Rocky and Spot

Rocky made a new friend on Friday. Here he is with Spot. They began by having a marvellous time chasing about the yard. Ricky has quickly learnt not to try to run at top speed under boats, so Spot had the advantage there.

Spot's very favourite thing is to find and play with old grinding discs. I don't know what they must do to his teeth. That's what he's hidden under the cloth in the photo - the cloth that I was trying to get clean and dry. Rocky can't really see the attraction of this game.

No pics of a pet at the Port

What a hopeless chronicler I am. I completely omitted to take a camera to Ellesmere Port when we visited on Saturday. My thinking was that I'd seen all the boats there before.... But of course, I'd never taken Rocky there before. The Ellesmere Port Boat Museum is an excellently dog-friendly place. They're allowed everywhere on the site, and in (as far as I could tell) all the buildings (probably not the recreated cottages though).

When we arrived at about ten o'clock, the car park was already overflowing, and we had to park on the road. It didn't seem crowded inside though. Having seen all the exhibits a number of times, the day was mostly about catching up with other boaters and comparing our plans for the summer. It was a dry day, if slightly chilly, and I think Rocky enjoyed his day out. He certainly got plenty of the attention and admiration that seems to fall on him wherever he goes.

Painting, tidying and starting to scrub...

I think I must have forgotten some of the things we did at the weekend, because once again we left with a feeling of achievement. Most noticeably, Jim primed and painted the new Rocky-proof partition - all in gloss red oxide to match the inside of the hull. Rocky observed operations and only got himself a few extra white hairs from the primer...

He has settled much better on the boat this visit. He gets on and off very confidently, and in and out of the hold. The stairs are the main project for next weekend, before the bags of coal wear out.

While Jim was painting, I tidied and scrubbed out the back cabin, and finally had a good sort out of all the odds and ends stored in various places, which can now be rationalised. I even managed to scrub the counter. Just the rest of the boat to do then. Last week's wind and rain indicated that the new translucent top cloth would need to be laced down with bungee cord, so that was the first job. I have been very remiss in taking photos though, for which, apologies. I will try to catch up next time.

We didn't need to go to the pub at all last weekend, cooking quite happily on the Origo. I was dubious about the Origo, but I am happy to admit I was wrong. Jim, conversely, was dubious about my purchase of a modern paraffin heater, but is likewise impressed with the outcome. Dinner on the boat is usually based around a tin of pulses (red beans, white beans, chick peas etc) and a tin or jar of curry or pasta sauce, simmered together with whatever fresh vegetables we've managed to find/got lying about and maybe topped with a bit of cheese, and served with cous cous or ready cooked rice (cooking rice from scratch, or pasta, makes too much steam and takes too long). Last weekend we enjoyed kidney beans in spicy puttanesca sauce with fresh tomatoes, mushrooms and olives, topped with crumbled lancashire cheese; chickpea madras with carrots and cabbage (much nicer than it sounds; the cabbage gives a lovely nutty flavour), and butterbeans with mushrooms in tomato and basil sauce.

We finished by clearing out most of the kitchen/sitting area in the hold, ready for the next tranche of improvements... watch this space.

... and keeping Rocky on board

He might have qualms about descending four and a half feet, but with a bit of a run up he'd have no trouble in the opposite direction, so the first task of the weekend was to Rocky-proof the hold, creating a safe enclosed space, particularly so that he can't escape at night.

And here it is. With the exception of a batten screwed to the underside of the cross plank, none of the structure impinges on the historic fabric of the boat. I'm lucky to still have old, if not original (I have no idea how old but pretty certainly, pre-1970) cross planks but reckoned this counted as part of the natural evolution of the boat's history. The ply section at the top is just wedged in at the moment, but we have the wood to make a couple of additional uprights (those misnamed 45-degree supports for the top planks) to sandwich the ply against the stand. This means it is easily removable when we need to take down the deckboard and lower the cloths again (not in the next couple of years, I hope.) The ply, incidentally, was repurposed (how did we ever do without that word?) from the former toilet partition. Where the toilet goes in the new set up is still a matter of some debate and design consultation. The sides will be filled in more neatly when Jim has his jigsaw to hand. Eventually it will be painted.

Getting Rocky on board

Greyhounds aren't very good with stepladders, so we had to improvise...

