And for my next target

Yes, I meant it.

Mind you, ever since I read Joan Bakewell on what a boon wheelie suitcases are for the elderly, enabling them to get out and about in ways previously not possible, I would not ban them outright (unlike umbrellas, which surely could be brought under existing legislation covering offensive weapons).

Actually, I'm a liberal; I don't want to ban anything outright. I think some kind of licencing scheme might be the answer. Old people could have a free licence, but it would act as a deterrent to those who don't really need them.

Why has there been such a proliferation in recent years? It must be something to do with the development of miniature wheel technology - or else a blinding brainwave that no one had thought of before, but I suspect the former - that has caused so many to be available, in so many different sizes.

But why have they caught on so successfully, to the extent that even the smallest case now it seems is not complete without wobbly wheels and a flimsy pull-out handle. Have we all suddenly become weeds, unable to lift luggage that we managed perfectly well ten years ago? Were there serried ranks of friendly uniformed porters at every rail and tube station right up until the moment that these things first appeared on the market, at which point they all became redundant? Or is it just that people now take far more stuff with them wherever they go just because, thanks to the advent of little nylon wheels, they can?

Only, of course, as soon as they come to a staircase, they can't. They become as helpless as Daleks. You see them plaintively standing at the bottom, anchored to their case like a ball and chain, pondering the cruel trick that promised them that they could take the entire contents of their wardrobe and six pairs of shoes on that weekend break. Similarly when (as not infrequently happens) the wheels fall off or the handle breaks, and they're stuck with lugging it around in the old fashioned way for the rest of their trip. These days, even abandoning it isn't an option.

More seriously, presumably TfL have given some consideration to what happens to all the cases, large and small, should the tube need to be evacuated - say if there were a fire. Can you imagine how they would impede people's exit as great heaps of them built up at the bottom of the stairs?

No. Take a tip from me - never travel with more than you can comfortably carry. Even if that does include a roll of black and white check vinyl.

Another gratuitous attack

Time to offend another large section of the population with a completely uncalled for, prejudiced rant.

Umbrellas. Um-bloody-brellas. At the first drop of drizzle, out they come, quadrupling the amount of pavement space each person takes up, and imperilling the eyeballs of those sensible enough to eschew this idiocy.

Why do you need a bloody umbrella? It's only a drop of water. How do you manage to have a shower, for heaven's sake, if you're scared of getting wet? If it really bothers you then get a coat. And a hat. Have you any idea how daft you look carrying your own personal little roof around with you? Particularly if it's one of those cheap crap folding ones and you spend more time shaking it and trying to turn it the right way round than actually sheltering under it.

More to the point, have you any idea how selfish and thoughtless you are being? Just because everybody else is doing it, doesn't make it OK you know. It's not just the eyes. When you're carrying the thing on the tube, do you realise that you're jabbing the point of it into the thigh of the person behind you? When you leave it on the office floor, open, to dry, can you not see that it's in everyone else's way, dripping? And when you are at an outdoor spectacle, does it not occur to you that you are obscuring the very view that the people behind you have every much right as you to see? Amazingly, utterly amazingly, this really does not seem to occur to people. Ask them to put the umbrella down and they look at you as if you're the stupid one, and say, but it's raining. Bloody go indoors if you don't like it, and let us hardier souls enjoy whatever it is we have come to see unimpeded.

Umbrellas are the ultimate manifestation of selfish individualism on an everyday level. I'm-all-right-Jack under my little shelter; sod the inconvenience to everyone else.

Tomorrow: wheeled suitcases.

Scenes from last summer III

Yes, this was random, I swear. Gemini (which I have never seen), on September 3rd, somewhere between Pitstone and Tring, as my dating/placing system seems to be fairly reliable.

A proposition for Craig

The year before last we toyed with the idea of taking Warrior to Braunston (the occasion, not just the place), to have a base for the weekend and thus be able to enjoy it to the full. We didn't, in the end, because we went to Atherstone for the RN rally and just generally didn't get our act together, but it is re-emerging as part of a plan for this year (yep, it's that time of year again, when plans start to emerge, all unpredictable, like the green shoots of spring).

