A Pilgrimage

Ashton-Under-Lyne: according to David MacKie in the Guardian (no, I'm not putting a link in; it's not that imortant), a Mecca for tripe lovers. On our travels I did see a retail outlet called The Tripe and Sandwich Shop, but strangely enough wasn't tempted to go in. ('Can I have some tripe please? Oh, and a sandwich ...') Our pilgrimage was not in search of tripe, or any of the other things for which Ashton is no doubt rightly famed, but the National Gas and Oil Engine Company Works. We weren't even sure they were still standing until we got chatting with Guy at Portland Basin Marina where we spent the night of Thursday 17th, but he told us that they were indeed, and that they were nearby, and showed us on a facsimile 1907 map of the area. We were so impressed we bought one. Guided only by this, we set off the following morning, in the rain (ho hum), to seek the very spot where Warrior's engine was built in 1937.

Finding it was a bit of a struggle, owing to a ring road having rather inconsiderately been built at some point in the past century, but find the place we eventually did - and very impressive it was too. Now an industrial estate, the extensive site is still largely made up of the original buildings. Some have modern cladding on, but many don't, as can be seen in the picture. Under the later, painted, names, the words 'National Gas Engine Co. Ltd' can still clearly be seen picked out in the brickwork (although not necessarily in this photo).

It was particularly heartening to see that the site was still being used for manufacturing and appeared to be quite busy and bustling. We got chatting to the people in one of the units, and they let us have a look inside; again, much of the building seemed to be, if not original, then certainly as old as our engine. And we spotted something very exciting. The steelwork supporting the roof was painted in a horrible shade of dirty lime green. We thought that it wasn't unlikely that a company making engines, and having quantities of paint about the place, might use the same paint for the buildings as for the engines ... Of course, the steelwork could have been painted much more recently, but nonetheless I made a careful mental note of the colour.

The following Friday, after we'd arrived at Stretton Wharf and Jim had collected the car from Huddersfield, we went to Wolverhampton to collect the crankshaft (another story) and dropped in on Phil Speight to pick up the paint we'd ordered for the engine, now thinking that it might have been entirely the wrong colour after all. But for some reason it had been made up in coach enamel rather than engine enamel, which was a true blessing in disguise as it meant that we could go back to the drawing board. Phil got out all his colour chips again, and while he and Jim pored over various sensible shades of green, I picked out the one that reminded me most of the engine works. Phil very kindly lent us some of the chips to take away with us and consult further ...

Fast forward finally to our journey home yesterday, when we dropped the crankshaft off at RN in Daventry. Considerable progress is now being made on the engine (again, another story) and it is now in about as many bits as it is possible to reduce an engine to. And on many of the bits that hadn't seen the light of day for decades there were distinct traces of a much brighter, lighter green paint. It matched my chip perfectly. This is enough evidence for us. We are going to stick our necks out and paint Warrior's engine a colour called Muscat. If it does turn out be be wrong, at least we will be able to explain why it seemed like a good idea at the time.

So our morning in Ashton was productive as well as enjoyable and exciting, and I'm very glad we went!

We're back!

Back from the land where time stands still, and there is no news, and a sliced loaf costs £1.50 ...
Some trip stats:
Miles: 103
Locks: 115
Tunnels: 6 (including two big ones)
Days: 11
Days it rained: 10
Injuries: 3, viz: Thorn in hand which went a bit septic but is better now (scrambling off via plank at a lock on Huddersfield Narrow); Scratched nose (hawthorn tree strategically placed after bridge on Macclesfield, very impressive with blood pouring down face in the lashing rain); Chunk pinched out of right thumb (tile cutters at Stretton Wharf).

So only minor injuries, hardly worth mentioning really. Unlike the crew member of The Honorable Lady, whom we first met at Marsden the night before going through the Standedge Tunnel. He'd taken a fall the previous day, and hurt his ankle, but was soldiering on. We met them again at Portland Basin; he was still soldiering on, but struggling a bit. Then we met the boat again at the Harecastle Tunnel and learnt that he was in Shrewsbury Hospital with a broken ankle and septicaemia. Best wishes for a speedy recovery Nick!

Will do a proper post soon - lots, in fact, covering the journey and making this temporarily Andante's blog rather than Warrior's. Suffice to say for now that it was absolutely brilliant. We found a good pub every night but one (thumbs down to the aptly named Fool's Nook at Royal Oak on the Macclesfield), and met up with some lovely people, in one case sitting talking til midnight (with Tony and Sheila from Owl in Stone - I've just realised that although I've noted our overnight stopping places I haven't attached the names of the pubs to them! Damn! Damn! Damn!)

