Another birthday

This time it's my Auntie Doreen, who's 90 today. Any minute now we're off to Swindon to help her celebrate it. My sister has just sent me this lovely photo, circa 1920, of my grandparents (the grandfather that I never met, who was a Great Western boilermaker (though that's not what I imagined one would look like), and the scary Grandma, from Jersey, whom he collected, not speaking a word of English, on a GWR outing, and who lived to be ninety nine) and my father, Leslie, and Doreen. A second sister, Ina, was to arrive a few years later.

Happy Bazday

And here's the birthday boy about fourteen years ago - one of my all time favourite photos of him. It takes a lot to look that mean and moody whilst wearing fluorescent green wellingtons and holding a slice of bread.

Snow fun (ouch)

Tomorrow is Baz's birthday when I will, in time honoured fashion, post a cute picture of his younger self. For today though, a completely non-embarrassing and mature photo taken a couple of weeks ago.

Cold comfort

Browsing through G2 on arriving home this evening, my eye was caught by an article about people giving up their fridges in order to reduce their carbon footprint. Oooh, I thought, no fridge. Just like me on Andante. I wonder if there are any hints I might have benefited from.

Well, what a swizz. These people who have oh-so-greenly unplugged their fridges still, it transpires, have a 'small freezer' in their basement. Plus a 'cool box' upstairs. And this is still treated as an enormous deal. This despite the fact that within living memory, most people didn't have fridges (surely in fact, the electric fridge was invented within living memory). I mean, Jim isn't that ancient, but he remembers his family getting their first, second hand, General Electric model. People had larders, and meat safes. Hmm, and daily deliveries from the milkman and the butcher's boy.

Admittedly, I had a fridge on Andante - one of those little brown gas ones - but it didn't work. We took it all the way to Sowerby Bridge (we got as far as Brighouse by boat, but then had to turn round and come back and go by car. No, we had to buy bolts, turn round and come back and go by car) to get it decoked or whatever it needed, and oh the excitement when we finally (with much lying on the floor squinting into its little mirror) got it to light. Cautiously, I put the CO detector in close - possibly, with hindsight, too close - proximity to its workings, and watched and waited. Unbelievably, it seemed to be working. A few hours later I was wondrously poking at the thin film of ice that was forming on the top of the ice cube tray, when off went the alarm. And that was the end of that little experiment. Subsequently, Jim bought a 12v fridge - a full size one - on ebay, which was wired in just before I sold the boat.

So, all the time I lived on Andante, in short, I was fridgeless. When it was very hot, I would buy a bag of ice in Sainsburys, and put it in a tin tray on the top shelf. But mostly I just kept stuff in the gap under the foredeck, sitting on top of the pig iron ballast, where it was a bit wobbly, but always cool. This in fact was the original beer cupboard, and never bettered.

Here are my top tips for living without a fridge:
1. Don't eat meat
2. Don't eat fish. Unless it's tinned.
3. Eat up everything you've cooked so that you don't have any leftovers (the main reason, I think, that I left Huddersfield a stone and a half heavier than I arrived. But it might have been the pie and peas).
4. Take your milk to work with you every day and let it chill out in their fridge (cheat! cheat!) Or you could buy fresh every day.

Oh look, here's fun

For weeks now Jim has been driving me mad (yes, even more than usual) by reading out bits from CWF and from emails from Moominpapa, and worse, far worse, trying to EXPLAIN to me about matters electrical, and this is something I neither want nor need to know. The fact that I have a total mental block against understanding it doesn't help either. But will he stop trying to tell me?

Yes, yes, I know it's important to know the basics. And I thought I did. I know how to wire a plug and I know what fuses are for and how domestic earths work, and I know not to stick my fingers in sockets and throw electric fires in the bath and all that sort of thing. But bloody hell, it's a whole different ball game on boats. In my naivety, I'd have thought that 12v DC would have to be simpler than 240v AC, but how wrong can you be?

