Not eaten

If anyone should imagine that our voyage to take Herbie from Iver to Cropredy is one mad dash, they would be sadly mistaken. We set off yesterday morning and got all the way to Uxbridge, about four miles and one lock. We did take on water and provisions en route, but that's still not much of a day's work.

This morning, we again failed to get under way, preferring instead to visit the Odeon Cinema where the old fogies' morning matinee was showing "In the Heart of the Sea", a true story from the nineteenth century about a whaling ship sunk in the Pacific by a huge white whale.

"Ain't that Moby Dick?" I hear you ask. Well, yes and no. This true episode was the inspiration for Meliville's great book. Having had their ship The Essex destroyed thousands of miles from anywhere, the survivors set off for South America in little open boats. Eventually running out of water and food they resorted to eating those that had died.

When we got back to the boat, I checked the fridge and the galley cupboards to make sure they were well stocked, 'cos I thought Kath had been giving me funny looks. I think we'll make it alive to Rickmansworth Tescos tomorrow.

Tonight we stopped at one of our old favourite moorings just above Black Jacks lock (should that have an apostrophe?). Apart from the squawking of the peacocks across the canal, it's a peaceful spot.

 

 

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What not to wear in the pub

 

This:

We had a one day Towpath Ranger conference on Saturday, and very interesting it was too.  Quite a lot of it was us Rangers asking CRT for more guidance on how we should work.  One thing we didn’t expect, but I suppose we should have realised, is that we are not allowed to be seen boozing in our uniforms, so if we feel in need of alcoholic refreshment after a hard day volunteering, we need to take a spare jumper.

One contentious issue is Lone Working.  As Rangers we often have the opportunity to take a walk or a cycle down the towpath to report on conditions, send in details of a fallen tree or damage to the path surface, or to answer questions from boaters or the public.  The question is, should we be allowed to do this solo?  Most of us rangers are perfectly happy to do this, especially as it takes effort to organise joint efforts, but CRT is not comfortable about this because of risks of accident or possible confrontation with stroppy people.  We have sent them away to produce more definitive guidance, bearing in mind that if we can never work solo, then we will get a lot less done.  In fact it raises the whole issue of when we are  or are not on duty.  Some rangers patrol the towpath on their way to work.  I might send in a report of something I see when boating along.  Neither of us would be in uniform or officially on duty, but that shouldn’t mean we cant report a tree down or snip of the end of a trailing bramble.  What we did agree was that we should not formally approach a member of the public unless we have ID on us.  I think we are to be issued with identity tag lanyards. 

As long as I have a lanyard i would be happy to approach a boater or member of the public in a helpful way if I was on my own, but I guess if I was dealing with anything contentious then I ought to be accompanied.  We’ll have to wait and see what the new guidance says.

Having started in London, the Towpath Ranger idea is being rolled out to the rest of the UK, the first ones are now going out in Leicester with many other places to follow so if you fancy a go at it, now’s your chance.  The good thing is that there is no specific regular weekly commitment.  One or two days a month is a sufficient minimum, plus the odd meeting.

Next week, we are told, we’ll get more publicity reminding people to be good towpath citizens and a couple of new posters will be revealed. Don’t get too excited I have seen them.  They are fine, but not exciting.

We’ve now got a natty little phone app to report in damage / incidents and the like.  If we fill in the form in situ, it’ll record the GPS location automatically and we can attach photographs too.  No they don’t give us smartphones, we have to use our own and the App is optional.

As for my other volunteering role as a boat mover.  I am now getting inundated with requests just as I am going away for a month on Herbie.  I think there’ll be plenty more when I get back, so it looks like Il be doing a fair bit of boating this year.

How to make a box

We try not to do things the hard way. When we make a box, the initial stage is 1. First take a box. 

Luckily for the storage boxes we need on Herbie’s shelves, wine bottle boxes have just the right footprint.  All I have to do is cut them down to height and stiffen the sides with extra layers of cardboard.  That’s when Kath steps in and works her magic.

She tears up pieces of previously painted or hand printed paper (all her own work) and sticks them on like this.

I suppose some people might find them a bit too  lively, but I love ’em.  She’s a clever old stick.  Once the glue is dry they get a protective coat of transparent wax.

This time she even subtly incorporated a logo.

After re-measuring the shelves I hope they are the right size this time  or I’m going to have to run for cover.

Whoops

You know the way us blokes do things. If all else fails, read the instructions. Today we were giving Herbie a pre season spring clean and I was allocated the task of cleaning the floor. Diligently I dismantled the back steps and cleared out the rack where we keep shoes and set about the floor in that area using a spray bottle of Cif I found in the cupboard under the sink. After doing quite a big area and thinking that this stuff must be strong cos it was attacking my hands a bit, I took a better look at the bottle. It was oven cleaner.