Summer clothing

As soon as I arrived at Chertsey, a good few hours before Jim and Rocky, I started to strip off the cloths. They were still in 'low down' mode, following last year's trip to the Stratford. I've long been seeking a way to get more light into the hold - glamping in the dark just isn't so much fun. The historic Union Canal Carriers window cloths that I bought at the Droitwich tat auction did a good job of letting light in, and keeping rain out, but because they were only a yard wide, using them necessitated shifting the other cloths about, and because they were deep, they were hard to use with the top planks in the lower position.

So last week I finally got around to buying a roll of translucent scaffold sheeting, having finally given up on salvaging any from a building site. It's two metres wide, making it pretty much perfect topcloth size, and reasonably heavy, at 170gsm. We simply unrolled it alongside the boat to get the right length and cut it off in a single section. It's held in place with the standard arrangement of strings, but if this proves insufficient, it has eyelet holes for bungee cord. The idea is to leave it like this for the summer, and then put the black cloths over the top in the winter or if we leave the boat for a while - or whenever we need to look properly historic.

The shaped cloth stays on at the front, and this dark area will be the bedroom.

Now we can clearly see what a lot of work there still is to do inside the hold!

The moon (and sun) under water

The Moon Under Water is, of course, George Orwell's ideal London pub, drawn lovingly in an Evening Standard article in 1946. Many of its qualities would still be considered desirable today - good beer, decent basic food, friendly barmaids, open fires and above all, the background quiet to hold a conversation. Some of the attributes he sought are far more common today - particularly a women and children-friendly atmosphere. Others are so long gone that I hadn't even heard of them - beer in china mugs, for example.

We have now become a class of second class citizen, banned from many a lounge bar and restaurant, and entered the new world of the dog-friendly pub. Until now, this hasn't been too much of a culture shock. We have been taken by Rocky and his previous family to the Red Lion at Litton in the Peak District, where log fires, good beer and excellent beer are found to be perfectly compatible with canine companionship. The only thing we have to remember is to bring his blanket, for those authentic flagstone floors. Back in Newhaven, the Hope offers well kept Harveys, decent food, log fires and again, a warm welcome to Rocky - as long as we let the landlady know before we come in so that Pip the resident Pyrenean mountain dog (and mountainous she most certainly is) can be shooed behind the bar. But oh dear, down on the boat it was another matter. I hope to hear differently, but between Brewood and Wheaton Aston, only the public bar of the Bridge was reputed to tolerate dogs - and as a result was full of them, along with a great many children (in the public bar? Call me old-fashioned...) and worst, a very large, very loud, TV. For various reasons, largely mouse-related, eating on the boat wasn't an easy option for the first couple of days, and anyway, we'd been working hard and deserved a treat.

But this wasn't meant to be about pubs. It was about this sun and moon together under the water...

I'm not quite sure how the effect has come about - the actual eclipsed sun is lost in the glare, but a secondary reflection appears next to it. It's the same in most of the photos I took.

Here are some other people looking at the eclipse...

We learned that while a welder's mask was an excellent way of safely viewing the eclipse of 1999, modern polarising ones don't work - the light's either not bright or not sudden enough to trigger their darkening. Produced an interesting green effect in the photos though. A cardboard pinhole camera and a colander were also utilised. There was very little cloud in the West Midlands (as noted also by Diamond Geezer).

Back to the boat

Hooray! At last I have something to write about. I have just spent a weekend with Jim and Rocky working on Chertsey, and hope to get at least a week's worth of blog posts out of that.

Here is Rocky, supervising operations.

The window seat and me

Train observations are obviously a great space filler, so here, in best social media tradition, are my favourite kinds of seats and the reason why. The train companies should love me; I want the least popular kind of seat - an airline style aisle seat, and I don't mind if I have my back to the engine and a Virgin-style windowless stretch of cabin side to boot. But I often don't get what my heart most desires, and someone else is probably losing out as a result.

At least when booking, you can specify an aisle seat. Now obviously, in an ideal world, one wants to undertake one's entire journey next to an empty seat. No jostling for elbow room on the armrest, no awkwardly asking if you can lower the armrest to put some semblance of a barrier between you and next door's flab/smelly anorak, and above all, no sniffing, coughing and spluttering of myriad viruses into your airspace. But if you have an aisle seat, at least you are not at risk of being trapped and compressed into the corner by some corpulent malodorous germ-ridden stranger. At least there is a possibility of escape, and you don't have to ask permission to go to the toilet.