Back in September ...

So don't go away!

The new car (1992 Volvo 940, £175 since you asked) is packed to the roof, and we will set off tomorrow morning for Huddersfield (I know I was in Huddersfield already, but I came back yesterday), to leave for the last time in Andante. It would be rash in the extreme for me to so much as suggest that there will be any updates to the blog while we're away. While I have carefully read Mike's handy wi-fi facts, and in fact have printed a copy to take with us, I doubt very much that we will have either the opportunity or the technical ability actually to get online whilst en route. We're taking the laptop, but that's mainly to store the photos and for Number One Son to watch DVDs (I don't want to be responsible for him dying of boredom. When we invited him along I kind of forgot to mention that there wasn't a telly.)

In the above photo, Lockboy demonstrates the Weed Weapon (Jim has another name for it which relates to the young people he expects to encounter on certain urban stretches, but we won't go into that). This is an ancient tool which Looks As Though It Might Be Useful On A Boat, lovingly restored and painted by Jim. I don't know whether he'll be repainting it in Warrior's colours once we get there, but it's in Andante's for now.

So, I promise we'll be back in September with the highlights of the trip. Meanwhile, wish us luck!

Bridges. Toilets. The usual stuff.

This is the view from Andante, on her proper towpath mooring, looking towards the Wakefield Road and the Narrow Canal and, on the left, Aspley Basin.

Observe the pretty rustic bridge. Or, in fact, the pretty useless bridge, as it has been closed for months and months. It is closed because it is unsafe. Even when it was open it was patently unsafe. It's curvature is such that you needed crampons to cross it in the winter, and it swayed alarmingly when induced to do so by the revolting offspring of patrons of the Brewer's Fayre. The grippy bits which were attached rather half heartedly to the wooden treads (what you can't see in the picture is that there are sloping steps either side of the big sloping bit in the middle) were all detaching themselves to become trippy bits. And to top it all there was a sign saying 'no more than four people on the bridge at once'. (Four slender wiry boaters? Or four Brewer's Fayre customers?) Which doesn't inspire great confidence.

Now what I can't work out is why the bridge was built like that in the first place. It hasn't been there all that long. The photo here (scroll down a bit) (pre-restoration, presumably, but post 1977 from the horrendous University edifice dominating the background) shows a bridgeless scene. Why does it need to be so high? (Compare it to the Wakefield Road bridge beyond on the right.)

The bridge is, apparently, to be rebuilt. Eventually. We cannot blame poor old BW for this one, it seems (though I shall be blaming them for something much more malign in a couple of paragraphs' time) as it appears to be owned by Whitbreads. A planning application has been made (it's a conservation area and, IIRC from the notices, bits of the stone bridge piers are listed. But how?? They weren't even there 30 years ago). However, it will all come to late for me to be able to visit the toilet.

Oh yes, now we come to the seething rage that I have sustained for the best part of a year. BW have built (relatively) glitzy new toilets and showers on the other side of the canal opposite the basin. These were quickly, if not easily, accessible via the footbridge. In the absence of the footbridge, you have to use the road bridge, which means walking round the basin, which takes about ten minutes. OK, no great hardship, but when I first moored here, totally unnecessary, because there was a toilet on the towpath side, set into the back of the 'pub', with a great big BW toilet sign on the door. It was in a very sorry state, and the amenities were basic, but I didn't care, because it was MINE! I cleaned it up, and kept it clean; I remembered to take a torch and my own loo roll, and in the summer other boaters used it too. Everyone was happy.

Then one day I came back from work to find the BW toilet sign gone and a suspiciously shiny new lock on the door. I rang BW and had a conversation that went very roughly like this:
Me: What's happened to my toilet?
BW: We had a complaint about it so we closed it.
Me: But it was a valuable resource for me and many other users of the canal.
BW: It was substandard so we closed it.
Me: But I didn't mind! It worked!
BW: We consulted with our user groups and they agreed we should close it.
Me: How can I get involved in these consultations?
BW: You can't. They're not for boaters, just for organised groups like the Sea Cadets. We don't consult boaters.
Me: Won't you reconsider? Lots of people used it.
BW: No. We've invested in lovely new facilities on the other side of the canal.
Me: But they're on the other side of the canal. It wouldn't have hurt to keep this one too. You didn't even have to clean it or anything.
BW: We had complaints that it was substandard so we closed it.
Me: Complaints? You said a complaint before.
BW: Ah, now you're trying to twist my words.
Me: (banging head on desk) Aaaagh! Everything anyone has ever said about British Waterways is true.

