119 days...

One hundred and nineteen days and half a dozen phone calls since I paid for it, Chertsey's licence has finally arrived! Hooray, and thanks especially to Paul Burch for sorting it out and reissuing the old number. Say what you like about BW, but frustrating as this process has been, everyone I've dealt with has been so wonderfully pleasant and helpful that I haven't even felt like shouting once.

Wanderers in Wolverhampton

Day 4: Wolverhampton

Well, that was too good to last; we got thrown out of the basin this morning when the supervisor arrived (don't worry Blossom, Minnow's still safe in there. We said we couldn't possibly move it.) Andway, we've spent the day on the towpath just beyond the basin and so far nothing dire has occurred. There are 'secure' visitor moorings on the other side of the canal; however, they are so secure that you can't actually go anywhere from them on foot, so that wasn't much good for as as we wanted to explore.

First though I got on with my painting and decorating inside the back cabin. I was doing the green moulding and it proved quite difficult and frustrating. I'm not at all happy with the result and there's still work to be done but you can at last get some idea of how it's meant to look. Then it was off into the town centre.

Based on a. the view from the ringroad, and b. the fact that it was widely reported to have been named by Lonely Planet as the fifth worst city in the world (although apparently this was a misunderstanding), I was prepared for Wolverhampton to be grim. But guess what - at least on a sunny September afternoon, it wasn't. In fact, looking at the city centre at any rate, it was really rather good. What do I look for in a town? A good range of shops, busy streets, a decent pub or two, and lovely buildings... well, Wolverhampton has all this for sure. Some stunning buildings, no doubt preserved through the fifties, sixties and seventies by poverty rather than appreciation of their Victorian/arts and crafts/thirties finery, but by and large there nonetheless. There seemed to be a fairly thriving market, most of the shops were open for business and we just had to visit this pub, the Posada, with its Victorian tiles, snob screens, booths and mahogony, and amazing curved windows. The beer was OK (I see it has had mixed reviews on BitE) but it was the surroundings that made it. And when we got back both times the boat hadn't been stolen/untied/vandalised/robbed, so we still think Wolverhampton is quite a lot better than it's cracked up to be.

Dog bites man... BW buggers up licence

So, not news I know, but naturally I have to share my tale of licensing woe. Although actually it's not a tale of woe, because although there have been cock-ups and chaos, everyone I have spoken to at BW has been ever so nice and helpful, and this time, they promise, they really will sort it out...

It started when I went to Fradley to fill in - and pay for - a licence application form. Apparently, in the commodious setting of the visitor centre/ice cream emporium I wrote my bank card number down wrong. Six weeks later, I got a phone call to tell me this, and to take the number down again. That's fine, said the nice young man, the post's just about to go, I'll print off your licence and pop it in the post right now.

A couple of days ago, a long, heavy envelope arrived from BW. Uh-oh, I thought. That feels like new plates... Just what I didn't want. Chertsey already has an index number - 70453 - one of the first to be issued when they were first introduced in the early eighties. 519333 might be a perfectly nice number, but I don't want it, thank you very much. The trouble is, Chertsey was last licensed in 1983, so there's no record of it on BW's computer - although I've talked to other people in similar situations, and they have been successful in getting their old number reissued, so I was hopeful. This isn't the cock-up, by the way; no, this is all quite understandable, if disappointing.

It was when I looked at the licence 'discs' they had sent that I realised something wasn't quite right - they had no craft name on them, no index number, and stated 'no permanent mooring'. If they hadn't been just about as dear as a licence could be, I might have made a tidy profit with them. So I got on the phone straight away (fortunately I had a direct number for the nice young man who'd phoned me up previously) and although he wasn't there, his nice young colleague has promised to sort everything out, and to arrange to reissue the old index number as well. So... watch this space.

Volunteers wanted to remove floating dead dogs

Perhaps this is what I missed by not going to the HNBOC meeting last weekend, at which a BW bigwig (might even have been the same one) was providing the entertainment with a talk on future spending and the involvement of the 'third sector', but never mind, I was able to read all about it in the Guardian yesterday.

Now I'm not going to get involved in discussions about whether this is the right - or only - way forward (probably not, but another time, maybe) but a couple of things leapt out of the article (shall I be cynical and say press release) at me.

The first was this:

Hales said: "Why does a taxpayer in Blackpool fund the Regent's canal in London?"