When booking, you can specify a table seat. I never do. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a non-table seat. So at least half the time I find my seat involves me facing someone else, and getting my feet tangled with theirs, and either having to complain or silently seething about the hard shell wheelie suitcase they have put under the table. But with an airline seat, I can stick my feet under the one in front (whilst selfishly denying that pleasure to the person behind me by putting my bag under my seat). I have a little table, should I need one. And best of all, I don't have someone gawping at me for two hours.

Now, I know that as long as I'm on the right train, it doesn't really matter where I sit. But if I take a non-reserved seat, I'm potentially depriving someone else of it, because they won't sit in my, apparently reserved, one. I could offer to swap, but that involves too much human interaction, sometimes. Often, anyway, the whole carriage is reserved. (Can I just mention a really petty thing that annoys me? When people come down the carriage looking for C27A, and can only find C27. The A stands for Aisle and is otherwise meaningless. Why do the train companies insist on printing it on the ticket and confusing people?)

So, I don't feel sick with my back to the engine, I don't want to make conversation, and I don't want to look out of the window. All I ask is a decent light, and I'll have my nose in a book the whole way. That's what trains are for, and that's what books are for.

An observation

An observation made, admittedly, when I regularly used a commuter train rather than one where most of the seats are reserved, but it came back to me today and is no doubt still true.

Many people will sit in a window seat and deposit their bags, coats etc on the aisle seat next to them.

I prefer an aisle seat, and make a point of not depositing my worldly goods on the seat next to me.

Once each pair of seats has been filled in this way, the next person to get on the train has to find a vacant seat. Nine times out of ten, they will ask me to move so that they can get into the empty seat next to me, rather than ask someone else to move their bags.

Is this because most people have such a desperate desire for a window seat? Or is it, as I suspect, because it's somehow easier to ask someone to get up so that you can sit on an obviously empty seat, than risk appearing critical by asking someone to move their bags?

Looking for Mr Wrigglesworth again another seven years on

I was just musing on some of my former teachers and thought I'd try Googling the one with the most unusual name, Mr (Alan) Wirgglesworth. About the third or fourth result was my 2008 post on the Hay Inclined Plane, of which I had just rediscovered a photo featuring his left arm. And on the post, there was a comment, from 'Alan', saying:

Hello Sarah, Alan Wrigglesworth (of one arm in the picture fame) here. Just found this on the internet. Be nice to hear from you.
Regards. Alan W.

Somehow I missed that comment at the time and the Google profile attached to it is no longer available. How I am kicking myself. So Alan Wrigglesworth, if you're still Googling yourself (or however else one finds out that one has been mentioned on an obscure boating blog) please have another go! Likewise, Phil Frier, Chris Collard, Mark Michael Mahoney and indeed many others who may have had the dubious pleasure of teaching me at one time or another.

I turned out OK...

Books I read in February

Ruth Rendell, No Man's Nightingale [crime]
I used to be a massive fan of Rendell - in the early eighties I had a complete set of her works to date - but she has been turning out rubbish for the last decade and more. This new Wexford story from 2014 is not as bad as some, but it still appears to have been written on autopilot. I used to like the way we only ever see the action from Wexford's point of view - it made the whodunnit puzzle more honest - but the flip side of this is that the other characters can, and in this case do, come across as one-dimensional. We never really feel involved with or invested in them. On top of this, Rendell, has taken in her later work to incorporating clunking political correctness, and constantly commenting on it. This is very annoying. (PD James does the same: two old ladies letting you know very loudly that they've noticed that the world has changed and they're fine with that, really; only you suspect that actually they're not).

Andrew Nugent Soul Murder [crime]
Short but engaging murder mystery, nicely written if a little self-consciously, at least at first, with some vivid characters, including a building.

Maggie Lett and Geoff Rowe Flood Waters [local history/historical fiction]
A fictionalised account of the Sheffield flood of 1864 which killed 240 people. Although it starts out looking amateurish (although one of the authors is a journalist), the account of the flood itself, caused by the failure of a dam, is gripping. The book however continues into a rather over-long Dikensian melodrama, before all is happily resolved in the end.

M.E. Thomas Confessions of a Sociopath [memoir]
Well written, interesting, very engaging (of course) and slightly frightening. Not just, or even mostly confessions, but an apologia and a plea for sociopaths' special qualities to be recognised and valued.