Wouldn't tell me who made the complaint of course. Interestingly though, I blu-tacked a note to the door with the BW phone number in case anyone else wanted to ring up and protest, and it was ripped down overnight. I don't suppose it was BW did that.

Travels with my tree

Got back from work yesterday afternoon to find Andante had a new friend - with a tale of disappointment to tell. They were on their way back from Marsden having learnt that they were too wide - by an inch and a half - to get through the Standedge Tunnel. When they say 6'10" they mean 6'10". When I got the tunnel paperwork through I thought about measuring Andante - but realised I could never do it accurately enough for it to be any use, so we too will find out when we get there. I was looking at this other boat thinking, rather desperately, 'well, it does look a bit fat...'

Note the rather sad looking yucca on Andante's bow. I don't like yuccas. I don't like houseplants. A tall top-heavy houseplant on the front end of a boat is a bad idea. This particular houseplant does not provide much in the way of aesthetic enhancement. But it's there because it was on its way to the dustbins, and I'm a sucker for anything that's being thrown out. It's a rescued houseplant. Will it survive the journey? Or will it fall in and perish amongst the dreaded blue-green algae? Or suffer a horrific lock-related fate? You'll just have to keep watching.

So, farewell then, Huddersfield

I'm not actually leaving, finally, until Saturday (my last day at work is Thursday) so this will be a week of farewells and souvenir photos of this rather lovely town. Like all big towns, at ground level it's a bit grubby, and it has its share of cloned shops, but if you look up it also has some fantastic buildings, and has managed to hang on to more of them through the 60s and 70s than many comparable places. It also has two canals - now prosaically called the Huddersfield Broad and the Huddersfield Narrow, but originally Sir John Ramsden's Canal and the Huddersfield Canal respectively. Andante's mooring is just on the broad side of Aspley Basin, the site of the old trans-shipment wharf between the two - no integrated transport policy in those days either.

There are two facts about Huddersfield which I'm very fond of trotting out, having taken the trouble to confirm them with a nice chap in the planning department at Kirklees Council. One is that Huddersfield is, in terms of its population, the largest town in the UK that isn't a city. Why be a medium sized city if you can be the biggest town? I mentioned this to a person from Northampton, at a conference earlier this year. Predictably, he said, 'No it isn't, Northampton is.' I then went on - in the next breath - to tell a woman from Liverpool that Huddersfield has the greatest number of listed buildings in Britain after Bath (some accounts say Bristol) and Westminster. Her reply was equally predictable - but I have that one on the authority of the Guardian as well as the man from the council. Unless of course you know different, as they used to say on That's Life.

Tonight I am going on a guided architectural tour organised by the Huddersfield Civic Society, a thoroughly sterling organisation.

Why the photo of such a relatively nondescript building to head this post, then? Well, the George Hotel in Huddersfield is well known (among people that like to know that sort of thing) as the birthplace of rugby league. And Caffe Nero in Huddersfield will go down in history as the place where we signed the papers and took possession of Warrior. Although only because the woman in the bank over the road who was supposed to be sorting out the money had gone to lunch.

Canal wildlife

Narrowboatworld reports a fresh outbreak of horrible disgusting slimy poisonous blue-green algae on the 'Shropshire Union Canal covering [covering!] the area from Wheaton Aston to Brewood'.

Utterly uncannily, that is the exact spot we are headed for.

