against the back cabin and counter.

This torch-waggling is one day going to get me into trouble.  No boater, snug in bed, likes to see a torchbeam dancing on their window at 3am; it's a creepy thing to do and I do try to minimise its effect. Sorry.

As with most of my photos now, you can see them in higher resolution if you click on them.

Roger's curious cows

A chap called Roger saw my assorted earlier 'Curious Cows' posts and pictures (here's one of them, here's another), and it struck a chord with him.

He tells me he had a similar experience last April on the River Soar:

You are probably not that interested in another 'curious cows' shot, but just thought I would tell you that I thought of you when I saw these.

We are from Oz and get over every year for a 6 week canal fix on our share boat.  This year we did a round trip from Napton via Leicester and Llangollen. 

The pics were taken near Zouch on the Soar in April, using our point & click Lumix.

Roger's experience seems to be a little more 'ready made' than mine.

Judging by the other (more scene-setting) picture he sent (right) I presume it was taken as they swept past in the boat, and the cows were already lined up, ready for their photocall.

In the case of my earlier pictures, the cows were never in place and they only ambled over when I scrambled up a steep bank to see over it.

Had Roger's cows already gathered to see something else?  Or do they always stand together like that? 

Animal behaviourists must have a fascinating job. I could imagine a whole herd of them staring at the cows, trying to work out why they are doing that.

More night photography & the full moon calendar

Granny has been in central Birmingham, last week and this. I've taken to cruising the lonely and largely empty Main Line at dusk in order to charge my batteries, rather than run them on the visitor moorings below the residential apartments.  

After cruising the Soho Loop last weekend, I stopped to photograph the junction with the Icknield Port loop, and reminded myself why I love night photography so much.

This scene would be lovely, were I to catch one of the restaurant trip boats coming out of the junction.

Must try harder. Perhaps I can go cruising next weekend.

Graffiti seems only to add to the glamour of night time photography, and the liberal sprinkling of dates on every piece of canal 'furniture' serves to stamp antiquity onto the backdrop.

A full moon makes night photography easier. According to the Full Moon Calendar there's one next Monday.  You don't need a blazing full moon to make a difference - a waxing gibbous moon is enough to paint colour and detail into the shadows.  In the example above, a little detail in the vegetation behind the bridge would have helped.

One of my favourite city night pictures was of King Edward's Wharf, overlooking where Granny is right now, as it happens. 

I took it in January 2006 - gosh, nearly six years ago now -  and it shows the penthouse apartments of the block, thrown into relief against the sky, thanks to presence of a near-full moon behind. 

Shown this way, the building has the brooding presence of a 'Transformer' or an enormous alien insect, silently awaiting its moment of calling. 

The 'grid' on the roof (presumably some sort of safety measure) resembles the feathery antennae often found on the more flamboyant insects, while the 'eyes' underneath (and the light further down) only increase the sense of life stirring within.

I wonder if this is what the architects had in mind when they designed it all?