Peter Robinson Abattoir Blues [crime]
Robinson at least hasn't lost his touch yet - maybe not outstanding, but good, sound stuff.

Steven Dunne Deity [crime]
Good characters, well written, but a pretty outlandish plot spoilt it a bit.

Prue Leith  A Serving of Scandal [fiction]
Feeble, poorly written political scandal/romance, with food porn shoehorned in.

Stephen King On Writing [memoir/non-fiction]
A book of two halves - engaging memoir, setting out how he became a writer, followed by advice (albeit far from comprehensive) for (aspiring) writers drawn from his experience as a craftsman, rather than an artist.

Gill Hasson Brilliant Communication Skills [non-fiction/self help]
I would be really pissed off if I had paid money for this book.

Caroline Graham The Envy of the Stranger [fiction]
From the author of Midsomer Murders, apparently, which I have neither read not seen. Second rate (which is not to say terrible, just not very good) stalker thriller which doesn't, really.

Elly Griffiths The Crossing Places [crime]
In contrast, the characters here are immediately alive - fat Ruth the forensic archaeologist, Nelson the grumpy cop, and Cathbad the pseudo-druid. There's only so much variety you can get out of having an archaeologist in every story, but very enjoyable nonetheless. This is the first in the series, and set the scene for what I know is to come later.

Ian Rankin A Cool Head [crime]
A 'Quick Reads' novella, more like a short story than a novel in its construction. The characters were worthy of a longer work, but this never got the chance to draw you in.

Ross Raisin Waterline [fiction]
Undeniably well written account of a former Glasgow shipbuilder going to pieces after his wife's death. The representation of dialect is spot on - just right, not laboured or false (thankfully the person who started correcting it to standard English in my library book gave up after page one). Suitably depressing, but ultimately perhaps, a bit empty.

Anna Richards Small Gods [fiction]
A first novel, rolling in descriptive language but always teetering on the edge of incredibility. The characters were never quite real, too much described and not enough felt. I struggled to finish it despite the quality of the writing.

Ellis Peters A Morbid Taste for Bones [historic fiction/crime]
I don't normally care much for historical fiction but Brother Cadfael is wonderful escapism. Well crafted, easy reading. Pure entertainment.

Old photos of Sheffield

Sheffield Basin (aka Victoria Quays), June 1987

 From the J R James archive

Licenced under Creative Commons

A friend sent me a link to this Flickr account. It's the J R James archive at the University of Sheffield, and contains hundreds of photos taken in the course of studies of town and regional planning. There are lots of various new towns, as you would expect, and also many of Sheffield - most earlier than this one.

The downside though (to someone who's not a Flickr expert) is that the hundreds of photos appear to heve been uploaded fairly randomly, and aren't tagged, so you will have to devote many happy hours finding your favourites, whether they be of Park Hill or Cumbernauld.

 Still very much worth a look though.

A bracing stroll

 I went for a walk on Sunday and found myself crossing a moor in a blizzard, horizontal snow blasting my face. It was great. Somehow it slipped my mind to take any photos actually during the snowstorm, but here are a couple taken from the top of Win Hill just before it started.

No smoke...?

You know how drivers of certain cars are stigmatised; stereotyped on the basis of their choice of wheels? Sometimes there's more than a grain of truth in it. BMW drivers as flash and arrogant; Mini drivers as self consciously cute; Ford Focus drivers as sensible and unflashy. And Volvo 240 estate drivers, I thought, as solid, practical, nostalgic, Guardian-reading, muesli-munchers. The very last people who would pickle their children in second hand cigarette smoke.

Well, not according to NHS England's latest 'Smoke Free' campaign advert.

I can only assume that they didn't want to alienate viewers by using a car that anyone was actually likely to own - or perhaps, more hopefully, that they think anyone in their target audience (i.e. people who like to pickle their children in second hand smoke) was likely to own. And that even if every Volvo 240 Estate owner in the country was as outraged as me, the worst they could expect was a stiff letter in the Guardian.

Nonetheless, as a lifelong non-smoker (albeit not an evangelical one) I do feel that I have been very unfairly tarred with this particular dogend.