Good news from the men with beards

On Saturday morning the chief wizard, Allister Denyer, from the Russell Newbery Engine Co phoned with the good news that there was progress with phase one of the engine rebuild. Progress in three ways, one, the engine was ever so slowly moving towards completion (only 4 months so far!), two, Allister and I are talking, in fact it is impossible to shut us up! and three the RN Engine Co has at long last, admitted to the value of communicating with their customers. The news is in fact better than even I hoped and certainly better that Allister's initial prognosis. The first part of the first phase which involves the complete dismantling of both the block and the crankcase and the complete steam cleaning of both items is now complete. The block is in remarkable condition and has been crack tested and is one of the best he has seen according to Allister. It just remains to hone out the black rust from the bores which remains after the removal of the liners. It is also remarkable because for the first 17 years of its life it was cooled by sea water as the power plant of a fisheries protection trawler based in Kings Lynn and spent the next 30 years or so sitting on the quayside in the company of a 4cyl Gardner until they were both bought by John Shotbolt in around 1985.
He installed the National in the one and only tug he built, Warrior, in 1995, which he originally intended to keep for himself, but 4 years later was prevailed upon to sell. The Gardner now powers his last boat - Revenge. These two boats were named after the Royal Navy's first two iron clad warships: HMS Warrior is still extant and moored in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
Back to the National; following the steam clean inside and out all the residual paint has been removed and both sections have been rubbed down, primed and undercoated ready for me to apply the topcoats of Craftsmaster Paints engine enamel equivalent of Mason's Dove Green which is, after considerable consultation with some of the stars of the old engine fraternity, the nearest we can get to the original National engine colour. Although to be truthful we are being slightly precious here as it is likely that all engines from what ever source were painted with what ever paint was to hand, we however would like to differentiate our unique National from the mid brunswick green used by Russell Newbery.
Next week, after the paint has thoroughly dried, and the honing has been completed RN liners will be slightly modified and then fitted to the block. The crank case and the block then will be ready for the next phase - casting the main and big end bearings in white metal and machining them to the crank which is currently undergoing major surgery at Custom Cranks. This should be ready to be picked up sometime at the end of August, when it will be delivered by me to RN at Daventry. Watch out for the next exciting episode then.

This doesn't look good ...

My post about the French stove last week got more response than anything else I've ever written about here. Not all that much, admittedly, but still more than anything else. As things are a bit quiet otherwise, I thought I'd do a quick update on it. Jim managed to get it to pieces - it's made in quite a lot of separate pieces; in particular he extricated the inner cast iron firebox from the enammelled front and top. It does not look good. There is a single, big, crack that extends from the bottom left of the front, by the ashpan, right round the side to more than half way up the back. The good news is that that's the only damage; the bad news of course is that it will be fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, to repair. It's cast iron, it's old, it's rusty, it probably wasn't very good quality in the first place - and our only hope is to try to get it welded. Mission Impossible for Len the local welder, with whom it now rests. Last we saw, he was still sucking his teeth and shaking his head at it.

Tomorrow, a report from Jim on the engine's progress .....

Logistics

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the 'art of moving, lodging, and supplying troops and equipment'.

In a decidely non-military context, that's what I've been trying to sort out this week: planning, as far as is possible, to ensure that people and things are in the right places before, during and after our forthcoming trip. The starting point was to get an itinerary from Canalplan - an amazing website. Two itineraries in fact, to take account of our passage through the Standedge Tunnel, which is booked for August 16th.

Lockboy, sadly, has too hectic a social life to accompany us this time, but we have recruited Number One Son to provide extra muscle on the first leg of the journey, along the Huddersfield Narrow, where I fear it may be much needed. The only hitch is that he has to be back down south for a wedding (not his own, fortunately) on the Saturday. The best plan I could come up with was to put him ashore at Stalybridge and onto a train home via Manchester. I've booked him a Virgin advance ticket - a bargain at £16.50 - but if he doesn't make that particular train we're looking at at least £74. So in a way that's the most time-critical part of the journey.

We'll drive up to Huddersfield on the preceding Saturday - so Jim needs to be able to get back to collect the car from there once we've arrived at Stretton. Stretton Wharf is five miles from the nearest railway station - hopefully someone will be found to give him a lift!

With personnel all in the right place, we turn our attention to Things. Andante is a pretty small boat, especially for three people, so we want the minimum possible amount of stuff on voyage. But there are loads of things we'll need once we get there to start smartening her up. So that all has to be fitted into the car ready for collection. And then there are the books and things I need to take home after the whole trip's over in order to take them to London for the new job. There are five boxes of them, so I've enlisted the help of a colleague (thanks Pete!). He lives about seventy miles along the south coast from us (another weekly commuter) but what the hell, it's all Down South, so he's going to bring those for me when he's next 'passing'.

Well, I just hope I haven't forgotten anything too vital. Bet I have.

230v, 3.5 kva alternator for sale!

Isn't it lovely? This piece of kit came with Warrior - it had to be to cut off to get the engine out - but it doesn't appear to have been used. Certainly on Warrior it wasn't connected either to the engine or the electrical system. We have no use for it so are hoping someone will buy it from us to help defray some of our outgoings! As we've never seen it in operation we obviously can't guarantee that it works, but if anyone buys it through the blog (it's also on ebay, but very well hidden) we can come to some sort of money back if not satisfied arrangement.