Ah well, I gave it a good rinse and then used the proper stuff. I just have to hope it won't eat the floor under the steps. We use a fair few cotton rugs on the boat and we brought them home to wash. The first one is still in the bath as I write and the water is still dark gray after its third soak and rinse. Anyhow the old boat is starting to look a lot more spic and span.

Having created a lot of shelf space by chucking stuff away, I used some cut down wine bottle boxes to make storage boxes which Kath will cover in some collage type designs and then paint with a protective layer of wax paint. I thought I'd made a good job of them, but the shelves have obviously redesigned themselves since I measured up cos the boxes don't fit. Bah!

Our final job before we left the boat today was to remove the secondary double glazing as we are hoping we won't get more very cold weather. See, we are optimists really.

We have a Rangers Conference in London tomorrow. I think various CRT management types will be giving us their words of wisdom. I wait with bated breath.

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Making a mess tidying up.

Well whaddya know? I just discovered that it’s precisely ten years ago today that we first arrived with Herbie at High Line Yachting on the Slough Arm.  Our first permanent mooring, where we stayed for five years before going up to Crick. As this photo of a slyph like Kath shows, the shelves and cupboards were bare at that time.

That was before we started filling her up with miscellaneous stuff.  Over the years, we keep bringing more books, CDs, tools and all manner of junk on board.  Whatever the opposite of Feng Shui is, that’s where we are now. Time for a de-clutter.

So yesterday we seized the day and removed a car boot full of books, CDs, surplus rainwear and all sorts of other stuff from the boat. It seemed to weigh a ton when we wheelbarrowed it away.  I almost expected to see Herbie sitting out of the water by a couple of inches. The annoying thing is that Herbie still looks cluttered.  Never mind, it’ll look better when we tidy up the rest of the stuff into all the storage places we’ve emptied. 

The problem now is our house, ‘cos that’s where all the stuff came back to, so I’ve had to spend more time clearing out unwanted books and things from shelves at home to accommodate the items from the boat that we want to keep.  It never ends does it?  The good thing I suppose is that our local charity shops are going to be amply restocked by us over the next day or two.

Another good thing is the calories we’ve burned off.  Every time we push a wheelbarrow of things to or from the boat, it’s 800 steps each way according to Kath’s pedometer.  I’m quite looking forward to when we get to Cropredy and we can get the car close to the boat for loading and unloading.  That should be early May.  It might have been sooner, but we’ve delayed our planned start by 11 days because of commitments near home.  Luckily John at High Line Yachting has allowed us to stay the extra time without charge.  Bless.

Did you, like me, think that CRT usually completed al their planned canal stoppages by Easter?  Well, not this year.  We’re going to have to get past Dudswell and Cowroast locks by April 19 or face delays.   I hope they might be doing something about the leaky lock walls.   We can get past in time, but it means we’ll have to burn off a few more calories each day ‘cos there are 45 locks to do before we get past.  With any luck we’ll lose a bit of weight.  Maybe we’ll get back to the weight we were when we bought Herbie ten years ago.

Memories

In yesterday’s blog post I included a picture of our old friend Pete Higson without realising that it is just three years ago today that he was taken from us.  Thanks to his wife, our equally good friend Val, for pointing it out.

Pete was very keen to come boating with us whenever he could, and he was the ideal companion, not only on the boat but in the pub in the evening when he would spend his beer vouchers(bank notes) with great relish.  We have known Pete for something like forty years and over the last good many years before he died we would play music together every Tuesday night.  So in his memory I have put together a little slide show accompanied by a recording of me and Pete playing and singing a song on one of our Tuesday nights.  Both the photos and the recording are a bit rough and ready, but its the memories that count.

I tried to embed the resulting video into this blog post but due to some technical problems I don’t understand, it didn’t work, so should you wish to see more of Pete and hear me and him murdering one of Bob Dylan’s more poignant songs, then follow this link.

Halt, who goes there.

We towpath rangers in the London Way Out West team, lately known as the WOWboys, have worked out a way to make cyclists stop and get a friendly word of advice regarding their speed.  As you may remember, we run these Share the Space events where we set up on a busy bit of towpath and hand out little folding maps which also include advice about the Towpath Code.  The trouble has been that the very people we most want to influence are the cyclists who plough through the midst of us without stopping.  So at Cowley lock on Friday we got a bit more assertive and created a barrier with a little gap and then stood in front of the gap.  Speeding cyclists may be inconsiderate, but most are not homicidal so they tended to stop.  I then spoke to them in friendly terms such as “Here’s a little free towpath map for you as a reward for being a considerate cyclist, so do read what it says and take care.”  One or two looked a bit shamefaced at my friendly approach and cycled off more gently.  Well it’s a start.