But I suspect that no one else really knows either. Otherwise they wouldn't constantly be arguing about it, would they? It's a matter of as deep division as the Creed. It's what we philosophers call an essentially contested concept.* There are, I would go so far as to hazard, no objective truths (short of don't stick your fingers in the socket).

So these objects are for something. Just don't ask me what.

*Don't bother looking it up. This is not, strictly speaking, true.

Scenes from last summer VII

A wall, somewhere in Northampton.

Scenes from last summer VI

Having been reassured that my random number selection is sufficiently random for these purposes. I bring you once again the Warrior Duck somewhere between Pitstone and Soulbury locks, in the rain that was to hamper their onward progress considerably.

This is of course a singularly inapropriate selection for today which actually, briefly, here at least, felt like the first day of spring, and made me SO wish I was on a boat.

But doesn't Warrior's fore end look nice.

How random?

Moominpapa suggests that my method of randomly selecting a number between one and four hundred, as I have been doing for recent photos from last summer, may not be all that random. He may be right, although I think it will be random enough for these purposes, where it isn't being used very often, and it's completely independent of the photos themselves. It's a pack of cards, so the randomness largely depends upon how well it's been shuffled and reshuffled and where it's cut.

I need to create a three digit figure, between 1 and 400.

So for the first digit, let hearts = zero, clubs = 1, diamonds = 2 and spades = 3

For the second and third digits, let 1 = 1 and so on, with 10 = zero and discounting picture cards.

This doesn't however give an equal chance to each number between 1 and 400; unless one had three packs or reshuffled the whole pack between each selection, it would militate against the last two digits being the same, and the latter two selections might also be influenced by the first if that were not a picture card.

So it may not, technically, be completely random. But it serves my purpose; it rules out the possibility of me exerting any preference, whether consciously or not, and above all, it saves me actually having to make a choice.

Scenes from last summer V

Pick any random number between one and four hundred. The fifth time I do it, and I pick a photo I've already used. So I picked another one. I can't see the names, but I guess it must be Cedar, with Cyprus inside. Cyprus is another of those rather charming misspellings; it should be Cypress, as in the tree, but got named after the country instead. Of these four Erewash boats (built by Yarwoods?) I also saw Ash when I was in Birmingham.

Scenes from last summer IV

Septembr 15th, Warrior and the Duck emerge from Titchmarsh Lock on the Nene.

Something funny's been happening with the blog today - when I access it from the address bar, whether on the main pc or the laptop, the sidebar comes up but it's blank where the posts should be - but when I access it via a link or through the archive, it's fine. Has anyone else noticed or experienced this?

Fear and loathing

I warn you now, not only does this have nothing to do with boats, it isn't even mildly amusing. But it's something that's bothered me for quite a while, and I was reminded of it by this story in the paper this morning.

It's the misuse of the suffix 'phobia' that bothers me. It started with homophobia, and now we have Islamophobia; more new formations will no doubt follow if they haven't already.

But the thing is, a phobia is a fear. An unreasonable fear, but a fear nonetheless. And we usually feel sympathy for people who are afraid of something, no matter how foolish or misplaced we judge their fear to be.

These new 'phobias' do not actually refer to fears at all, but to hatreds. Fear and loathing may well be closely related, but they are not the same thing. We can sympathise with someone who is afraid of, say, horses, but not someone who wants to go out and hurt them, or wipe them off the face of the earth.

Take women. There are two clearly different words to describe fear of women - gynaephobia, and hatred of women - misogyny. So it is possible; there is a prefix available that denotes (unreasonable) hatred. We need to be able to make this distinction in other areas as well. The lazy use of the term 'phobia' by journalists who can't construct a new term with a more appropriate 'mis' prefix robs us of a valuable sublety in our language, and brackets together those who fear and those who hate. It's not the same thing, and we shouldn't allow the lazy use of language to blur the distinction.