To which the answer surely is, have you not grasped the point of a national system of taxation, Tony? The point is cross-subsidy; in some areas services are expensive to provide (think of public transport in sparsely populated rural areas); in other areas economies of scale make services relatively cheap to provide. Some areas are rich and some areas are poor. If every area had to pay for its own amenities and services, inequalities would become even more entrenched than they already are. His example is in any case disingenuous; it is surely the super-wealthy residents of Maida Vale and the commuters of G.U. Metroland who have funded the Liverpool Link and the Lancashire, not the other way round.

This attitude sounds like the beginning of the end for British Waterways or a national waterways system by any name, and an argument for a break up into self-funding regions, which will, for all sorts of reasons, have vastly differing levels of income and of outgoings, and would in many cases find themselves in competition with each other. It also brings to mind shades of the post-British railway system (shudder). Will we see the return of stop locks and the Worcester Bar?

The second assertion that I would take issue with is this:

"And if I own a brand new flat in Birmingham, I'm not going to sit there and do nothing if the canal I overlook is full of floating dead dogs, or the tow paths are covered in dog shit, or the lock gates don't work, and the value of my property is going down. I'm going to get involved."

Has he ever visited an area where the streets are covered in dog shit and the street lamps don't work, and there may even be the odd dead dog, or cat, or pigeon or rat? And has he noticed the people getting involved? Because mostly, mostly they don't. If they're affluent and confident, they shout and complain until someone else (usually the local authority) does something about it; and if they're poor and depressed, they put up with it and don't see any possible alternative. And frankly, the eventual residents of all those new flats, bought-to-let-off-plan and now being repossessed or offloaded by desperate failed would-be property magnates, are likely to fall into the latter category. And I'm sure that most of them wouldn't even notice whether the lock gates worked or not, let alone care.

'Getting involved' is the New (and now somewhat tarnished) Labour mantra. It involves passing the responsibility for local problems onto the people who are suffering from them, but without giving them the power to do anything meaningful about it. The way to achieve things is by banding together, but you cannot do that effectively if everyone in an area is poor, poorly educated, and depressed. You have to spread that load more widely. At its best, at its (hardly ever reached) ideal, that is what the state does; that is what the state is for. In practice, it hardly ever works. The irony is, that in a small way, as a vestige of the glory days, that's what British Waterways, the forgotten nationalised industry fighting on without noticing that the war was over and the private sector had won, was doing.

Moor? More! More!

A big boat needs a big mooring, and hence I have been keeping a watchful eye on the British Waterways moorings auction site for quite a while. Occasionally a 22 metre 'berth' comes up - sometimes even with an available depth of more than 70cm. And when that happens, off I set on a mystery tour... to Weedon, Banbury or Wolverton, say - to see what the mooring's like, and to have a look at the local town and facilities, to see if I could see myself being based there.

And on a couple of occasions I have come back and bid. The policy of auctioning moorings like this is of course highly questionable, but it has to be said that (in my experience at least) the site works very well. Obviously, from the fact that I keep looking, I have not yet bid successfully; I have in fact been outbid on two moorings so far, both of which have gone over the guide price, and the most recent one, that I didn't bid on, went way over. Yet I also hear of moorings not reaching their reserve, including one of these full length ones, the first time it was offered. Taken across all the moorings, the auction system, which sets the guide price at what it's currently bringing in, and the reserve somewhat lower, may not be inflating prices, but my recent limited experience suggests that it might be at the bigger end of the market. Certainly I was priced out; I wouldn't pay over £1,600 a year for a towpath mooring with no facilities and no security and in the case of Wolverton, not even any rings.

I could, in theory, take Chertsey to Bill Fen, where Warrior resides, and pay the grand total, including VAT, of £846. And maybe I'm mad not to. But getting up and down the Nene, and round Whittlesey Dyke, is pretty theoretical in a boat like Chertsey. Not impossible, certainly - ask Fulbourne - but not the sort of thing you want to be doing two or three times a year or more. So I decided to bite the bullet and look for somewhere more central. It's a canal boat, for heaven's sake; it needs to be on the cut. And I want it to be not only within relatively easy reach of home (a lot to ask given where I foolishly decided to be born and brought up) or at least of London, but also of the rest of the canal system.

And I think I've found somewhere. It's not signed and sealed yet, so I'll save that for another time, but I'm glad that I ventured into the world of BW moorings. It was an interesting experience, and a nice excuse for the occasional day out.