This was different from our normal STS events where we have been targeting mainly commuters.  This time it was more for people out and about for leisure, and a lot more people stopped to chat and look at the maps.  It was a two way conversation.  I learned more about the sale of  the Toll Cottage by the lock, (CRT is reported to have sold it while the current occupants still have two years of a lease left to run.) and the concerns of the very nice lady who operates the trip boat Albert, which takes parties of mainly elderly people up to Denham and beyond for cream tea cruises.  She is concerned because it seems that because of HS2, there are plans to re route the pylons which cross the canal above Denham, and in so doing remove most of the trees on the offside as you approach Widewater lock.  This would indeed be a tragedy as it is a particularly attractive stretch as illustrated by the photo featuring our dear departed friend Pete as we cruised that particular stretch.

 

As Cowley lock is only a short cruise from Herbie’s current moorings, we chose to go there by boat.  It was a good thing that we did, for we came upon the mighty Still Rockin’ as we came through Packet Boat Lane bridge, so giving us the opportunity for an evening with Carol and George on Saturday and very pleasant it was.  that’s a nice thing about boating, you never know what friends you might meet round the next corner.

 

I’m out on the towpath again later this week at Hanwell or Brentford, seeing if we can make cyclists stop and listen to our advice.

BTW we just got a message that one of the walls of Norwood top lock (above the Hanwell flight) has been damaged and is now only 13ft 7in wide until further notice.  I can testify to the fact that it hasn’t been the full fourteen feet for some years as I was once on a big boat that got stuck in it.  Anyhow best not to go through there two at a time up for the time being.

Poison and good news

Blimey, it doesn’t do to read the health warnings on some products.  Having just used some stuff called Creocote to weatherproof a new stern button fender that Rick mysteriously acquired for me (Fell off the back of a boat? No, from some nick nack sale), I’m probably going to lose all my skin, get cancer, and poison all aquatic life on earth for a thousand years.  Interestingly one of the main ingredients of this brew is diesel.  When I first started brushing it on, the stuff just seemed to disappear, but after a few coats you can at least see where I’ve been.  Let’s hope it works.

Having returned to the house to wash this deadly potion off my hands, I noticed one of my fingernails has a longitudinal groove in it, so I looked that up on Google.  Apparently I might either have a deficiency of iron, or I might have too much iron.  Well, that’s helpful then.  I suppose I could lie north south and get someone to hit me with a hammer and see if I turn into a magnet or not.  Or I might have just hit my finger sometime.

Good news today.  After waiting all winter for Cropredy marina to confirm they have a berth for us from May for 12 months, I got an email to say its OK.  It’ll be nice to have a different base for a while, and we haven’t done a lot of cruising on the South Oxford.  What I’m hoping is that we get a dry spell and we can at last finish off the Thames.  We haven’t yet cruised anything above Eynsham lock, although I love the upper Thames.  We used to take the kids camping at Eaton Hastings and at Radcot when they were little.  We’ve also camped at Lechlade and at Newbridge , so we know the area quite well from the river bank.

Note for bloggers – in case it helps

For a long time I used Windows Live Writer(WLW) to write these post, or something called Blogsy on the iPad  Then WLW stopped working so I had to resort to the native Blogger editor, which I don’t like much.  Anyhow, today I searched for a solution and discovered Open Live Writer, which is like WLW but is supposed to work and I’m using it right now. Setting it up was very easy.  If you are reading this, then it worked.  Here goes . .

Imagine Donald Trump

 

Here's a picture of the Canal Cafe theatre above the Bridge House Pub in Little Venice. Not very big is it? Photos are not allowed during the performance so you'll have to imagine the stage. Last night's News Review was as funny as usual, the highlight for me being the Donald Trump sketches, one with him singing Imagine -”imagine there's no Muslims" etc another where he is confronted by Jesus over his lack of Christianity only to say he was taking no lessons from a Jew with a Mexican name. You had to be there I guess, but it was very funny.

We did the touristy thing yesterday afternoon and took a bus to Portobello road market. The only thing we bought was a cake! If you are ever there, seek our Garniers bakers shop and go in for a cake or a savoury and a cuppa. Their stuff is to die for, and as for bread, I think they had nearly twenty different types, all of course fresh baked.

Still hardly any boats moving in Paddington. I strongly suspect there are a number of overstayers. I feel another letter to CRT coming on. Perhaps we ought to get up a petition of boaters who are put off visiting London by the situation. The London boaters themselves have a strong voice collectively, but us visitors currently don't.