The original tentative plan was based around going to the IWA festival at Radcliffe-on-Soar. The problem with that - other than the fact that once you've been to one or three the novelty wears off a bit, unlike other events I could mention - is that it's at the wrong end of August. Flexible though my time is, I do need to be back at work in September. But the thought of going there put the idea of crossing the Wash into our heads. It had already been in Jim's for quite some time, and I allowed it a small corner in mine on the proviso that we will actually have a pilot on our boat, steering it, won't we... And it spares me one navigation of the Nene. Having done that, but not gone to the IWA, we hoped to explore some northern canals we've not yet traversed: a circuit of the Leeds Liverpool and the Rochdale, perhaps, and a detour to Sheffield on the way.

But now there is a better plan, and it involves propositioning the ever keen Craig (who with Vicky came with us from Little Venice to Limehouse last year and were fantastic). It goes something like this. Jim brings Warrior solo from Bill Fen to Stanground, then picks Craig up at Peterborough. Craig - not me - enjoys the delights of three days on the Nene (and Craig, if you're reading this, I hasten to add that everyone except me thinks the Nene is absolutely wonderful. I have just taken agin it for no good reason, honest). I join the party at Northampton for a handover in the Malt Shovel. Craig may, if work calls, depart at this point, and I get to do the Rothersthorpe flight which I like a lot (mainly because it's at the end of the Nene), and we then proceed to Braunston where hopefully we can plot up somewhere that's not in the way of anyone big and important. The bugger with Braunston of course is that unlike Peterborough and Northampton, it's not well served by trains. Apparently one can do things with buses - if anyone knows what, with detailed instructions, I should be most grateful to be informed.

After that we will have a month or so before the summer holiday proper begins, and hopefully will be able to leave the boat somewhere even if that does mean coming south a bit and/or moving it once or twice. Then we can head north again - and, eventually perhaps, return via the Wash at the end of the year's travels.

Now and then...

I know I'm always banging on about things changing, and usually for the worse... And even if the change is for the better, I still have a bit of a problem with it. It's a bit hard to explain, but I suspect it's all of a piece with my inability to remember which direction I was walking in when I emerge from a shop, or to have any conception of how a linear route relates to a map - I can manage with one or the other, but it was a revelation to me that some people can effortlessly combine the two. The problem is that once something is changed, I simply cannot remember how it used to be. Just very recently it's dawned on me that some people have very visual memories, and others - e.g, me - don't. Most of my memories tend to be stored as human Word files, rather than jpegs. And of course the thing with the workings of the human mind is that it takes a long time before you realise that not everyone is the same as you.


Anyway, when I got back from Birmingham last week I showed Jim my nice Gas Street Basin photos, and last night, he recognised the very same scene on his second reading of September 1974's Waterways World (25p). The scene clearly isn't exactly the same - the buildings are different and I think the photo must have been taken from a different vantage point (but I can't be entirely sure, which is symptomatic of my affliction) but the amazing thing is that the boats could be the same. Some of them probably are.

Sincere apologies to WW for nicking the picture, but I do hope they won't mind.

Toilet travails, lavatorial larks and macerator madness

It's not only boaters who have trouble with their macerators. A certain senior offspring who lives not a million miles away (it would not quite be in good taste to refer to him here as number one son, although that is indeed his name) is dependent on one in his cottage. And it is not, ahem, macerating, although it is pumping fine.

I was apprised of this earlier when he turned up on the doorstep asking if he could borrow my prized Snap-On screwdriver to dismantle the unit. This seemed to me like a Very Bad Idea on a number of fronts, especially if it was going to involve my Snap-On, so I declined, and said he should wait til Jim got back. Provided they haven't actually broken it, it's still under guarantee, so we thought it best to ring up the proper man to come and look at it, but in the meantime we dug out the instruction book and troubleshooting guide, and have diagnosed the problem as a clogged air distributor, or disseminator, or something. I suggested hitting it with a hammer, but my technical expertise was not valued.

Meanwhile of course, life goes on. What a shame, I said, that we don't have a spare porta-potti at home that we could lend them. For we possess two (one belonging to Warrior and one to Helyn) but the bottom half of both is kept on Warrior (a back up and a spare back up). But then Jim remembered that when he last returned from Bill Fen he brought a bottom half with him, on account of the elsan point being frozen. Of course. So we had the bottom half. But could we find the spare top half? Picking our way through our outbuilding which, despite copious Freecycling and downsizing seems to be some kind of bottomless knick knack pit (from which they emerge, rather than one into which they disappear; just thought I ought to make that clear) by the light of a very feeble torch, it was definitely not where I remembered it. Son in question was then sent to clamber, in the dark and the wind and the damp, into Helyn on her trailer on the drive, and search there. The first time he emerged, he said there was only another bottom in there - impossible, I said, and gave him another leg-up. This time he turned it over and lo and behold it was the top so we now had the pair.