More photos here.

The specifications are as follow:

3.5 kva output
57/110/230 volt
30.4/15.2 a
50 hertz
3000 RPM
weight 18.2 kg
clockwise rotation (looking from front)
90mm overall double pulley
length 375mm O/A
diameter 173mm O/A
Manufacturer's name (?) Mecce Alte, made in Italy
Date of manufacture is 2000.
It appears to be very similar in specification to the Electrolux Travelpower

Any enquiries/offers/expressions of interest, leave a comment here with your email address (or phone number if you prefer) and Jim will get back to you.

Into the digital age

Hampstead Lane locks, Regents Canal, about 2.30 pm today ...

I posted a couple of weeks ago about my trusty Practika SLR camera which I bought in the early 80s when I was about seventeen, and have been using happily ever since ...well, how quickly things change! For my birthday last week (thanks Jim!) I received a Canon Powershot A700 (needless to say) digital camera. Jim's latest engine pictures, and yesterday's stove one, were taken with it. It certainly is a boon to the blogger to be able to point and shoot, upload and post, all within minutes.

But I suspect that the shift from film to digital will also have wider ramifications; it is already affecting the way I think about both taking and keeping photos. Digital images are at every stage more ephemeral, easy to take and easy to delete, and somehow that makes them seem less sacrosanct. Having been a fairly keen photographer, on and off, since my teens, I have many large boxes of prints. I've always felt it would be wrong, somehow, to destroy any of them. But at the weekend, leafing through some prints of Andante in Huddersfield, I found myself throwing half a dozen in the bin, because they were out of focus, or shaky, or simply near duplicates of better pictures. I still have the negatives though ...

More importantly, what about the digital images we do want to keep? Apart from the danger of (someone else) accidentally deleting them, will we have the right software to look at them in ten years' time? Will the hardware be compatible? Will the CDs deteriorate? Do we have to back up our most precious pictures with prints - an expensive process for decent ones. Or do we develop a new attitude to photographs, no longer seeing them as a moment frozen in time and captured forever, but as passing elusive glimpses that will themselves disappear?

Oh yes, and what was I doing at Camden Lock this afternoon? I went up to London for a meeting related to the new job I'm starting in September, and took a half-hour stroll for a little waterways refreshment. Had to fight my way through a lot of tat, but I did get to see the canal in the end.

No fire without smoke?

This is the stove we were hoping to install in Warrior. The Morso Squirrel which was already installed, despite having nice new glass in the door, was in a parlous state. Given that it was a maximum of ten years old and that they aren't cheap, this was rather disappointing, not to say shocking. But it appears that it had been abused somewhat, being used very hot with no or inadequate firebricks in, and with water running down the stovepipe for some time, it's little wonder that the iron at the back was very badly burnt away with actual holes at the top. So that's off to the tip.

The 'new' stove is an old French one that I fell in love with many years ago in an antiques shop in Lewes, East Sussex. Round here it's quite common for antique dealers to go to France for attractively rustic artefacts and lovely enamel things like this. For years it sat in our kitchen, with us constantly meaning to get around to plumbing it in, but then last winter we got a cast iron range and fitted that instead, leaving the French stove homeless. One of the main handicaps with is is that it's a non standard size for British pipes and fittings. The other was that we didn't know whether it actually works.

So this morning we hauled it outside and lit some paper and wood in it to see where the smoke went and whether it had any serious leaks. Depressingly, it looks like it might have. I know it's not really a fair test, because it's not going to draw properly outside without a chimney (although we actually managed to rig up quite a good temporary chimney with a bit of liner left over from the kitchen range and part of a traffic cone). Even allowing for the fact that it needs new sealing stringy stuff (whatever that's called) in the top and the door, and new mica, probably, in the door (and where do you get that?), there were still mysterious wisps coming out around the top. It's hard to see where they were coming from because of the stove's double-skinned nature; it could be swirling around anywhere between the firebox and the enamel cover. I cling to the hope that it's coming out of the door then being sucked back behind th enamel to emerge from the top. We don't want to spend any money on getting a new pipe and fittings made if it's not going to get past Ian with his BSS hat on. But I really don't want to give up on it. It's the sort of dilemma that seems to happen a lot in this game.

Woo! New engine photos!