 

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Sell-by date exceeded in Bloomsbury

I'm not much of a one for sell-by dates and use-by dates and all that. If food looks fresh and smells fresh then I'll have a go at it. I would draw the line at some bread we saw yesterday though because it was four thousand years old! To be fair, it didn't look all that appetising, a bit dry I thought, but there it was in a display case at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology.

If old bread doesn't turn you on, how about the oldest surviving garment in thee world. Five thousand years old and made from a very fine linen thread.  That's older than some of my odd socks I keep hanging on to in case the other half shows up.

If you can find this place, it's worth a visit. There are no great sarcophagi or statues, but loads and loads of smaller artefacts, some of them exquisite. It's the sheer antiquity of this stuff that impresses me - that people four and a half thousand years ago were obviously quite sophisticated. This stuff is three thousand years older than the Angl Saxon stuff we get excited about here and a lot of it is much more refined. Some of the stone carving and pottery and glassware is very very fine.
Here's some jewellery Kath liked. Tiny intricate ceramic shapes on a necklace.

As the museum is within the UCL there are students hanging about to explain things to you, and when we went there was a student seminar going on and I listened to one giving a very interesting talk about the religious significance of amulets.
The museum is free. Go take a look when you're in London.
Not a lot of changeover in Paddington basin. It's full as I write I think.

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Beaten on penalties

A very jolly evening yesterday at the Warwick Castle in Little Venice. We teamed up with Carol and George (Still Rockin') and Diane and Ray (NB Ferndale) to enter the pub quiz. Carol obviously gets up earlier than me and has already posted a photo of us on the Still Rockin' blog.

George proved he is Still Rockin' by getting more of the music questions than the rest of us, and between us we managed to answer a fair few of the rest of the topics, although as usual we didn't do too well on pictures of "famous" people. Not famous in our house most of them. Anyhow, come the finale, we were equal first with two other teams so there was a tie breaker. Do you know the population of Topeka, Kansas? (Answer at the bottom) Well we were way out, so we missed out on the big prizes.

It's been alarmingly windy at times in this notoriously windy spot. In the middle of the night I could hear something large and metallic crashing about further down the was. Maybe a bin or a length of the fencing they have put up to mark of the demolition work.

Yesterday I went to Mecca. Well my version of it, which is Denmark Street where every shop is a guitar shop. I wasn't out to buy a guitar, I already have quite a few, but I fancied a tiny amp to go with my old "Maffi" stratocaster which lives on Herbie. Here's what I bought, with a coffe cup for scale.

 

Cute huh? Very retro and somewhat geared towards a sixties sound. It's especially good if you plug headphones in.

I'm doing a bit more on my book while I'm here, and I suppose I must be getting close to half way at 34,500 words. I'd better start thinking about untangling the plot, I haven't got a clue what will happen.

Talking of big numbers, Topeka (according to our quiz master) has a population of 120,000.

 

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Tea at the Palace

I am awash with tea. Kath went off ancestor chasing this morning while I prepared to attend a meeting at the CRT Little Venice office. They are teaming up with the national Walking for Health charity to set up towpath walks for (mainly) older people who need to up their fitness or people who might be otherwise isolated and need company.

Anyway at the meeting I had a cup of tea. When the meeting finished, Mike,one of my Ranger friends came back to have his first look at Herbie and of course we had a cup of tea. Then another ranger friend dropped by and on went the kettle again while we chatted about this and that. Quite a jolly sociable afternoon. Anyway they eventually departed and I sat down to read the paper when there came a knock on the side of then boat. It was Veronica, another CRT volunteer who lives on a boat on Blomfield Road. "Cup of tea Veronica?" "Yes please." We had a long chat over our tea about all sorts of stuff including what it is like to live in what are to many minds the most attractive moorings in London. Not all roses it seems.

We had just finished our tea when Kath returned. Veronica went off home and Kath and I walked down to Rembrandt Gardens where we had an invitation to visit Carol and George on their big boat Still Rockin'.

Of course the first thing they said was "Cup of tea?". Well it would have been rude to refuse tea at the palace!

Still Rockin' is a lovely boat, it feels more like a comfortable apartment inside. Being boaters, we of course discussed toilets at some length, especially as they too have an Airhead composting toilet. I was glad to hear that we were not alone in having to overcome fitting issues with the "exhaust" system, although we all agreed that the Airhead was a good thing to have now that we have got the installation right.

Now we are back on Herbie having a bite to eat. I declined Kath's offer of tea.

How nice to come away from home, moor up in the city and spend the whole day chatting to friends. That's boating for ya.

 

 

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