Easter excursion

Emails have been winging prolifically between Jim and Moominpapa planning our joint Easter Expedition. We are going to go to Cambridge with Warrior and Melaleuca in convoy, possibly stopping off along the way (or the way back) to explore minor waterways and expensive eateries.

I shall be enjoying my annual jaunt to the Political Studies Association - in Manchester this year - until April 9th, so it looks as if we shall travel up to Bill Fen on Friday early morning, throw our things and provisions onto the boat and depart post haste to make eight hour journey to Salters Lode by nightfall, in order to go through on the 10.30a.m. tide on Easter Saturday.

Then we will wend our way at a more leisurely pace up the Ouse and onto the Cam, hopefully meeting up with people along the way, and spend a couple of days in Cambridge checking that the nice pubs are still there before returning within a week or so.

Prior to that, Jim has to pay another maintenance visit, to make sure that all is finished and prepared for which I suppose is the start of the season, as we're planning some early summer boating too this year. So I expect the plans will be fine tuned/altered/ completely rewritten before we actually go - but if you think we might be passing you, do say.

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.

What it says on the label

You may have noticed, since yesterday, extra green words appearing at the bottom of posts. Yes, I have decided to start labelling - aka tagging - posts so that anyone with a burning desire to read all that I have written, and only what I have written, about, say, Tarporley, can do so at the click of a mouse. Categorisations are of necessity somewhat rough and ready, to avoid a proliferation of taxonomies. I shall (if I don't lose interest/the will to live) retrospectively label all the posts going right back to the start. This process will, I imagine, become slower and slower the further back I go, as I will have forgotten more and more of the posts and have to remind myself what they were about. To be honest, with my cataloguing tendencies I'm amazed it's taken me so long.

This reminds me tangentially of one of my favourite paradoxes, Bertrand Russell's paradox of sets.

Now for this post, should I introduce a new category of 'blog disappearing up its own arse' or should I just file it under....

A painted boat

Before I'd even had a proper look in Tarporley's back cabin, I was perturbed to hear that 'it needs redecorating'. When was it last done, I asked. Probably in the fifties, was the reply - how serious, how accurate - I don't know. Certainly the graining is in a bad way, but if the painting's anything like that old it would have done well to survive as intact as it has. Probably nothing special - I would have to leave that to others to judge. But worth preserving? Yes, why not. Whenever it was done, and whoever it was done by, it's a little bit of the boat's history, and if it still looks good then I'd say it's well worth keeping. I'd have to agree that the rest of it could do with a bit of a seeing to though.

Painted Boats and Pirates

I went to see a film last night; not something I often do. But this of course was a film featuring - if not actually about - boats. Apparently Painted Boats, directed for Ealing Studios by Charles Crichton in 1945 was intended as the first in a series of what we would now call docu-dramas about workers in wartime Britain. In the event, no others followed.

As a film drama, it is, to be perfectly honest, not exactly gripping. It centres on two boating families: the traditionalist, horse-boating Smiths, whose daughter Mary has somehow acquired a cut glass accent and is wont, at moments of heightened emotion (which are frequent) to clasp a kitten to her breast. Interestingly, although the film is set over a period of months, the kitten never gets any bigger. The cause of the heightened emotion is Ted Stoner, whose family have a motor boat and butty, but who has had a bit of education and can't wait to get off the cut. My favourite character was the obligatory cheeky kid brother, Alfie. So we follow the trials and tribulations of the families through various life events - the death of Mr Smith, the replacement of horse by engine and the eventual call-up and escape of Ted, after which Mary and her mother continue pluckily on to Limehouse, accompanied by Alf who, although it is never spelt out, I like to think has also escaped from the fate of being sent to live with an aunt and going to school.

But the plot and the accents and the size of the kitten don't matter at all, of course, because it's got boats in. And there is nothing like some old footage of heavily loaded boats, particularly with a Bolinder soundtrack, to get me clutching the metaphorical kitten oh so tightly. I'm not entirely sure who was playing the boats, only that they were fictitious characters - although quite a few others did make cameo appearances as themselves. I'm sure this is a matter of record somewhere, but I can't remember where.

