Top Thirty, 2010 week 10

Here is the UK Waterways Site Ranking as it stood at 0840 on Sunday 7th March 2010. This is taken from the UK Waterways Ranking Site.


1 Jim Shead's Waterways Information (=)

2 JustCanals.com - Forums (=)

3 Pennine Waterways (=)

4 Granny Buttons (=)

5 CanalCuttings.co.uk (=)

6 CanalPlanAC (=)

7 Retirement with No Problem (=)

8 Towpath Treks (+4)

9 Jannock Website (=)

10 Canal Photos (-2)

11 Narrowboat Gypsy Rover (-1)

12 Waterway Routes (+6)

13 UKCanals Network (-2)

14 Narrowboat Alacrity (-)

15 nb Epiphany (=)

16 Narrowboat Caxton (=)

17 Water Explorer (-3)

18 Baddie the Pirate (-5)

19 nb Lucky Duck (+3)

20 Narrowboat Bones (-1)

21 WB Takey Tezey (-1)

22 Google Earth Canal Maps (+1)

23 Derwent6 (-6)

24 Chertsey (-3)

25 Working Boat Hadar (-1)

26 Contented Souls (-)

27 Seyella's Journey (-2)

28 Narrowboat.co.uk (-)

29 Canal & Narrowboat (-2)

30 Zulu Warrior (-)

The figures in parentheses denote the number of places moved since the previous chart; (-) denotes new entry or re-entry into the top thirty; (=) denotes no change.

Halfie is at number 32. There are 101 entries altogether.

Inland seagulls

On my cycle to work this morning I passed a field which was being ploughed. I just had to stop to take a snap or two of the enormous number of seagulls in attendance.


It actually looked more impressive than this but, by the time I'd fished the camera out of the panier, the tractor had turned and the gulls had thinned out a bit.


Perhaps they were scared off by my hi-vis jacket. No such problems on the cut, although I've seen more than one boater wearing a fluorescent coat.


This is at the top of Watford Staircase locks in February last year on a trip from Stockton Top to Market Harborough and back. We saw Hi-Vis Man quite a lot during the week.

Opening Pandoro's box

Jan was given a large "cake" in a box as part of her end-of-term "booty" from the parents of one of the children in her class.


Pandoro is actually an Italian bread, not cake (pan d'oro - bread of gold), but it's sweet and comes with a sachet of icing sugar. When Ally and Ben visited last weekend we got it out, dusted it with the icing sugar, and served it up.

From Wikipedia:

Pandoro (pan d'oro) is a traditional Italian sweet yeast bread, most popular around Christmas and New Year. Typically a Veronese product, pandoro is traditionally shaped like a frustum with an 8 pointed-star section.

It is often served dusted with vanilla scented icing sugar made to resemble the snowy peaks during Christmas.

Yes, the season for eating it might have passed, but we needed a good excuse to get it out of its box! (And don't worry, we were still before the best before date.)

There's a thorough description, with videos, of how to make one here. It looks extremely complicated, with four doughs and precise timing. This account introduced a new word to me: levain. Is this American for yeast? Well, not exactly. According to Wikipedia (again):

Levain is a bread leavening agent used traditionally in France and today by artisan bakeries and hobbyists around the world. It produces breads with rich aroma, pleasant structure and excellent keeping properties. Levain is a type of pre-ferment which is made in two fermentation steps from an active sourdough starter culture, flour and water. It yields a rather dry and porous dough which can be kept refrigerated for up to a week.

According to Wikipedia the formula for making pandoro took a hundred years to perfect. Has any boater attempted one in their bread making machine? (Phew. Got a boating reference in at last.)

Winter isn't over yet ... and no boating for me in April

There have been at least three burst water mains in our Norfolk village recently, presumably caused by the low temperatures. And yesterday morning I cycled past this car in a ditch. The field at that point was flooded. Water had found its way onto the road and frozen overnight. Now there may have been another vehicle involved, and the road didn't feel slippery as I went past, but it looked as though the car had simply skidded off.

The worst hazard for me and other cyclists at the moment is not slippery surfaces but potholes. There are several bad ones on my route to/from work, and I have to be really careful to avoid them or they could easily throw me off my bike, especially at the speed I go!

No boating next month? David has Shadow booked for a week in April; I'd applied for a week's leave to coincide ... but we're being refused all leave from April until after the General Election. Grr.

BW? We don't want your charity, thank you.