They have been duly clipped together and handed over, with instructions and directions as to where to find the manhole cover. Now all we, sorry, they, need is some blue...

Scenes from last summer II

According to the photo, this was September 8th, which, as it is clearly not the Rothersthorpe flight, would put it between Blisworth and there. It's just one of those completely anonymous, pretty pictures that you see on greetings cards and jigsaw puzzles, and think, now why did they chose that one? In my case of course, the answer is I chose it through my random number generator, which consists of a pack of cards and a set of instructions for generating any number between one and four hundred, for this purpose, but can be easily adapted. I might even share it with you, as long as you promise not to say I'm odd.

Scenes from last summer

Last night I was looking through Jims photos from last summer. You may recall that I had to decamp at Uxbridge, as paid employment called, but Jim continued with Luck Duck up the Grand Union to Northampton and thence through to Ramsey, with a few stops along the way to wait for the weather, meaning that in all this part of the journey alone took three weeks.

There are four hundred photos from this, and in some of them the sun is shining! So I thought it would be a nice antidote to pick a few random selections from this album over the remainder of the winter (oh, and I've got nothing else to write about of course).

Now obviously looking at this one, my first thought is 'what's the next boat along but one?' and as there are so many photos I only have to click back along the sequence to see that it is in fact Elstree.

Platform one and three quarters

Whenever I visit Tarporley, or the Museum, or, for that matter, my friend Dean, I always make sure to make use of the footpath along Platform One at Kings Cross. It's actually a lot more pleasant, and I guess it must be quicker, than walking around the outside, but above all it is a Matter Of Principle. Because, I hear from a range of sources, although I couldn't find anything on the web, plans are afoot to extinguish said right of way as part of the development of Kings Cross and the surrounding areas. There were, I believe, people counting how many people used the route, as if that would have a bearing, although I suspect (and so does an Islington councillor I met at some event last year) that it's a forlorn hope. It is quite heavily used, despite the powers that be clearly discouraging it (by making the exit path very narrow and invisible for a start) but I hold out no hope that the great god regeneration will fail to see it off in the end. Which is a shame.

There is a certain glamour and romance about Kings Cross that you don't find at other stations. When the mist rolls into that great shed you can almost imagine that it's smoke and steam wafting about. St Pancras, lovely as it is, is too new and clean to convey this atmosphere, and Euston - well, the less said the better.

I have a soft spot of course for Kings Cross because of my weekly commute to Huddersfield over a period of eighteen months. London may be one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and wherever you go - including the concourse at Kings Cross - you are surrounded by people speaking hundreds of different languages; dressed in myriad different styles, and of all hues of skin and hair. But the really exotic thing, the promise of romance and adventure, is in the big fat red faced GNER guard, who greets you in a broad Yorkshire accent. It's that that tells you that this is the gateway to new and strange places.

A poem

Jim found this; it's the product list of the Liver Grease, Oil and Chemical Company, founded in 1809. I hope they won't mind me reproducing it for its sheer evocative poetry. It reminds me a bit of this poem.

Aluminium Solar Reflecting Bitumen Roofing Paint
Anti-Scuffing Compound & Grease
Bitumen Paint BS 3416 - Solid Bitumens
Beechwood Tar & Pitch
Barbados Tar
Burgundy Pitch
Black Lead Powder
Black Annealed Wire
Creosotes: Types 1, 2, and 3
Caulking pitches (black and white; hard and brittle to soft) + Oakum
Concrete Mould Oil
Chalk Lump
Caustic Soda
Cotton Waste (white and coloured)
Colza Oil
Cardium Compound equivalent
Carbolineum BS 144 (1990)
Caulking Irons made to order
Cork
Cork Dust
French Chalk as powder or sticks
Disinfectant Fluids (black, white and pine)
Distillate Degreasants
Export products Empty Tins / Drums.
Fish Oil
Flux Oil
Graphites
Greases
Greasy (gland) Packing
High Temperature Silicone Grease
Iron Cement
Jointing Compounds: white graphite, petrol & oil resisting for pipes.
Linseed Oils (raw, boiled)
Low Cost Oil and Grease from time to time
Lead Powders (red, yellow, white)
Lap Compound
Lime (quick, slaked)
Lime Wash Constituents
Lysol (disinfectant)
Molybdenum Disulphide Powder, blended in grease, wax or oil
Naptha
Oakum (Swedish)
Oils:
Coal Tar - a thin tar.
Colza - a burning oil for hurricane lamps
Shutter - for concrete.
Drying - for paint making.
Fish - for decks & ropes.
Paint - for surface coatings.
Storm - for hotter burning, and also pouring onto troubled waters.
Pine Tar - industrial perfume, and also for hoof oil.
Soap Oil.
Pitches: Petroleum, Vegetable, Mineral, Coal, Caulking, Burgundy
Quick Lime
Roofing Tar & Bitumens
Rosins (gum and wood)
Stockholm Tar
Sodium Hypochlorite
Spun Yarn
Solvents (numerous)
Spirits
Soap Oil
Storm Oil
Slushing Oil
Tallow
Tar
Tarred Marlin
Turpentine (substitutes or genuine)
Toluene
Tall Oils
Varnishes
Wood Preservatives (brown)
Wood Tar
Waxes (bees and petroleum)
White Lead Paste (or in Tallow)
White Spirit
White Petroleum Jelly
Xylene