The event was courtesy of the IWA, held at the Pirate Club in Camden, and was the first of their 'socials' I've attended. Everyone was certainly very welcoming, and it is, I hope, no disrespect to note that a good number of them could have been founder members - and who knows, perhaps were. It was also a great pleasure to meet Tim Lewis, one of the prime movers behind Fulbourne, one of my favourite-to-look-at boats.

Conditions of carriage

Have you ever read the National Rail Conditions of Carriage? Or those of Transport for London, covering the tube and buses? Nor had I, even though we agree to be bound by them every time we buy a ticket and use the service. In fact, as they stand, the conditions are fairly innocuous, user-friendly and mainly concerned with where and when any particular ticket entitles you to travel. There are rules about not putting your luggage on the seats (oh would that they were enforced), or taking flash photographs on the tube. So far all very sensible and reasonable.

All that might change however if the British Transport Police get their way. Nominally as part of the fight against knife crime (a classic moral panic if ever there was one), they are asking the rail companies and TfL to write into their conditions of carriage that by purchasing a ticket you are giving your consent to be searched. Apparently it is not enough that they are already legally entitled to stop and search anyone whom they suspect of committing a crime - and carrying an offensive weapon was still a crime last time I looked. They basically want carte blanche to carry out what are effectively random searches on the travelling public. That's very different from anything already in the Conditions of Carriage, and it also overturns policing codes that forbid voluntary searches (a refreshingly sensible provision given that when confronted with two policemen and a dog nothing is really voluntary). It is in effect a change in the law, being proposed not just via the back door, but through the scullery window of the conditions of a commercial contract.

Please, someone, tell me I'm not the only one who has a horror of being searched. Call it a phobia if you like, you can even call it a neurosis; I don't care. I physically recoil both from that invasion of my personal space and the powerlessness which it represents. It is the things I hear about the indignities imposed at airports in the name of 'security' that is the biggest factor preventing me from flying. Even when it's reasonable and justified, I would still rather avoid situations in which it might occur. After all, I am a blameless, law abiding citizen going about my daily business, not giving even the slightest cause for suspicion. The sort of person with nothing to hide and therefore theoretically, nothing to fear. But I do fear this. I fear the ever growing power of the state, not just in some abstract way, but because of what it can do to me, personally, physically. It can assault my privacy, and my dignity, and even if I am exceptionally sensitive that still does not diminish my right - and yours - to be left alone.

The current request is couched in terms of the operation against knife crime, but if the conditions are changed, there won't even need to be a reason. Police are drawing parallels with the consent given when attending a football match. But there are a number of differences. A football match is essentially held on private property, and the owners of that property have the right to demand whatever conditions they like; take it or leave it. The public transport system is, notwithstanding privatisation, still effectively that - public - and should provide a service to everyone. More importantly, no one has to go to a football match, just as very few people have to fly. If I decide that foregoing that pleasure is a price I am prepared to pay to avoid the sort of environment where searches take place (and in the case of airports, where men with guns hang out), then I can do that without too great a cost. But I can't decide not to travel by train, because the cost - giving up my job - is too high.

I wonder whether I can verbally decline to give my consent when I buy a ticket? Not to a machine or a website, that's for sure. All I can cling to is that consent does not have to imply co-operation.

However, the police request has received a 'lukewarm' response from the Transport Select Committee, so perhaps it won't happen. Perhaps it was just a headline-grabbing or kite-flying exercise. A bit like the proposals a while back to introduce 'airport style security' at mainline stations as a counter-terrorism measure. Presumably the powers that be eventually realised that someone who wanted to blow up Kings Cross (say, as it's a route I'm familiar with) wouldn't actually have to board a train at Kings Cross, or even pass the station entrance. They could get on a train at Dewsbury, for example, or any other unmanned station on that line; change at Wakefield Westgate, which doesn't even necessitate changing platforms, and arrive at Kings Cross already on the train. So I live in hope that this latest wheeze is just another example of such short sighted, ineffective, superficial and excessive responses to threats whether real or perceived.