The bathroom project

I live in a nice flat on the top floor of a nice house in a nice part of Sheffield. The flat has many attractive features, including high ceilings, big double glazed windows, gas central heating (when I first viewed it in freezing December 2012, living at the time in a bedsit with a single small electric radiator, this was the reason I snapped it up), big rooms, new carpets and a very nice landlord. It also has some endearing eccentricities, the main one of which is that to get to my bathroom, I have to go out of my 'front door' onto the tiny landing, and in through another door at right angles to it, as the bathroom is separated from the rest of the flat by a substantial chimney breast. Can't go through it; got to go round it. The tiny landing is only shared with the one other flat on the top floor (they have their own, internal, bathroom) and so far this has never presented a problem.

On the positive side, this quirk means that the rent is considerably cheaper than it would otherwise be, and that I have an absolutely massive bathroom. While the bath and shower are fairly new and modern, the basin and loo - and the tiling over the basin - are probably fifty or so years old. The Twyfords pedestal basin is deep and solid, and the Dudley Slimline plastic cistern isn't pretty, but boy does it flush. I like it all a lot. There was no denying, however, that decoratively it was a little tired. At some point it had been papered with the woodchip wallpaper that doesn't quite hide all evils (and which always peels off when you want it to stay on, but is absolutely impossible to remove when you don't). The skirtings seemed to have been made of lots of leftover scraps, and the radiator - whilst wonderfully warm - was undeniably rusty.

So in a fit of looking for a project, before Christmas, I asked my landlord if it would be ok for me to decorate, stressing my credentials as having been fully trained by Jim. He agreed, and said that he would pay for the materials. So all I had to do was start. Well, I bought the paint, and various abrasives, and a few weeks later I started to rub down the radiator. Sadly, within ten minutes, I was heartily sick of it. Well, I thought, it's going to take a long time at this rate. So the next time Jim offered to help, I accepted with alacrity.

Jim came up for a long weekend - Rocky stayed with Baz in Eastbourne; we didn't think we'd appreciate his help - and we got started first thing Saturday morning, and by Monday afternoon everything was rubbed down, filled, rubbed down again, patched up, repaired, stuck down, primed, undercoated and painted. I don't think I've ever in twenty-whatever years worked so efficiently with him! We even had time to go out for fun with Adrian and Linda on Sunday afternoon while the gloss was drying.

My bathroom was lovely and big before, but now it's big and lovely.

Quiet addition to the blogroll...

No fanfare because she's actually rather shy, but Sebastian's wonderful girlfriend has started a blog...

Large print computer

Last year, I decided to treat myself to a laptop. Not a new laptop you'll note; my very first laptop all of my very own. Partly on grounds of cost, mostly on grounds of portability, and slightly on the grounds that it's so very neat, I went for a small one. I believe it has an 11" screen. It certainly packs away very neatly and is light and easy to transport (although for boating the iPad still wins hands down because of its great battery life and low charging demands).

However, I had reckoned without my aging eyesight. Working on the laptop at my desk (ok, dining table) with external keyboard and mouse, I found myself peering at the screen, or zooming in so much that I was constantly scrolling from one side of the screen to the other. I hadn't really wanted to get a monitor, because the current set up is very easy to pack away out of sight (in an old Extramural Studies bookbox) when I've finished working. But when I saw one in Oxfam for £9.99, I couldn't resist. It's a really big one too. Turns out it's about ten years old, but I plugged it into the computer, switched everything on, and wihtout any further action from me, it worked. I was very pleased. And now I can write this without straining my eyes and see the whole document in all its glory in front of me. Meanwhile the laptop itself stays in the box (open when in use) and my table top is less cluttered.

Bought for the boat 3

Whilst having my weekly browse in Oxfam, this lace caught my eye.

Then I realised that it was attached to a rather lovely linen pillowcase, complete with tapes under the lase to keep the pillow in. Perfect for the back cabin!

Bought for the boat 2

On the boat, largely because of the relative hassle of boiling the kettle (and with the Origo, it is only relative) we do tend to make tea in a pot. The Bernard Hales Memorial Teapot, as it is ceremonially known, as although Bernard is still very much alive, the teapot always reminds us of him. I bought it for 50p at the HNBC Droitwich tat auction (to which Bernard contributed it), and it came with two small frying pans thrown in. One of the best 50ps I've ever spent (and I've spent a few).

The teapot is aluminium, so it's great for sitting on the stove. However, in the summer, in the hold, there is no stove, so we needed a tea cosy. We also needed a pot holder, for handling hot pots without setting fire to the tea towel. So here, along with a napkin as a bonus, is the answer to all our Chertsey kitchen problems.