Urban Oddities

After the last set of photos, something completely different.  Some evocative views of true urban settings.

First in  Birmingham, Kath asked me to take this picture.  I suspect it will end up as a piece of textile art in due course.  One building reflected in another.

 

Here it is un-reflected – not half so interesting.

Then for contrast, but only a short walk away, a more historic scene.  We squeeze through the seven foot wide gap at Worcester bar which used to separate two canal companies and necessitated unloading one boat into another across a few yards of land. Now, thankfully, open to navigation.

 

Now we go to Leicester where six feet from our overnight mooring we see this.

Sadly, it appeared to be abandoned.

 

And lastly a puzzler for you.  This picture was taken ten minutes walk from Coventry canal basin.  Any idea what it is?

Nature album

This years cruising itinerary of London, Oxford, Coventry, Leicester, Birmingham, Warwick etc sounds a bit urban when I tell friends where I’ve been.  My photo album tells a different story.  I don’t find it easy to get good pictures of plants and animals but a small percentage come out alright, so here’s a selection from our cruises this year.

Don't forget, clicking brings 'em up big

1 Just a mossy branch, but the light was good.  This is my favourite.

2. The “other” side of mooring at Braunston

3. A visitor at Foxton Locks

4. perhaps the roses on our cans are more realistic than we think.  Actually I think this butterfly looks like
an old plane ready to take off

5. Crab apple blossom I think.  there was a bumper crop this autumn.

6. At last a peacock that doesn’t squawk – on the S. Oxford

7. A Richmond on Thames heron looking, as all herons do, grumpy and miserable

The people have spoken

Back to a more normal blog view.  Blogger’s new tricks didn’t find favour with you lot out there and I’m inclined to agree.  We’re not quite back to how we were, but near enough for now.

Meanwhile winter draws on and it’ll soon be time for the start of the ever popular Herbie Awards season in which we consider the best and worst of the years cruising, pubs, events and all that stuff. Will there be new and exciting categories this year?  There might be if you can suggest any.  Also what about the Herbie Special Award for someone who deserves it for their actions this year.  This year I’m inviting nominees from readers of the blog.  Thinking caps on folks.

An experiment -any views on views?

Blimey, what’s all this?
I thought I’d try out Blogger’s new Dynamic Views.  There are a number to choose from and some are more startling than others. if you click on where it says Magazine on the black bar at the top, you can see the blog in all sorts of strange new formats.

Some of them do have the advantage of encouraging you to look back at older posts and perhaps browse the blog rather than just reading the latest post.   I rather fancy the Flipcard view, but perhaps it might be too confusing for the casual visitor.

Sore fingers

I’ve got really sore fingers from rubbing down.  Not paint this time but brass.  People who bother to polish the mushroom vents on their boat will know the feeling. For a change though, this brass has nothing to do with boats. It’s more to do with something to keep me occupied while I can’t go boating. It’s my new clock.  Well, when I say new I mean 40 or 50 years old.  This clock will never live on the boat.  Apart from being too big, it is a pendulum clock.  Imagine that trying to work while the boat rocks in the wind!

 

There are lots of brass sub assemblies like this

all tarnished with age and the object is to take it all to bits and using wet and dry paper and metal polish get them back to a shiny state.  I have of course taken photos from every angle, otherwise I’ll never get it back together again. Just like me getting the clock in the first place, this is all entirely Rick’s fault.  He has a similar clock we he has restored to spectacular condition, I suspect better than new.   I will never achieve that standard, having neither the skill nor the perfectionist tendency, but I won’t be able to look him in the eye if I don’t at least give it a good clean.  Incidentally since his house is full of interesting old clocks, I have been considering referring to Rick in future as The Time Lord. 

Taking a clock to bits is a bit scary, but I suspect I might get it reassembled and working as the bits are nice and big and simple.  By Christmas would be nice.