Jim has returned from his travels with a new set of engine pictures - see them here in the 'Warrior's Engine' album. All in all the news seems good: the crankshaft is basically sound and the taper will be laser welded and machined to the correct dimensions by the Custom Crank and Engineering Company of Wolverhampton. This will cost (gulp) £900. This is much cheaper than a new crankshaft (sigh of relief). The block seems to be in good shape too. The original cast iron pistons (above) are going to be replaced with new Russell Newbery alloy ones. This is a bit sad, but the old ones are, unsurprisingly, very worn, and we do get to keep the old ones to use as paperweights (or ballast?). Although some people have suggested that it would be OK to replace them with other cast iron ones - assuming we could find some - the balance of opinion is that we can run at higher revs (and that we might want to) with the alloy ones. And some Nationals were built with alloy pistons, so it's not too unoriginal.

Enjoy!

Travel plans

Jim's been doing some travelling this week. He's currently on Warrior - back in the water for the time being - having taken a rather convoluted journey up there, calling in at Guildford, to collect the crankshaft; Daventry, to pick up the gearbox cone; Kidderminster, to collect a teapot; and Wolverhampton, to drop off the crankshaft and gearbox cone at Custom Crankshafts who will be machining it.

Most importantly, we've finalised (famous last words!) our summer travel plans for Andante. The original plan was to do a Pennine ring taking in the Huddersfield Narrow and the Rochdale and end up back at Andante's home mooring at Aspley Wharf. I was determined not to leave here without going through the Standedge Tunnel - it'll be a long time before we get Warrior up here - if ever; Warrior might be a bit too deep drafted. The new plan includes that - then we head south, bringing Andante down to join Warrior at Stretton, where we will tidy her up and paint her, and then, I'm sad to say, sell her. The reasoning is that it will be easier to get the work done with boatyard facilities (such as they are!) and easier to sell Andante in the Midlands, especially with someone on hand to show people over, so we don't have to keep travelling up and down. It should also make for a really interesting journey, with a purpose at the end of it. And it means that when I leave Huddersfield for the last time (Jim will be coming back to collect the car) it will be by boat. Which is nice.

Taking sides?

Last week, Granny Buttons drew attention to the idea that there is a sharp dividing line between people who approach the waterways with an open mind and those who are obsessed with 'heritage'. This led me to wonder which side of the divide I fall on, and whether this is the only, or even the most significant, distinction to be made between different waterways users.

Part of me definitely has a strong rivet-counting tendency, best illustrated perhaps by my niggling obsession with getting the right colour paint for Warrior's engine (we have now committed on this by the way, having ordered the engine enamel from Phil Speight and asking him to match it to the best of his knowledge). It's not that there's any innate virtue in reproducing the original colour, but rather a case of, if you can, then why wouldn't you? The research, and the things you learn and the people you meet through this sort of obsessiveness, is a major part of the fun. The detective work is a challenge, and often leads to a great sense of achievement (and possibly even smugness - an emotion not to be underrated).

Do I feel we have a duty to posterity to preserve things exactly as they were? Not really - as long as there are records, and, importantly, examples, somewhere. History is important, but change is part of history and that includes changes that are taking place now. So why am I pleased to see buildings listed and working boats restored? Ninety nine percent of the time it's simply because they are just more beautiful, lovelier and better built than any modern replacement would be. I don't want to live in the past, but I do despair of the contemporary lemming rush for ever changing, gimcrack, disposable rubbish, whose only virtue is that it's 'new', the pursuit of which drives us into debt and heart attacks and ultimately the environmental grave - and which always still leaves us hungry.

Here's a thought. The age of canal transport lasted, say, 200 years. We think of this as an interesting and significant blip in history, whose end was inevitable. Mass road transport, which we take to be the norm, has been in place for about seventy years, if that.* Will it last another 130? Of course not. I'm not a great lover of sci-fi, but I like to toy with a futuristic plot in which roads are broken up and overgrown, but a few hardy souls set out to restore them so that they can chug around in their salvaged and restored lorries ...

Finally, a lot of waterways users (and I have gleaned this largely from the letters pages of the waterways press and Narrowboatworld rather than direct experience) seem to be neither interested in heritage nor open minded: the ones who complain about 'tatty boats' running their engines, about not being able to take their dog through the Standedge Tunnel, about online moorings being an eyesore or, conversely, about boats passing their online moorings too fast and so on. I don't mind seeing online moorings; I don't mind feeling the boat move, I'd rather hear an engine running than listen to someone else's taste in music, and I'd rather see a tatty, loved and lived in boat any day than a fresh out of the box identikit tub spray-painted dark blue or dark green that you have to take your shoes off to go aboard. If it's inhabited by a couple of hippies with a hairy dog on a piece of string and preferably a clutch of grubby (but happy!) children, so much the better. Bonus marks for a wind generator.

