July the 1st!

It's been a whirlwind since my last blog... 2012 is turning out to be an excitingly busy year for coolcanals.
 

We've finally emerged from the burning hole of researching, writing and publishing our latest book, yet the all-consuming months of scratching at scorched deadlines are always instantly forgotten when the first copy of the book arrives hot from the printers! July 1st is the official publication day of our latest book:
'Britain's canals, a national treasure in 100 must-see objects'.
 
And today is emotional for other reasons too. British Waterways, the governing body for Britain's canals, offically transfers to charitable status as the new 'national trust for the waterways' - the Canal & River Trust. BW is no more! Martine & I will miss the friendly BW way that has been part of our everyday canal life for so long. But this isn't a sad day, July 1st is the day Canal & River Trust takes up the baton for caring for the canals & rivers of England and Wales (its big launch is 12 July)and, under its new charity status, more funds can be raised to help protect and maintain the canals (and we're sure that they'll be just as huggable as BW!).
 
Martine & I were really honoured when we were asked to produce a special edition of 'Cool canals Weekend Walks' for the new Canal & River Trust fundraising campaign. All new 'Friends' of the Canal & River Trust will get a free copy of this special edition, and we hope it'll inspire even more people to enjoy walking canal towpaths as much as we do.
 
Meanwhile we're still building the boat around the desks in our mini narrowboat-sized office - my tenon saw is permanently positioned to trip us up, and the sawdust levels in our lungs are reaching red alert. There's still no cooker (we're making do with a camping stove and epic variations on a salad theme!), no fridge, and nine months of sleeping on a hard plywood floor has taken its toll!! Thankfully friends we meet along our travels sometimes take pity on us, and narrowboat NB Jandai fattened us up recently with some great home cooking and even got stuck in with some of the woodwork - boaty camaraderie at its best! :)
 
Who in their right minds would choose to build a boat, while living on it and running a publishing business at the same time...?
 

Community Pubs Month

Rotund midriffs don't really tally with the image of long-distance walkers. We've rambled here, there and everywhere along the 2,000 and more miles of canals, and have calf muscles of iron, but the stomachs tell another story! I blame those landlords and landladies of canalside pubs serpenting us with their best ale on almost every turn of the canal.

Our floating office has been moored in Stourport Basins for over a month now, which feels like an eternity for our itchy feet (we're in our usual typing frenzy getting our next book ready for our printer's deadline!). But Stourport is making us welcome - it's a canal town, and so a good community goes without saying. Maggie, the landlady of our Stourport local, has her own narrowboat of course.

April is Community Pubs Month and her pub, the Hollybush, just a stone's throw from the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, has what a good pub needs - a landlady who cares about her pub, fab real ales and a community welcome that's real.

The local pubs have welcomed us strangers in town, and already the looming goodbyes will be sad. It's a reminder to me of the vital role real pubs play in nurturing community. It's a hard and frankly worrying fact that, according to CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale), pubs are closing at a rate of 16 per week. Canalside pubs have the bonus attraction of the water and summer tourism, but still need to manage year-round trade to keep them open.

"In the old days, you just had to stand behind the bar with a jug of ale and people would come flocking in", Maggie jests, "but now pub landlords and ladies have to reach out and give people reasons to come: pub quizzes, curry night, jamming nights". And Maggie's energy spreads into social media networking too, and of course her good beer, lager and food... and a smile.

GOOD landladies and landlords make GREAT pubs... and create vital hubs for their communities.

Support your local:
Community Pubs Month is an initiative by CAMRA to increase awareness of local community pubs this April.

Pub is the Hub

CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale

Walking boaters or boating walkers?

Of course when I write our Coolcanals guide books, the 'point' is to focus on the 'best' of the waterways and tell the story in tourism language – a job that's easy... we're walkers, and what's not to love about trundling the towpaths! It has occurred to me though, now that we're living on a narrowboat again and continuously cruising the canals, we'd think that walking the same stretch of towpath that we've cruised in a narrowboat would be a tad tedious. Never! Walkers and boaters experience the canals from different viewpoints.