Dirty jobs

I case there are any non boaters out there who think the boaters are all living in the lap of luxury, let me mention toilets.  Don’t get me wrong, boat toilets are fine to use, but not being plumbed into the sewerage system, we do have to get them emptied.  Those like us who have cassette type toilets have quite an intimate re-aquaintance with their contents from time to time.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of the places BW requires you to use for this purpose are less than immaculate.  Personally I prefer the outdoor ones for reasons you might guess.

Happily the facility at our marina is of the shiny stainless steel variety under cover but in the open air.  In short it is very acceptable, so we are indeed fortunate.  Somewhat more fortunate I fear, than the marina staff who have sometimes to attend to blockages in the facility.  Today I spotted a notice there asking boaters to take great care with removable plastic items e.g sliding covers and screw on spout caps on their cassettes when emptying.  It seems they recently had to remove seven such items that had jammed the pipe and in the wording of the poster – “as you imagine this was not without some difficulty.”

Heroes.

Today I shall refrain from photographic evidence. I know your limits.

Odd Jobs

Jobs for this weekend:
1. Drive to Crick to change Herbie’s nappies
2. Drive from Crick to Halesowen to buy a clock that doesn’t tell the time

Hmm I can see that you might be excused for thinking I’ve finally lost the plot.  Perhaps I should explain.

1.  Herbie does indeed wear nappies.  We use cheap disposables to absorb any fluids that leak into the engine sump tray. Most effective they are too, providing you pull of the elasticated edges so they lie flat. When they are saturated just pop them in a plastic bag and dispose.  Herbie has had a small but persistent diesel leak from the fuel filter.  I think I might now have tracked down the source and with luck can cure it by replacing a washer.  Leaks are swines to cure sometimes.  You fix where you think it is and then you find it’s somewhere else.

2.  Now about this clock.  I bought it off Ebay and I have to collect it because it is big and heavy.  The literature on these clocks say they are accurate to within 8 seconds a month.  Not bad for a pendulum clock.  The problem is it has no face so although it keeps good time it doesn’t let you know what it is!

Have I gone completely mad? 

Au contraire mes amis.

You see it is a GPO master clock as used in old telephone exchanges to time calls etc. It is capable of sending out an electrical pulse every 1,6, or 30 seconds, and these pulses work a slave clock which does have a dial.  Aah, so do I have a slave clock?  Well, not yet, but they do come up on ebay quite often so its only a matter of time.  Which of course I can’t tell.

It’s all Rick’s fault.  He has a small collection of master clocks and he made me want one.

Bang to rights.

Once or twice on our last trip the “lads” were out on the towpath on their motor bikes.  After one incident I saw this notice at a nearby BW water stop.


What is a Section 59 Warning?, you may ask.   Perhaps the “lads” know, but I didn’t.  However I consulted Constable Google and he provided me with the answer, and here’s what he said.

Section 59 of the Police Reform Act 2002 states that any person driving a vehicle on or off a road in a manner that causes nuisance or inconvenience to other road users or members of public will receive a warning that lasts for 12 months. 

If at any point within that 12 month period you are caught driving in a similar manner then your car (or bike presumably) can be seized by the police and you'll have to pay a penalty to get it back. This is normally in the region of £200 depending how long they keep it for and what area you live in.

This power is executable by Police officers and Police Community Support Officers ONLY.


I wonder how often the lads get caught.  Come to think of it, how many of them hang around BW water points reading the notices.   Next time I see one of these lads I’ll politely ask him to sit and wait while I summon a Constable or a PCSO.  Problem solved.  I know my rights.

An unusual windlass.

   

I saw a lady using this windlass on the Curdworth locks and she kindly let me photograph it.  She said her husband bought it off ebay although it looks like a one off. Obviously it’s an adapted socket set ratchet, but I’ve never seen anything else like it.  I omitted to photograph the handle, but it was a pretty standard cranked windlass handle.  It was quite light to carry, unlike the big ratchet jobs with extending handles that some chandleries sell.  I wouldn’t mind one. Anyone else seen one or know where they come from?

Calibrating Canal Planners using the stop watch you didn’t know you had.