Brummagem

This was my third or possibly even fourth visit to Birmingham, but the first time I managed to venture beyond hotel and conference centre. With a free afternoon I took full advantage to explore on foot where I have never yet ventured by water.

My first purchase on arrival was an A-Z (it is my intention to build a complete library of these) and with the help of this, a lot of brow-furrowing, and the helpful pedestrian fingerposts (which I am convinced are designed to funnel you to your destination via the shops, a bit like the signs that tell you you can only get to the end of the pier by going through the amusement arcade, even though this is clearly a lie) I eventually found some canal, and by dint of following some more signs on the towpath, arrived at Gas Street Basin. This was smaller and less glitzy that I had anticipated, which was far from being a disappointment; quite the reverse in fact.

In all my waterside perambulations I believe I saw only one other boat moving, and that was a BW tug and mud hopper (is that the right term? A boat full of mud anyway). Not a single pleasure boat was underway, and the visitor moorings were all empty.

I took a bracing stroll down the Farmers Bridge flight, and even now it is possible to see why this route was so hated by boatmen; even without the chemical outfalls, evil smelling sludge, dead dogs and factories it was dank and forbidding. So I loved it of course.

Making my way back through the city centre, I found England's second city rather disappointing. Although there are some very fine buildings, there are many more appalling ones, and there seems no sense of cohesiveness. Grand pieces of public art - including a Gormley sculpture and many lesser pieces - seem to have been dropped randomly about the place; as did the buildings themselves. The pedestrianisation of the city centre leaves it, as is so often the case, feeling sterile and artificial, and enormous shopping centres abound and dominate. There is still a great deal of dereliction, interspersed, again apparently randomly, with shiney regeneration. There was none of that sense of grandeur that you feel in, say, Manchester.

There was, however, a splendid memorial to Joseph Chamberlain, reminding us that this was the epicentre of Victorian civic pride, the municipal powerhouse driving the development of English local government and its mission to improve the lives, physically, educationally and spiritually, of the inhabitants of England's great industrial cities. Sadly, like its physical, architectural, manifestations, that mission is now but a shadow of its former self.

This one's for Nev

Blimey. I turn my back for five minutes, and suddenly it's CanalWorld (electrical chapter) here. Talk about lowering the tone. Let's have little interlude, play some soothing music and... that's better.

So, to our first request. Nev would like to hear the latest on poor little Helyn. Well, I'm afraid there isn't much to report; she's still sitting on the drive working on her green patina while we are distracted by other matters.

The most dispiriting thing which has hindered progress has been the steering cable. We had to replace it, because it broke. The old one had an eleven inch throw; these are apparently no longer made. The new one has a nine inch throw. Now you (I) would have thought, no matter, it won't have quite such a tight turning circle, but it'll still work; after all, that's only one inch less movement in each direction. But it seems that the difficulty is getting it lined up centrally to start with, rather than having it turn all the way one way and not at all the other. I have held the bloody thing in my hands and moved the engine and it has been fine, and I said, look, this is fine, all we need to do is make sure that THIS bit is held HERE and it will work. But apparently there are not the means to hold THAT bit THERE rather than where it wants to go. It is the sort of situation I find very frustrating because there's no reason for it not to work; everybody else seems to be able to make theirs work, and I can see with my own eyes and feel with my own hands how it should work.