Take Bratch Locks for instance. We've walked through the famously popular Bratch Locks lots of times. On foot, we always enjoy a good gongoozling session if we're lucky enough to catch a boat on the move. We spotted two kingfishers in the hedgerow last time we walked this bit of the Staffs & Worcs Canal and spent ages over a picnic, sitting with our legs dangling from the wall outside the old toll office at Bratch. This week when we boated through the locks, the journey was a much more serious affair. The primary aim was to avoid death by drowning, and the secondary aim was to complete the course without the unwanted embarrassment of becoming 'The Boaters Who Flooded Bratch Locks' because we didn't follow BW (British Waterways)'s warning signs. For a boater, Bratch is all about the coded blobs of blue and red paint on the paddles. This is BW's bid to help simplify the unusual lock procedure. It's easy once you've read the signs: open the blue-blobbed paddles first and then the red, or is it the red and then the blue? Or both together? (Aaargh... we wish those darn gongoozlers weren’t watching us)

Can't believe it's been a whole month since we piled all our belongings into our new sailaway narrowboat at Kingfisher Narrowboats in Trent Lock. There hasn't been much time to build the interior yet. We've been on the move, heading southwards to the Midlands, before the canal freezes in winter. So far we've travelled the River Trent, the Trent & Mersey Canal and the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal. As continuous cruisers we have to move regularly to meet BW's regulations – but that doesn't stop us mooring long enough to explore the towpaths and revisit some of our favourite walks.

The only hitch at this time of year is that there aren't enough hours of light to fit in enough walking and boating into a day. Counting down to Dec 21, things will be looking up after the shortest day of the year. We're outdoor people, and hate being trapped indoors. I'm almost (I lie) tempted to join the mad cyclists we hear pedalling past our boat in the dark! They cycle in clumps, and chat together as their lamps flash past at ridiculous times of the night, rain or no rain. Who are they?!

No, we're content to stay boating walkers, or are we walking boaters?

Canal & River Trust

Momentous! A new era is dawning over Britain's Canals. British Waterways has announced the name and logo of the New Waterways Charity set to launch early 2012.

In 2012, the new 'Canal & River Trust' will take the baton to protect the future of our canals for all waterways users - boaters, walkers, cyclists, wildlife watchers, sightseers.... Ahead lies a fabuously challenging task for the new charity to preserve the past and fund the future... and the changes ahead will surely rank amongst the biggest on the timeline of UK canals. Exciting times!

[Canal timeline in a nutshell:
It all started over 200 years ago with the opening of the canals as a revolutionary trade route for the Industrial Revolution. The success of canals depended fundamentally on the determination of canal engineers and entrepreneurs (Brindley, Telford, Wedgwood, Cadbury....) The decline of canalmania came with the legendary arrival of the speedier steam train. Canals were redundant, and left to crumble. After World War II, a group of people, passionate about keeping Britain's canal networks navigable for leisure boats, launched an era of direct action. In 1946, Tom Rolt and Richard Aickman formed a voluntary organisation, famously known as the IWA (Inland Waterways Association). 1948 brought a landmark change as Britain's canals were nationalised and BW (British Waterways) became the governing body of the waterways.]

'Conker'ing my fear of spiders

Five years is a long time in one place for me. The house is sold and I can't wait to move back to a home on the canals again.

John & Mick at Kingfisher Narrowboats have been building our 57-foot narrowboat (a semi-trad Sailaway with additions). All's nearly ready for moving on day. But... there's a problem for me. Someone's already moved in. A spider is hanging maliciously from the porthole and I know he's got friends in dark crevices.. I can see a repeating film in my head - waking up in the middle of the night, trapped in a 6-foot steel corridor with something tickling my chin. And this chap isn't the revolting type with crisp black legs, it's worse - he's the most repugnant variety, with tiger stripes and a bulbous boily body. Just heavous!