Sometimes you don’t even know what you’ve got when you’ve got it.  I was thinking overnight about the probable inaccuracies in my CanalOmeter for the Bottom Road (see yesterday’s post) because on a good day you can zip through close flights of locks much faster than you expect. If only I had timed our ascent with a stop watch, I could check.  Suddenly I realised I had an answer.  Let me start from the beginning

I use data from Nick Atty’s brilliant Canalplan to calculate travelling times. Experience has shown me, and thousands of others, that it’s a pretty good guide to cruising times. I used to just take the distances and number of locks and do the rest of the calculations myself based on what speeds I expect to achieve and how long it takes to do locks locally.  However since Canalplan introduced the option to show cumulative times I’ve just used those.  Stupidly I forgot to adjust Canalplan’s settings to reflect the “local conditions”. 

Locking times can vary enormously.  Anything from 5 minutes (e.g. Northampton flight) to 35 minutes (River Nene, where you have to tie up, walk round the corner, and wind one of those bl***y wheels).

For narrow canals, Canalplan’s default settings are

Average speed 2.5 mph.  Time for individual lock 12 mins, -  for locks in flights 8 mins

2.5 mph might seem slow, but as an average I might accept it because of slowing down passing moored boats and any small delays.  The lock times don’t seem unreasonable either, but I recalled that going up Farmers Bridge flight we seemed to be doing a lock every 5 minutes or so.   If only I had timed the flight I could have compared actual times with Canalplan’s predictions.

Wait a minute. Eureka!  I do have the times.  Simples. Digital photos have a time stamp don’t they. In fact I have photos, hence times,  for the whole trip that day, from the first lock we entered to when we emerged at Farmers Bridge.

First lock (Minworth bottom lock) 07.34 (believe you me, we don’t often start that early)

Entering Farmers bridge bottom lock (after a short tea and sandwich break) and 6 miles and 14 locks already done (phew) 11.20

 

Coming up through Farmers bridge top lock 12.26

So from the first lock that’s 3h 46 mins to the bottom of Farmers Bridge locks and another 1hr 6 mins to the top.

Blimey! We seem to have done 13 locks in 66 minutes, so that’s about 5 mins per lock.

Now using Canalplan’s default settings we get 5hrs 26 mins for the first part plus another 2 hrs 26 mins to the top.  A total discrepancy for the whole day of precisely 3 hours. I could have had another couple of hours in bed!!

Is this Canaplan’s fault?  Are CanalOmeters a waste of time? Not a bit.  We should have done the settings first. We knew we had extra crew to set up locks in advance and there were very few other boats moving to delay us.  There were 26 locks in all that day, so overestimates soon pile up.  A minute ago I just redid the Canalplan route with more realistic settings and the answer came out within half an hour of the true figure.  Not bad for a long day’s work.

The lesson for you in using Canalplan and for me in making CanalOmeters is to think hard about the default settings before you start.    I may well re-do the Bottom Road CanalOmeter to reflect this.  My older ones for the southern GU which did use local knowledge of speeds and locks have proven to be pretty accurate.

The Bottom Road CanalOmeterised

Last night I was re reading bits of Idle Women – Susan Woolfit’s great book about women on the canals in WWII.  At last I was able to relate to some of the canals she worked on around Birmingham, and I was interested to remember that the route to the south via Fazeley and Hawkesbury was known as The Bottom Road.  According to Mrs Woolfit, the boaters didn’t like it a lot even though they got extra pay for taking that route She says the boats were sometimes sent that way because of “something to do with saving water”.  I’ll need to ponder that one.  Apparently the boaters objected to the very dirty condition of parts of the route, and also to the single locks.  Single locks are a delight for a single boat, but for a boat towing a butty they are hard work as you have to do every lock twice and manhandle the butty into the locks.

Anyway, enough of that.  All this inspired me to waste a few hours today in creating a Bottom Road CanalOmeter (with an extra bit added to get me back to Crick).  I don’t like to create one of these calculators until I have first cruised the route because you have to choose which landmarks to include, but having now cruised it i felt able to go ahead.  If you don’t know what a CanalOmeter is, then take a look at my CanalOmeters page which tries to explain everything.  Suffice it to say they come in handy when you want to know how long it will take to get to where you are going from wherever you are en route.