So we tend to think, hmm, lets go off and do something else and perhaps the answer will magically come to us in our sleep, or the mice will do it. The interior is now pretty much finished. All the flaky paint has been removed and replaced with nice bright proper white paint. The exterior will need another scrub, and maybe a new coat of varnish on the handrails, but all the other jobs are tiny little things. I still want to take the trip up the Sussex Ouse once it's finished and before we sell her, if at all possible, but we really do need to get on. That's one big bit of clutter!

Anyway, while I was in Birmingham I saw one of Helyn's long lost relatives:


Nice wheelhouse! More Birmingham pics to follow... always leave 'em wanting more.

A shock to the system

Sorry to all those who have 'tuned in' in the hope of reading 'War is a danger to health' or 'Stop whinging it is only your legs' a story of the machinations of the Planning Committee of Wealden District Council, a neighbouring district council to ours in deepest East Sussex but there are developments of yesterdays story that cannot wait and I feel further enhances it. It transpires that I was wrong about the gruesome twosome of CWF. They are not primarily concerned about any poor child, pensioner, single parent or other sentient being that touches your boat (if the earths are not bonded) but about SWIMMERS who might be electrocuted. So all of us that are responsible for metal boats must check our wiring and calculate that all fuses are more than 50% higher value than any potential(!) loads always allowing for the fact that they are only 50% of the amperage rating of the connecting wiring - if that can't be achieved you will apparently have to upgrade all your wiring and then and only then make sure that both your 240v and 12v are separately bonded (fixed securely) to the hull. All that so that all the many thousands of swimmers that regularly use the 'cut' shall not be electrocuted. Please do not rely on any of the figures contained herein, it is all greek to me.

posted by Jim

Urban Myth or volte face

Never one to refuse the chance to have a rant and taking advantage of my great leader's trip to Birmingham to stroke her beard as well as visiting the Gas Street Basin, I thought I would regale you with my views on an urban myth which seems to resonate far and wide across the ether but is especially championed within the confines of the Canal World Forum. This is not the kind of myth promulgated in the Daily Mail - the French demand that we have straight bananas, flat crisps or square onions to go with our Kraft cheese slices (can you still get them?) or that there are millions of Roma waiting in Calais to shoplift their way to fame and fortune or that any royal, however obscure, poverty stricken and impossible to pronounce (preferably all three) deserves greater sympathy than any overseas natural disaster especially in a Muslim country and of course the biggest myth of all, oft repeated in the Daily Telegraph, that New (or even old) Labour are synonymous with the red tide of Socialism and there are mounted hoardes of Red Army cavalry waiting to change our way of life forever. These myths have two main themes, one , to reinforce the fact that the old world order is alive and well and secondly, that anything to do with what George Bush called Urp especially if it is also to do with the French is a bad thing and no good will come of it.
Back to the job in hand - the myth in question concerns earth bonding to a metal boat hull (what incidentally happens when you have a fibreglass or wooden hull?) . There I bet that has got your attention, at least it links to Moomin's comment. When this was last broached (for the thousandth time?)on CWF, who almost without exception think (know) that it is a good thing, the 'Dirty Den' of the forum, not known for his humanity or kindness, justified earth bonding not because the 'numbers add up' or 'it is more work for boat electricians ' or Readavolt gizmos can sell more gizmos but because visiting children 'might get electrocuted'. Well try as I might, I have found no evidence whatsoever that any child, adult, pensioner or single parent (for Daily Mail readers) having been electrocuted fully or partly. I am not disputing the theoretical position but there are plenty of stories of people suffocating or dying of CO poisoning either assisted or un assisted by bottles of vodka and blocked ventilation and people drowning likewise and even people having a few fatal injuries from other sources but nowhere can I find people, howsoever defined, being injured or dying from electrocution and there are, I have no doubt, some right dodgy turn outs amongst the nearly 40000 boats on the Inland Waterways.

Tomorrow 'War is a danger to health'

Jim

Request show

Oh dear, as you may have noticed, I've hit a bit of a lean patch. After such a good start, I've quite run out of things to say. Nothing has been happening chez Warrior in recent weeks, and my stock of ideas has run dry. So, in a shameless example of shifting responsibility, it's over to you. I am now taking requests. If there's anything you'd like an update on, or to hear more about, or see more pictures of, please say now! Or of you'd like to rent-a-rant, name a topic and I'll be happy to oblige. You could even dedicate it to someone.

Happy Birthday Ali

Tonight we are all going to The Harp in Covent Garden, to celebrate my sister's fortieth birthday. I've made her a lovely card, using this photo of her on the tenth birthday, in 1979. She's hardly changed!