So pleasure-boating and heritage-obsession can, perhaps, go hand-in-hand. It's the misery-boaters who are out on their own!

(The above paragraph was sponsored by Hyphens-R-Us Ltd of Chapel-en-le-Frith.)

*Please feel free to correct or tighten up these figures - they're very much off the top of my head but I hope the general drift still stands.

Now we're cooking with gas!

Friday, July 14th

Our last full day up at Warrior last week, and we took advantage of a visit from Ian not only to bend his ear about the engine, but to get him to check out the cooker, following the kitchen refit, and OK it for use. After finding and fixing a slight leak we were at last cooking with gas again. Until now, while on dry land with 240v available we'd been using a microwave - something we don't even have at home. Combined with a lack of refrigeration facilities, this rather limited our menu repertoire, and we mainly lived on tinned vegetable chilli and Uncle Ben's microwave rice. I have to say that, if you ever find yourself in the position of having a microwave and no other cooking facilities, Uncle Ben's microwave rice is highly recommended. It comes in lots of different varieties and heats to perfection in two minutes. To celebrate the inauguration of the cooker, Jim had cheese on toast for tea. This meant that I got a double helping of tinned vegetable chilli and Uncle Ben's microwave rice. Then we put the microwave in the car.

I'm a great fan of gas for cooking, at home as well as on the boat. I can't see the attraction of the 'gas free' boat - especially if it relies instead on heavy electricity use. To my mind, 240v on a steel boat is a much scarier prospect than gas - at least you can smell the latter. But then, I still find electricity in any context a little mysterious and frightening. Talking of which, we also discussed Warrior's electrical requirements, as Ian will be bringing an electrician up (or possibly down) soon. These will be entirely, or almost entirely (haven't finally decided yet), 12v.

Decisions about the engine have been going on and changing all week, but we seem this morning to have come back round to what we decided on Friday - in short, that we will do most of the reassembly of the engine ourselves, at home, rather than have pay RN rates to have it done by them, and in the meantime will get Warrior mobile again with an engine from Ian, a 1970s Lister HRW3, with a Blackstone gearbox, which we can sell on once we've finished with it. This should take the time pressure off. There will no doubt be many more hitches and changes of plan along the way, but that is the latest state of play. The latest news is that not only is our engine unusual, but that our Bruntons 1:1 gearbox is itself a very rare example. Lets just hope that we can get them both up and running!

True Grit

Thursday July 13th

We did very little work on Warrior on Thursday, as another boat was being gritblasted. We were warned to batten down the hatches against the ensuing dust, but it wasn't too bad. We put our clear plastic sheets in the front doors and the kitchen side hatch, but the back end of the boat wasn't too affected. In fact, in the kitchen it wasn't the dust that was the problem so much as the exhaust from his enormous compressor which was lined up right alongside. Running almost continuously for what seemed like all day, this had the inestimable benefit of drowning out the sound of Radio 1 (yes, I really have got a downer on them; I honestly would rather listen to a compressor all day. More musical, too).

Well, it was very impressive to watch - and looked like an absolutely horrible job, especially on a day as hot as this was. We had (briefly) considered having Warrior's topsides (too naval?) blasted as we had the hull, but watching this decided us against it - on top of the cost (every penny well earned, mind you) there is also the hassle of masking eveything properly, and clearing up afterwards - and Warrior's paint, though horrible, is sound. So it's back to plan A, much sanding. Enter Number One Son, Lockboy's older brother, who owes us a favour or two ... He's not mad about boats, but he does like power tools, so we have high hopes of his assistance.

Other things I did while confined to quarters included putting the bed curtains up - that's a curtain on a rail either side of the steps and a flat panel in the middle, attached to the back of the steps, and I'm quite pleased with them even if I do say so myself. I also varnished the insides of the kitchen cupboards. Oh yes, and I sat out on the back and read the paper quite a lot.

Two other boats arrived and were craned out in the evening - a couple with a boat each. One of the boats, at eighteen months old, was an object lesson in the importance of removing millscale - the blacking was just falling off the hull.

I'm all alone in the office today, the kid that couldn't go on the school trip - everyone else is off on a departmental 'awayday'. The fact that I'm only here for another three weeks seemed like the perfect excuse to give it a miss. In case you're worried that I'm missing out on an all-expenses-paid treat to some exotic location, they've gone to Oldham.