Incandescent

Until I realised that it would align me with a Daily Mail campaign, I was quite attached to old fashioned incandescent light bulbs. I never quite got round to stocking up on them before they disappeared from the shelves - the demise of Woolworths put paid to that, somewhat procrastinated, notion, but I still maintained that the replacements couldn't save that much electricity as the fact that they take so long to warm up means that you never turn them off... That and the deadly poison. In all seriousness, this does have about it the whiff of a policy that wasn't quite thought through.

There was, however, a fairly convincing piece in the Guardian last week that persuaded me that not switching over to energy saving bulbs is in fact morally equivalent to raping a polar bear. So I will accept the coolly flickering domestic gloom with something approaching equanimity. No more 100 watt bulbs for me.

Fifteen* watt ones are a different matter. Let's face it, on the boat - at least with the fittings we've got - compact fluorescents are not a possibility. Ironically, though, alone of everyone I've ever met, I actually like flourescent light; at least the old fashioned sort than emanates from long tubes. At least it's bright. And it's diffuse. What I don't like is concentrated spots that get in my eyes. Had fluorescent tubes on Andante; absolutely fine. But Warrior has those directable spotlights and we're pretty much stuck with them. We've tried the LED bulbs - to save on battery as much as anything else; say what you like, but with hauling your coal in and worrying about your batteries there's nothing like boating to make you aware of your energy use. Hmm, and your waste disposal. But they gave up the ghost very quickly, and were flickery and unreliable. So it's tungsten bulbs for Warrior. And just to make sure we don't run out, or have to buy at chandlery prices, we stocked up at Ramsey Motor Factors for fifty pence apiece. They were also excellent at finding us the bulbs we needed for the old brass bulkhead lights in the engine room and back cabin.

*oops. 21 watt actually, as the photo clearly gives away. I thought they were nice and bright.

Take two bottles onto the boat?

OK, we all know that on a boat, space is at a premium. So you don't want to be clogging your kitchen cupboards up with all manner of different bottles of cleaning products. Or your bathroom shelves, for that matter. Secondly, we all know that putting anything down the boat plughole other than super eco-friendly biodegradable phosphate free fish-respecting ethical stuff is not only very naughty, but liable to lead ultimately to a ban on putting anything at all down that particular plughole.

So in the light of both the above points, and in the service of boaters everywhere, I am conducting an experiment. To just how many different purposes can Ecover washing up liquid be put? After all, it's a detergent, and a mild one at that. So is shampoo, shower gel, general purpose cleaner, laundry liquid &c &c (See! I remembered). Do you really need more than that one bottle?

So far I have experimented, on my last visit to the boat when it was still warm enough to put water near one's head, with using Ecover Aloe Vera washing up liquid as shampoo. I did this three days running and with no discernable ill effects - lovely shiny hair. (My hair is, in point of fact, shinier than usual when I wash it anywhere other than chalky Sussex; on the plus side we must have the best tasting tap water in the country).

I've also used it (Ecover, not my hair) neat to clean the gas hob, with perfectly satisfactory results.

My next ventures will be to try it as shower gel, and for washing socks. I shall report back. Should anyone else wish to join me in this experiment, or indeed suggest other uses to which this product might be put, your contribution would be more than welcome.

Museum musings

Today in the course of my marketing duties I visited the London Canal Museum - not to look around the exhibits, but to talk to the chap in charge. This is all getting very heady. Especially as they are closed on Mondays and I had to knock on the door and gain special admittance. Well, I'm supposed to be marketing Tarporley, but here is a plug for the museum. Did you know that you can have your wedding or Bar Mitzvah or indeed any other party there, or a conference? And they have a very good website too. From past experience I can also tell you that they have a good shop with an excellent selection of books. Oh, and some exhibits too.