In fact I did it the other way round, starting at Crick and going up to Brum, but it works either way. If you’re cruising the North Oxford or the lower half of the Coventry or the B’ham and Fazeley canal you might find it useful.  One word of warning though.  When it comes to long flights of locks he calculations may well be well on the pessimistic side.  With a couple of extra crew and locks in your favour you can easily save a couple of hours up the Aston and Farmers Bridge flights.

 

I really ought to make CanalOmeters more frequently because if I don’t then I forget how to do it and it becomes a bit of a nightmare as I have to re discover all the tricks.  It’s all done with Excel spreadsheet pie charts and the formatting can be a bit of a nightmare.  Strangely enough, its the inner hours wheel that is the hardest to do. Anyway, despite a few more grey hairs it’s there now .  Click on my CanalOmeters page if you want to down load The Bottom Road as a PDF or any of the others there.  To make one all you need is a bit of card, a printer, a pair of scissors and one of those little brass paper fastener thingys.

 

I think the next one I’ll do will be the Stratford route.

How the other half lives.

People speak of the North South divide as if it was all in favour of the South.  Well the divide sure showed itself to us on our last boat trip, but not in that way.  (Note to all real Northerners – I know that Brum is not the north*, but it’s as far north as we got, so bear with me. ) A pint of Brew XI (Brewed for the Men of the Midlands the old advert used to say) at £2.75 a pint?  Give me some more of that.  When we drink in pubs in the Home Counties you could easily add 75p to that. 

As for food, we did eat out more than we ought, but sometimes I couldn’t believe the prices.  Best was at the Beehive in Curdworth on the B’ham and Fazeley where just after the cute little 57 yard tunnel there are the last good moorings before storming the battlements of Brum.  The Beehive is ten minutes walk from the canal and very unprepossessing from the outside,



but this is a pub I would gladly visit again.  Inside it is friendly and comfortable and we had a rump steak with all the trimmings for £6 odd!  It was good too.  I just checked the menu of the Malt Shovel at Cowley, in many ways a similar pub a day’s cruise from London on the GU.  Identical meal £10.45.  At other pubs in the area it might cost a couple of quid more.

We might have paid about £9 or£10 at the Greyhound at Hawkesbury but the food there was of a quality that would cost £14 or  more at Bugbrook or Old Linslade, or Apsley  . .

I don't think Midlanders have too much to grumble about.

What about the fabled friendliness of the north midlands?  Well of course on the canal most people are friendly, we spend the whole day waving and saying hello. But once shore we’re back to reality. 

All I can do is give an example of how we were treated one night. On our way south from Brum we moored on the pontoon outside the Bluebell Cider House at Hockley Heath not far above Lapworth.  That’s Warwickshire. Their on line menu showed tasty sounding meals for less than a fiver but we arrived at the moorings earlyish and decided to tidy up the boat, have a cup of tea and a shower before awarding the pub our patronage.  At 7pm our hunger got the better of us and we strolled up the garden path feeling suitably famished.  “Doing food tonight?” I asked.  “Oh I’m sorry, on Saturdays we finish food at 7”.  Imagine my delight!

Seeing our disappointment, the bar lady said she could always order a Chinese takeaway for us and found a menu from the nearest one and phoned through our order.   We each had a pint of their rather splendid Black Rat cider and sat down to wait.  When the Chinese food finally arrived, the pub provided us with plates and cutlery, which of course they had to wash up afterwards.  Actually we hardly had time to eat because we were deep in conversation with the locals about this and that, and got so friendly with one couple that we kissed goodbye when they left.

Nuff said.

*footnote re Where is the North?


Many many years ago I was in a school in Sunderland talking to boys in their final year.  Unemployment was rife up there.  Prospects for these lads were very bleak.  In the South East there were jobs galore.  I asked one boy if he would consider moving down south if he couldn’t find work locally.  “Down South?” he pondered. Then stoically, “Yes, I would” he said.  I asked where.  “ I dunno, York or Leeds I suppose”. 


It’s all relative isn’t it.