Seeing in the dark

Back in March last year, in the days when the country had a government, I took this photo at Kilby Bridge on the Grand Union Canal (Leicester section). (original posts here and here.)

Sort of OK-ish as a night-time photo, but look what happens when I tweak it on iPhoto:


Suddenly I can see in the dark!

Top Thirty, 2010 week 19

Here is the UK Waterways Site Ranking as it stood at 0915 on Sunday 9th May 2010. This is taken, with permission, from Tony Blews's UK Waterways Ranking Site.


1 Jim Shead's Waterways Information (=)

2 JustCanals.com - Forums (+1)

3 Pennine Waterways (-1)

4 CanalPlanAC (+2)

5 Granny Buttons (-1)

6 CanalCuttings.co.uk (-1)

7 Retirement with No Problem (=)

8 Towpath Treks (+1)

9 Narrowboat.co.uk (+1)

10 UKCanals Network (+3)

11 Jannock Website (+1)

12 Trafalgar Marine Services (-1)

13 Canal Photos (-5)

14 Water Explorer (+1)

15 Waterway Routes (-1)

16 nb Epiphany (+2)

17 WB Takey Tezey (+3)

18 Narrowboat Gypsy Rover (-2)

19 Google Earth Canal Maps (-2)

20 nb Lucky Duck (-1)

21 Narrowboat Bones (=)

22 Derwent6 (=)

23 Chertsey (+1)

24 Towpath Townie (+3)

25 Narrowboat Caxton (+1)

26 Baddie the Pirate (-1)

27 Working Boat Hadar (-4)

28 Captain Ahab's Watery Tales (=)

29 Halfie (-)

30 CanalBoatingHolidays (-1)

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.

There are 102 entries altogether.

Savoy Hill

In 1983 or 1984 Jan and I took the BBC Club's narrowboat Savoy Hill for a cruise with two other couples, Steve and Sue and Kevin and Sue. We started from, I think, Tring, going south on the Grand Union to Brentford (with a side excursion on the Paddington Branch and Regent's Canal), thence up the Thames to Oxford, north on the Oxford Canal to Braunston, then south on the GU to Gayton. In a week.

Somewhere I still have the log: I must dig it out and remind myself of our dawn-to-dusk days. I remember we had to push it to get to Gayton for our rendezvous with the Inland Waterways Section's boat manager, the infamous DT. (Unless I'm mixing up that cruise with our next one.)


The photos here must be from our second cruise on Savoy Hill: the Warwickshire Ring, again, in a week. As I remember, we'd kept a bottle of fizz in the fridge to celebrate conquering Hatton locks. It's definitely a GU lock in the background, but is it Hatton bottom lock? I thought we'd done the ring clockwise, in which case we'd have brought out the bottle when we'd got to the top of the flight. So where was the photo taken?

Top photo left to right: Sue, Steve, Jan, Sue, me with OS map.

Bottom photo left to right: Kevin, Sue, me, Jan, Sue, Steve. I must have set up the camera on self-timer.

Edit to say: Oops! Where is that stern rope going?

The Granny Effect - in pictures

I wrote about the Granny Effect some months ago, and a few bloggers have picked up on it. (Bill and Debbie of Humdinger; Captain Ahab; and Nev of Waterlily. Indeed, Andrew Denny himself acknowleged the effect here.)

Three days ago Andrew wrote about my failed attempt to buy a boat. The effect of his post on the number of visitors to my blog is graphically illustrated in the image above, taken from StatCounter . There I am, bumbling around with between 40 and 100 visits per day, when BANG! Straight up to 217 visits on the day of Andrew's post, and subsiding again pretty swiftly afterwards.


Here's another blip, from October 2009, again due to the Granny Effect. (The post responsible was this.)

Incidentally I picked StatCounter more or less at random after seeing it on someone else's blog. It seems geared towards businesses rather than blogs, but it serves its purpose. What do others use?

Last day of campaigning (until the next time)

Chloe Smith (Con) speaking to a not exactly packed Disability Forum in The Forum, Norwich a week ago. To her left is former Home Secretary Charles Clarke (Lab); to her right are the Lib Dem, another Labour and the Green candidates.


The person nearest the camera is signing for the deaf.

A bit of relief on the Nottingham Canal

On the towpath near Nottingham Railway Station is an interesting low mural along what I presume must have been a cable factory.


Most of the high relief looked like a tangle of cable, but in places were what looked like cross-sections of seriously heavy duty conductors. Not the sort of stuff you dangle from pylons!

Some posts on the Nottingham Canal

One commemoration post and two mileposts, that is. The commemoration post is of cast iron, dated 1869, and indicates that Samuel Parr and J. G. Woodward were overseers, and T. Godfrey was an assistant overseer. But of what? According to Jim Shead's Waterways Information the Nottingham Canal (opened 1796) is abandoned and mostly unnavigable. That must be the section upstream of where I was, as everything looked fine to me. Perhaps Parr and co. oversaw improvements to the navigation. I discovered that a J. G. Woodward was Sheriff of Nottingham in 1870/71. (Perhaps messrs. Parr, Woodward and Godfrey had nothing to do with the canal, and the plaque relates to some other building.)

I photographed two more common cast iron posts: the first with the number of miles missing...


... and the second giving very clear information.


These mileposts look like the paddles which platform staff wave at trains, don't they?

Caution: eggs overhead

Another strange thing we saw on our walk around Kenninghall in Norfolk last weekend was an arched construction, like a pipe bridge, over the footpath.


When we got underneath, and looked up, we saw that it was a covered conveyor, transporting freshly laid eggs from the hen houses to, presumably, the packing plant.


The sign on one of the buildings indicates that the eggs are produced for Noble Foods, apparently the UK's largest egg producer.



One news item dated 17/07/2009 from the Noble Foods "the progressive face of the UK egg industry" website caught my eye (and not just for its disregard for capital letters and the usual rules of grammar): 

the happy egg co. launch Hard Boiled Eggs!

Says Rob Newell, Head of Marketing for the happy egg co.: "Happy Boiled Eggs are the perfect solution for people who love free range eggs but dont have the time or knack to prepare a boiled egg.  

"As the summer months approach, we are confident they will be a real hit for picnics and offer fresh inspiration to those wanting a tasty and nutritious snack in minutes."

the happy egg co. Hard Boiled Eggs will be available in Waitrose, ASDA, One Stop and online from Ocado.com.

RRP for the pack of two is &pound0.89p. The product will also be available in a four pack.

I can understand the circumstances where you might not have the equipment to boil an egg. You're on an outing, perhaps, and suddenly realise that the only thing which will satisfy your peckishness would be a hard-boiled egg. Not having the time is perhaps excusable if you didn't boil said egg the previous night and didn't have time in the morning. But not having the knack? After all that Delia taught about boiling an egg?

Actually, 89p for two hard-boiled eggs doesn't sound like too much of a rip-off.