The frame of the rose

For a long time Jim has been adamant that we need to redecorate Warrior's bathroom. The original elastoplast pink was getting tatty in places, and the wall behind the bath was damaged when the kitchen was ripped out from the other side of it. But every wall in that bathroom has a beautiful swag of roses painted on it. To have painted over them would have been unthinkable (to me at any rate). So for a long time we were at an impasse. Then (and I am going to take full credit for this) I had an idea. It took me quite a long time to convey this idea adequately, but eventually, with the help of some photos of Tarporley's back cabin, I think I managed it. And this is the solution at which we arrived.

And here it is in the process of being done:

I haven't yet seen it in the flesh, although I've seen the graining and it suits the small space of the bathroom really well. In addition, Jim has stiffened up the bath side panel with some 2" timber strips, and lined them with moulding too.
And oh dear, yes, that's the spare toilet in the bath. The pumpout was frozen, of course.

My favourite mug

I would like to take this opportunity to mark the passing of a very dear friend. My favourite mug suffered a tragic freak accident this morning when another mug fell on top of it. The other mug, naturally, was undamaged.

My favourite mug was made of white toughened glass, which in my view is the absolutely best thing to drink tea out of, as all good caffs know. It featured a charming, if not very right-on, illustration of a smiling tiger - who, I now suddenly realise, not having looked at it properly for years, bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Forsyth - and a very small Indian man - hunter or keeper? I never could decide - whose crudely drawn features manage nonetheless clearly to convey an air of baleful impotence in the face of the disproportionately big big cat.

I remember selecting it - in Woolworths, where else - some time in the mid 1970s. My sister and I got to choose one each. It has been with me ever since, a minimum of thirty, probably more like thirty five years. It has comforted me with tea on many momentous occasions, as well as making the odd racy foray into delivering coffee or cocoa. Tea is its real purpose in life however. It has stayed with me from house to house, from life to life. It is one of the very few things I would never leave behind. Other mugs - hundreds, probably - have come and gone, but this one I have used nearly every day. Every day for thirty plus years.

And now it's gone. I didn't quite shed a tear - I'm very good at not crying over spilt milk - but it's another little bit of my past consigned to the dustbin, and a timely reminder that nothing lasts forever.

The name of the rose

I was browsing through last year's posts the other week, while compiling my somewhat peremptory review of the year, and realised that Martin Duiker, who painted Warrior's roses and castles back in 1995, had left a comment on this post. John had mentioned that Martin had been in touch, but I thought we'd missed the chance of contacting him. However, I have emailed him now to say how much we love Warrior's 163 roses and seven castles. Hope you get it Martin - or if not, that you see this. More on this subject tomorrow...

Not that I'm competitive

You may have noticed a little black and red box appear to the right of this page. A kindly soul by the name of Tony Blews has set up a ranking site for UK waterways websites. Some fellow bloggers were already subscribing to the US based Top 100 boating sites, but I never got round to that - didn't fancy the flashing orange ... thing ... anyway. But when Andrew pleaded a while back for someone to develop a UK based one, I said that if they did, I'd subscribe. So last night I signed up. At that point I was sixth in a chart of six, but the next time I looked had risen to a heady fourth out of eleven. That may of course be the highest position I ever attain, having slipped back this morning to seven.

It is very interesting though, as for the first time now I actually have a way of seeing the number of visits the blog is getting. It would be great if every one of the blogs on Granny's boatroll signed up, and we would have our own top hundred. (Although actually I can't see what's to stop anyone signing them all up anyway...)

I shall follow my progress with interest. Or probably, in fact, obsessiveness.

Interesting if potentially unreliable fact (check? What, and spoil all the fun?). Aeroplane Black Boxes are actually bright orange and are named after a Professor Black who invented them.

Meanwhile in Ramsey...

Jim has today returned from a lengthy - since December 29th - sojourn on Warrior. What he has been doing, I shall share with you another time. But it was, it goes without saying, a trifle chilly. Apparently John was actually standing on the ice, breaking it for the swans - who showed their gratitude by aggressively chasing him. Today, of course, as Jim left, the thaw sets in. Still, at least he remembered his slippers this time.