Missing the bus

There was a minor flurry in the papers last week about a bus driver who, being an evangelical Christian, refused to take out one of the buses carrying the 'atheist slogan' There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

This does raise the interesting issue of bus drivers refusing to drive buses on the basis of objecting to the adverts on the side, which are often for films advertised on the basis of their sexual or violent content - yet I never heard of a Christian refusing to drive one of those.

I haven't seen any of these buses yet, but apparently there are now 800 of them over the country carrying this advert, paid for by funds raised through the atheistcampaign website. Now in principle, obviously, I thoroughly approve of this campaign, which was itself initially prompted by scary fire and brimstone Christian bus adverts. In practice however, the slogan is terrible. That 'probably' - inserted at the insistence of Transport for London - makes it mealy mouthed and bet-hedging. It's not even an unequivocally atheist statement. An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in the existence of any god or gods.

And the second sentence, Now stop worrying and enjoy your life does us a disservice on two fronts. Firstly it implies that religious people are worrying, which they're no more likely to be than atheists, so it can be easily dismissed by those whose religion is a source of comfort and security rather than eternal questioning. Secondly, it can be interpreted to give credence to the idea that atheism equals unbridled selfish hedonism. Not what was meant, I'm sure, but undoubtedly how it could be read by opponents.

Having had a read of the atheiestcampaign website though, I can see why they chose to go the way they did, and it's great to see that so many people are supporting this very simple idea, and that it's taking off worldwide.

If I had to think up a slogan though, to reassure the worried and show that atheism is not equivalent to amorality, it would be: You don't need god to be good

If it's good enough for the engine room

... Then it's good enough for my kitchen. The time before last that Jim was up on Warrior, I took advantage of his absence and took down some shelves* in the kitchen. I say shelves; what they actually were were primary school lockers, minus the doors. A set of foot square boxes seven boxes wide and three high. They were super, and I was very pleased when we salvaged them from the school, and for years they held all manner of treasures. Coffee pots, mostly. But I was starting to find it all a bit overbearing and as I was in the process of downsizing the antique collection, not really needed any more.

What I had forgotten was that when we moved into this house, there had been a door knocked through this wall, and although Jim filled it in and made it good it's still bare plaster and not quite flat. But fortunately we still have lots of the wood left that we did Warriors engine room with; pine T&G from a 1920s house (well, they wanted it replaced with nice smooth plasterboard). Perfect, especially as one wall in the kitchen is already - original from 1901 - done similarly. When it's finished the whole lot is going to be painted in some trendy shade of white.

Gosh, keeping up a post a day isn't going to be easy.

*When I say I did it, obviously what I mean is I told Aaron and Sebastian to do it. Children are so useful once they get big and can wipe their own noses.

A different kind of quiet

In theory, one of the beauties of a boat is the chance to get away from the noise and distraction of everyday life and get some real peace and quiet. In practice, of course, it doesn't always work like that. Boats are also great for working on, socialising on, and indeed living on - and bringing much of that noise and distraction with you. The days you can sit, alone, just looking out across the water, are few.

So you might think that having an engine like Warrior's, which could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called quiet, would be anathema to someone who craves tranquillity and solitude; that it would be the cause of stress rather than relaxation. I possibly even thought this myself in the past, much as I love the engine. But on my last visit I realised how wrong that was. What stops you being alone with your thoughts isn't noise per se, but speech - conversation (even one sided!), or the radio, or other people's conversations overheard. Even most music, especially with words, demands attention and breaks the thread of your daydreams. Start the engine, however, and all that fades away, and you're surrounded instead by an entirely rhythmic and (provided nothing goes wrong) utterly predictable buffer of sound between you and the outside world. Lack of quiet, but not of peace.

Hope and anchor

Oh boy, look what we've got. Jim spotted it among a pile of old stuff outside one of the chandleries in Newhaven, and snapped it up for a bargain price. I'm not sure what this means for our future travels, and whether it's reassuring (I was never sure our other anchor would be up to anything too strenuous) or worrying (about where such reassurance might lead us to venture).

Nor am I entirely certain where it's going to live. There was a brand new narrowboat at Floods Ferry when we were there - if I remember rightly it was called Wandering Snail, and featured a painting of one and an elaborate pun about being the 'less cargo' carrying company. Anyway, it had been built with a special anchor shaped recessed panel in the cabinside. Terrible, isn't it, how you never think of these things until it's too late.