Can an animal-loving veggie let the sole of John, Mick or Martine's boot solve this problem? According to John, some boaters say that placing conkers in the portholes stops spiders from crawling in. Is this a spam joke that someone gets kicks out of every time they see a boat cruise by with piles of conkers in their portholes? Or is it rooted in scientific fact?

Does anybody know for sure?
What shall I do?
Boot or conkers?

The conkers have started dropping off the trees now - I've started my collection.

August

Where on earth did August go?

It flew by in a whirlwind of excitement, planning, preparations, M&S hats, sobbing and champagne - my son got married!!!

Poor George is the long-suffering ear to his Mom's canal mania. How ironic then that he and Donna chose to be married in the canalside church in Wolverley on the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal... by Carol the vicar (who owns her own narrowboat, of course!)

The Droitwich Canals have reopened! But what's next, now the shovels have been hung up?

I was at the ceremony, 1st July 2011, when the Droitwich Canals were officially reopened... 40 years since restoration began.

"2,500 volunteering days to get here, £12million to make it happen, 21 miles of extra boating... Allow me to declare this restored canal open." Caroline Spelman (Secretary of State for the Department of Environment) unveiled the Droitwich Canals. The hurrahs that followed could never be more than an understatement of the achievements behind this moment.

Amongst the crowd there were work-worn faces glowing with "We did it!" and there were curious new faces that had sauntered across the road from town to see what the fuss was about.

Some of the big names in the waterways world could be spotted brushing through the bunting, and VIPs included Peter Luff MP and British Waterways' chairman Tony Hales. A marvelous day of suits and ice creams.

But the real red carpet treatment had to be meant for the 'volunteer'. This opening ceremony was a gathering of ordinary folk who had achieved extraordinary things over decades of enthusiasm and hard work for the restoration of the Droitwich Canals. Max Sinclair, the local canal enthusiast who launched the campaign to restore this canal over 40 years ago was there... his presence was the heart of the ceremony. The day drew old friends and gave tumultuous thanks to everyone who had clubbed together to make the reopening of the Droitwich Canals possible... and, for the cherry on the icing, the press got a stonking story to tell.

Martine and I gate-crashed the marquee to hear the opening speeches. Tony Hales spoke with his official hat on, and a personal smile for the achievement of a canal he knows well. "Vision, determination, skill, partnership" his words chorused the positive mood of the Droitwich canals, "obstacles can be overcome for a common cause working together".

Each VIP speaker struggled to thank every individual who'd helped the restoration project - yet the single word that hailed loudest from every corner was 'partnership'. The success of the Droitwich Canals Trust and the strong partnership behind it, was the tip-of-the-day for the future of all of Britain's canals. Where would our canals be without fundraisers and fund-givers, without people who care and people who 'do', without skills and shared knowedge, without local support and central consent?

But none of this is ground-breaking stuff, is it? The case for the benefits of 'partnership' is as old as the canals themselves. After all, a working partnership steered the Droitwich Barge Canal when it was first built by James Brindley, and opened in 1771... Entrepreneurs, engineers, navvies, land owners, local people and politicians.

So everyone seems to agree that partnerships are important. But partnerships without purpose are like ducks without water. Substancial commercial funding only comes to build a canal when it can rely on its future use, its raison d'etre. The mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution were the original business of the canal networks, and now the big industry is tourism. Heritage, wildlife, boating, walking, cycling, sightseeing and waterside attractions are brinking on an exciting new era for canal tourism (especially as the New Waterways Charity launches its PR campaign and public interest is set to boom).

The local area supported the Droitwich Canals because tourism is the 3rd largest industry for the County Council. It is estimated that the canal will bring 320,000 visits over 5 years and £2.75million per annum to the local economy with new jobs.

The pride of a nation is grateful to those behind the success of the Droitwich Canals... Now it's the language of tourism that must help guard the future of this canal, and every other canal in Britain.