An inch of ice on the fishpond

And believe me, in my back garden that's unprecedentedly cold. Here on the south coast, in the lee or the shadow, or the something of the South Downs, we have an unusually mild and dry micro climate, and in my tiny walled back garden, even more so. Is it not Eastbourne that lays claim to the most annual hours of sunshine in the country? Torquay, I believe, has higher average temperatures, but more rain.

I noticed the difference when I went to Huddersfield, in both rain and coldness. It's even noticeably colder in London, and as you go up on the train you can see the ground get frostier. I always try to bear this in mind when I'm tempted to up sticks and move to another part of the country - somewhere less crowded, more canal-y; somewhere different... somewhere bloody colder. So yes, reading the tales of people boating at the moment, I know I've got it easy. But I really do not like the cold. More than anything else, more than dark, more than wet, it's cramping and constraining. For me it's cold, not heat, that's oppressive. Heat is relaxing and expansive; cold constricting and repressive. It's OK if you're dressed for it - what a liberating discovery thermal undies were - but that only works if you're planning to be out in it for a significant time. If you're in the house, you're stuck there.

Anyway, I was meant to be going to Birmingham today. After a Tarporley committee meeting which saw me getting to bed at one a.m. following the consumption of large amounts of beer, dragging myself to a local government seminar in the frozen Midlands was just about exactly the last thing I felt like doing, but I'd forked out fifty eight quid for a train ticket so felt honour bound to use it. So Virgin/Railtrack have at least one customer who was very pleased to learn that there were no trains running out of Euston today. Having confirmed this on the website at six this morning I was able to go back to bed with a clear conscience and thoughts of a refund. There's always a bright side.

Lovely lists

My word, suddenly it's so easy to edit the links list that even I can do it unaided. All on my own, I've added AMModels' site. This is an absolutely brilliant site for looking up old boats - when and where they were built, who owned them, their numbers etc. Mush of this info comes from the lists that Roger Fuller used to maintain, which I guess in turn owe a lot to those lovely little books by Alan Faulkner and others. But Andy's (for that is his name) site has a massive bonus - it's gradually gathering up to date information about where boats are now and/or what's happened/ing to them, and it has loads of photos. Also, where it has the edge over lists in books, is that it's crudely searchable (using the find function) whioch is really useful when, for example, you might want to check whether it was Sun that Water Ouzel used to be. And now the site also has a forum. A small one, so far it has to be said, and not terribly active yet, but looking at the list of members (yes, I've signed up) most of the old boat buffs from CWF are there so the discussion, when it gets going, should be well-informed and informative.

The one downside used to be that I could never remember the URL, so consulting the list meant a quick trawl via CWF. But no more - now I can just click on the handy link to the right here.

Gone to pot

And there goes another one. Wedgwood (or Waterford Wedgwood as we should now more properly know it) has gone into administration. Throughout my childhood, I had a green Jasper ware bedside light. It wasn't very nice, to be honest; the shade was horrible, but I used to lie in bed and stare at the base, with its bas relief of Greek figures. That's what Wedgwood has always meant to me.

But also of course, the company, and in particular its founder, were enormously influential in the development of the canals. Josiah Wedgwood was promoter of one of the earliest, the Trent and Mersey, for which the Act of Parliament was obtained in 1766 (yes, I have quickly scanned my Hadfield). It was impressive, coming through the Potteries with Andante in 2006, how much stuff was still being produced - despite there also being a lot of dereliction and even some regeneration. But surely this is a prime example of a product that can be produced as well, and more cheaply, overseas; how many of us, to be honest, care where our dinner plates come from? Mine are in fact (I've just looked) from Staffordshire, Bilton's 'Galaxy'. But they were probably made in the sixties. Biltons are (I learn from Stoke on Trent City Council's informative website) no more.