Linked-to in the latest IWA Head Office Bulletin is Monday evening's West Midlands Inside Out TV programme which features interviews with Tom Rolt's widow Sonia, Vic Smallshire of the Dudley Canals Trust, and Robin Evans, Chief Executive of BW. (Why does BW always seem to invite ridicule? Here is its boss, dressed in a totally out-of-place suit and tie, stepping over puddles on the towpath.)

Mr. Evans restates his intention to get charitable status for BW. Why do I feel uncomfortable with this? I think it's partly because charities should be for helping those unable to help themselves. There should be plenty of money sloshing around for the upkeep of the waterways without the suggestion that people should have to put their hand in their pocket to donate to the cause. Will there soon be BW charity shops in the high street?

Developers love building next to waterways, and people love living there. The government should capitalise on this - while this state of affairs exists - and recover a "waterside premium" from the developers' profits. Councils through whose land passes a river or canal recognise its contribution to the local economy in terms of tourism and jobs. It's time they put something back. How about half to maintain their local waterway and half to central BW coffers for restoration or major repairs? But how do you determine how much the waterway is worth to the economy? I don't know the answer. Anyone?

I'm not sure if the programme linked to above will stay on the iPlayer beyond next Monday 8th March, so take a look now. The canals bit is about 7 minutes long, from about 22 minutes in.

Two interesting "stoppage alerts"

Yesterday BW sent out a couple of alerts, or "Advice" as it calls them. It probably sent more than two, but these are interesting. Here's one for the Regent's Canal:

St Pancras Way to Camley Street Wednesday 3 March 2010 - Friday 26 March 2010

The width of the towpath is to be restricted at two locations approx 100m east of St Pancras Way to permit safe working on a wall and a viewing platform.

Visitors are asked to take extra care and show consideration to on-coming towpath users when moving through the two restricted width zones.

Boat owners are requested to follow local signage regarding mooring on this stretch.

Enquiries: 0207 985 7200

Why have I picked out this one? Well, the first "advice" is for "visitors", asking them to "show consideration to on-coming towpath users". This is evidently more important than information for boaters, who, I assume, will encounter mooring restrictions here. How many "visitors", presumably walkers and cyclists, will receive this advance warning? Does this show where BW's priorities lie?

The second "advice" is for the Grand Union Canal:

Station Road to The Parkway Saturday 13 March 2010 - Saturday 13 March 2010

The towpath will be closed between midnight and 6am on the morning of the 13th March to allow repairs to the railway bridge to be undertaken.

Enquiries: 0207 985 7200
That's it. Little indication as to where on the Grand Union Canal, which stretches from London to Birmingham, this section of towpath is. Oh, there are two clues. One quite big, and one very small.

The big clue: the enquiries number is a London number.

The small clue: it's by a railway bridge.

I'll just have to search for the road names then. I'll try "The Parkway" first. On streetmap.co.uk there are 22 roads with that name. The only one which looks possible is in Iver, Bucks ... but no. It can't be that. It's a small residential street about two miles west of the canal. And there's no railway bridge nearby.

OK, I'll see how many "Station Roads" there are. Yup, thought so. More than 900 of them! I'm certainly not trawling through that lot.

So I have no idea where this particular piece of BW "advice" relates to. And I don't need to know either - I'm just on a bit of a rant!

What's this? Sunshine?

On a day off, too! I dug over some of the vegetable patch ready for the usual runner beans and courgettes. Last year I grew some potatoes for the first time in a decade, and they were very successful, so I'll be doing the same this year, along with some onions.


My friend the blackbird soon came to help himself to the freshly exposed worms.


This one doesn't seem to have any distinguishing features (unlike the person doing the work, who has distinguished features(!)) so I don't know if he's the same blackbird as kept me company during last year's digging.


Shortly after coming inside it started to rain lightly.

How do liveaboard boaters grow their own? In pots, troughs or grow bags on board, or at their moorings. Some moorings I've seen have been mini-allotments, complete with garden shed. Perhaps those boaters do their cruising in winter, otherwise they'd not be able to tend/harvest their crops.

River Weaver website

I've stumbled across a website on the River Weaver. According to the site, River Weaver Navigation, it's been set up by BW employee Mel Blakey. It looks like a good resource for anyone contemplating navigating the river, or for anyone interested in its history. There's an in-depth discussion of the geology of the stone used in the building of Hunts Locks too!

What caught my eye was this:

Interesting Facts

Why does this logo have a 'link' with the RWN?

(Go on - click on it!)

A short search of my own revealed confirmation from citroenet.org.uk.