Panelling the engine room

Wednesday July 12th

What I actually did on Wednesday was more blacking. What I am going to write about, however, is the panelling out of the engine room, which has been going on since our last visit, and is still underway.

For some reason, the engine room was never lined. This meant that it was cold and prone to condensation in the winter and an absolute oven in the summer. We are lining the cabin sides (vertically) with reclaimed old beaded edge pine t&g; the ceiling, in the same material, will be a little trickier, as the roof has a removable section for getting the engine in and out. Jim is currently working on it and it will probably end up with the middle section being a removeable panel, larger than the hatch, which screws on to the surrounding woodwork. We are using polystyrene for insulation behind the panelling. The porthole will now need a liner, but we won't be getting a brass one to match the rest of the boat; rather, we will have one made from steel and paint it.

The painting will be in pale grey for the woodwork (by and large everything above the gunwale) and raddle red on the metal, including the hull sides and engine bay. The Craftmaster paint is justifying its cost by being a pleasure to put on and covering very well.

Not one of my more scintillating posts, granted, but it's late afternoon in sweltering Huddersfield and I just want to get out of my airless office and go and swelter on Andante instead. Remember, when it's too hot to work, it's not the heat that's the problem!

Black stuff, and bed

Tuesday July 11th
It has fallen to me to do the blacking - mainly because I lack the myriad other skills which Jim is deploying elsewhere on Warrior. Not that blacking isn't a skilled job! (Well, no, it isn't really.) In our absence, Warrior's hull was shotblasted and two coats of blacking put on; my aim this week was to add a further three, making a total of five coats. We are using Rylard Coflex vinyl tar (comastic) and are taking it right up to the gunwale for ease of future patching up. I'm putting it on with cheap (£1.29) bristle brushes and chucking them away at the end of each coat - actually, despite being cheap they shed far less hair than most brushes I've used. I've always preferred brushes to rollers; it may be slower but it's less messy and it goes on thicker and better. This stuff went on very nicely (and the finish is authentically rough with plenty of runs and brushmarks!).

I did the third coat on the Monday, half of the fourth on the Tuesday and the other half on Wednesday, and the fifth on Friday - Thursday was a day off because a boat was being gritblasted nearby. The only bit not done is the fore end - owing to a large and apparently growing pile of gravel having been delivered around it, which provides a lovely effect of Warrior ploughing through the waves but impedes painting access. Rather than move the gravel, Keith is going to move Warrior at some point, and then we (or they) will get the last bit finished off.

The tin the stuff comes in is of course emblazened with myriad warnings to the effect of how nasty it is, and I was careful not to inhale too much of it - but I was still surprised to find that - at least in combination with the sun - it will burn skin where it drips on it. I first noticed this with a mysterious sore elbow on Monday evening which then developed burn marks; I suffered no ill effects on the Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Friday nearly every drip was leaving a mark and I finally sussed out the cause. Whether the difference was in the different tins, the temperature or the sunlight I don't know. But it's obviously good stuff!

Other tasks today included Jim building the base for the bed under the foredeck. This is as close to the floor as possible, to give us maximum headroom, but raised up enough to provide some airflow to the mattress and clear a water pipe. Originally, there was a very ingenious and well built roll out bed, but it had several disadvantages: it was narrow (3'9"); the head sloped downwards, and we had to move the furniture to make space to roll it out. Having a fixed bed under there means the bed can be wider - about 4' at the head end widening to the full width of the boat, and the head end slopes (slightly) upwards rather than downwards, making it much more comfortable. We thought of levelling it out but that would have lost us more headroom. As it is we have about two foot, which is cosy but adequate for getting in and out. The whole space under the foredeck is panelled in pine and beautifully finished - even though it was never intended to be seen. There is a large hatch over the centre of the bed that we can prop open for ventilation - before the wasp season starts I have to make an insect screen for it! We had a mattress made in 4.5 inch thick foam, covered in striped ticking, by the Foam and Fabric Shop in Seaford, East Sussex - I think it cost £270, and it's very comfortable and shaped to fit in both dimensions.

Finally, on Tuesday, we went out for dinner to the Hartley Arms in Wheaton Aston, which was pretty good; certainly much better than our other attempt at eating out in the area, at the Vaughan Arms, Lapley - definitely not recommended! After a nice meal and some very good beer we went for a walk along the towpath where we saw a lovely new boat and engaged the owner in conversation - he turned out be to a repairer of boat engines, specialising in old ones, and we may hear more of him here ...