Quiet reading

Tis the season to be sitting by the fire with a good book. Once again, lately, I have mostly been reading bad ones. So much less effort. But among my Christmas presents was Peter Ackroyd's Thames: The Biography, a memento of the happy(?) times spent on that great river last summer, which I should get stuck into. I am also mindful - as I always am at this time of year - that there are still a number of canal-related books that I should reread, perchance to write about. And one that I haven't read at all yet, and really should: John Liley's Journeys of the Swan. I ordered one through Abe Books, and it arrived today. That should keep me out of mischief for a little while.

Not quite a partridge in a pear tree

But amazing creatures to just have wandering up and down in front of the boat, even if their plumage is not currently in all its glory, still a lovely sight.

Hidden delights

Why, I often wonder, would I want to go abroad, when there's so much I haven't yet seen in England? (Well, you might reasonably reply, because there are more beautiful/interesting/exciting things abroad, and you would be right, and one day I will go to Venice...)

I have, I can say in mitigation - and I have to make this count for a lot because it is the only serious bit of Abroad that I have done - been to Russia. Communist Russia, just about (November 1982). I have been to the Moscow State Circus, where they had performing bears, and the Kirov Ballet, and shared a sleeping compartment on the Moscow-Leningrad train with, inter alia, an Intourist guide with an interesting skin complaint called Stanislav (the guide, not the complaint). Had my father been interested in such things, he may well have been disappointed to discover that Stanislav was due to take over from Irena at the station. The train had a samovar at the end of each carriage, but not, as far as I recall, a toilet (but it must have done. Perhaps it is just too horrible to remember.)

But for those of us who still hold out against foriegn travel (and I really don't mind flying, but I cannot stomach the thought of airport security), here, which I found via Diamond Geezer, is all the evidence you could ever need of the many and varied delights yet to be discovered on your very doorstep. Forgotton, hidden and unbelievable places, touching in their insignificance, or amazing in that you've never heard of them. Astounding in their brilliance, or brilliant in ther mundanity. Go and randomly browse the archives. It will by turns warm and break your heart.

I need some....

Brown thread
Sellotape
Velcro
Clothes pegs
Envelopes
A saucepan
One of those things you hang your knickers on to dry
Plimsolls
A birthday present for a small child
Dye
Paper
A photo frame
Curtain rings
Shoe polish
Iron-on patches
Mugs
Needles
A tin for putting flapjack in
Light bulbs
A pay-as-you-go mobile
CHOCOLATE
Blank CDs
Pencils
Shoe laces
Elastic
Ker-plunk
A4 plastic wallets

I'll just nip down to W...

.... oh bugger.


.

And hello 2009

Nope. Still looks the same as yesterday. Anyway, my new year starts in October. But in time honoured tradition, I have made a new year's resolution, and I fully intend to stick to it.

In 2009, I will stop procrastinating.

I decided to do this about three weeks ago, but put off implementing it until the symbolic date. Of course.

My tendency to put things off, shove those little tasks into the darkest recesses of the back of my mind, where they gnaw and nag at me and assume monstrous proportions; or to write them on a list, and in doing so consider them at least half done, is, I am firmly convinced, the only thing standing between me and greatness. If I was not constantly being burgled by the thief of time, I would be superhuman.

And when I do set to and do things - as, to be honest, I have been this week - it's great. They're seldom as hard as they first seem, and even if they are, the only way to make them easier is to chip away at them by making a start. So I wrote a book proposal on Monday (the idea for which has been hanging around for years); updated my CV on Tuesday (needed doing since 2006); made a start on the most daunting prospect yesterday, my paper for the PSA conference in April (yesterday being the deadline for withdrawal, so I'm committed now). Today I will catch up with Tarporley business, and tomorrow, I promise, I will finally finish that proposal for a new course. Then I can go back into the office on Monday with my to-do list almost non-existent and wearing a smug glow.

So it only remains to wish all of you a happy, productive and successful 2009, and leave you with Diamond Geezers new year advice.