Little More...

Massive Curry, No Beards

Before I tell you about the curry, let me first clear something up. To James and any other doubters; here is proof of our floating state in the form of a photograph of none other than James lovely sister Louise who came to stay for the night (and kept us up till 1am, the minx!) and gamely (also rather attractively I think you'll agree) posed on the stern of our boat to put to bed, nay banish from credulity, any doubt that we are indeed on a boat. If that ain't enough for yer, there's also Polly's Flickr site. So there, ner!

Also, pre-curry, please join with me in lamenting the fact that there have been no further beady-boater sightings since the initial one in Sowerby Bridge.  I did see a beard today, not on a boater but on the surly and unfriendly face of the bloke in the boatyard at Outrighton. We had stopped to fill up with diesel, which is a bit like stopping at a garage except there is only one pump, situated right by the edge of the canal, it is usually rusted to buggery and the fuel it contains is embarrassingly cheap. This man who served us was so abrasive and borderline rude he would have made a bottle of whiskey feel unwelcome at my Granddad's wake. A bad beard-ambassador.

But you want to know about the curry. It was dee-licious. And immense. Better than that, it was shared with Nick, Polly and The Toast who had come down for a cuppa and a bite. At what a big bite it turned out to be; Alan had one too many lumps of naan bread and is still paying the price, although I shan't go into details. Polly and Toast had to leave early which was a shame except for the fact that Nick had brought a cake with him and P and T went before pudding! Result! A shame also that Toast didn't have his camera with him to take some arty shots of the boat since he is something of a talented photographer and would make a much better job of it than I do. Have a gander at his website www.ysr23.com. He really is very good.

(Incidentally, I've no idea why my photos come out all pixellated on this blog; they look miles better when I first take them....honest!)

Today is the second day of full countryside we have had since leaving Littleborough's Pennine grace behind exactly one week ago and I must admit it's a bit like a nice cup of tea after a long hard day. We are moored up on the outskirts of a little Cheshire town called Lymm and the view from my window is like a kiddie's painting of the countryside, all stripes. A big, wide lick of yellow paint across the bottom of the page for the cornfield, a bumpy green bit above for the trees; all darkened-green in the dusk; and a dusky powder blue with a couple of dark cloudy-smudges for the sky.  Ten minutes ago when I stood on the roof after my tea (and after a glass of red wine, health-and-safety-fans) it looked like this:

I have become a bit obsessed with the sky at the moment, it being a bit of a novelty to the London Dweller. The built-uppyness of London is the closest thing you can get to having a roof on your world and it means that unless I stand strategically placed on Hampstead Heath, the best I will get is a tiny glimpse of sky. London really does just offer a person a few kinky peep-show peeks at the sky whereas here it is so big and available that I have already asked it out and am embarking on big daily snogs with it.

Tomorrow we head for Stockton Heath where I will try to make enough time to tell you all about the super-posh nutter with the brown dalmatian and Lady Di fixation whom I met by a tree in Dunham Massey yesterday. I think you may like him...

Outside the Pub at 7am

Bit early for a pint, but with the day we had ahead of us I allowed myself the cheeky thought that a wee livener might be in order.  Fortunately the pub was closed.  Unfortunately for us if I had known what the day ahead actually entailed I would have broken in and loaded up with the pub's entire supply of whiskey and a couple of bags of dry roasted to get me throught it.

The Rose of Lancaster pub in Chadderton is your overnight stop if you want to travel into, or through, Manchester on the Rochdale Canal.  You have to be at a designated lock further down by 8.30 in the morning to be let in by staff as the 20 locks that take you into Manchester from the North East of the city are padlocked.  Not the most encouraging welcome.  Encouraging is also not the word for the 6.45am start, nor the weather which was not so much taking the piss as taking the piss, chilling it and chucking it down heavily on us.  We did a total of 28 locks that day (Saturday) in a 12 hour non stop stint that took us through shit tip after shit tip; where the sights and, more pressingly, smells included chemical factories, Morrison's warehouses, rubbish dumps both official and unofficial and areas that smelled like the God of All Dodgy Fried Chicken Outlets lived and conducted his vile experiments there.  There were all kinds of floating undesirables in the water, including a poor man further up the canal who had fallen in the night before and drowned.  We didn't see him, but heard about it soon after they found him; news seems to travel fast by water. 

And then suddenly it stopped.  Because we hit central Manchester, where the money is spent.  I'm no hypocrite, I freely admit I would rather be in Castlefield than Ancoats but why does it have to be one or the other?  The abruptness of the change just seemed to rub in the unfairness of it all.  So, nursing my privilege and a severe case of soggy feet me, Alan and my ever Herculean parents (who had come and helped us throught the "Big 28") lit a fire, ate a chicken and settled down to watch a film and dry off, foul-smellingly.

Castlefield is a gorgeous example of how buildings can be as nice as trees and fields.  I was as happy there as I had been in rolling countryside, but I suspect that a long stay there would become a bit oppressive, what with all the posh bars with very few people in them selling the delicious smelling food that you can't afford because you gave up your job to be a gypo for a few months.  Still we were visited by Jon, Nicky and their two scrumptious kids who helped us through the very last lock we will have for the next 42 miles!  Oh Yes!  After 32 miles and 92 locks we don't have to go up or downhill for bloody ages!  We will miss locks about as much as a severe case of piles on a Himalayan expedition.  (Although I invite you all to be on nostalgia-watch for the next 42 miles of blogging).

Obviously we did a nostalgia walk through Manchester City centre, this being the place Al and I met each other and lived for 5 years.  The walk took in a range of sights: a place that styles itself as The World Famous Ritz Nightclub (bouncy floors, sick in the corners) where we have done a fair bit of what could laughingly be described as 'dancing'; the Royal Exchange, Afflecks Palace (totally unchanged, as though it had been plastic-ed for the last ten years like a Florida pensioner's setee).  Then we met our friend Polly and, on a whim and heady with the sugar rush from the mega-bag of sweeties Jon and Nicky bought for us the day before, decided to give her a lift home to Chorlton; a journey she could have made for 85p on a bus in 35 minutes but which with us took one and a half hours.  It was free though.  So she can't bloody complain.

That was yesterday and since then we have had two meals made for us by our lovely mates, had our washing done and emptied our poo-tank down Polly's toilet.  I bet our friends LOVE us coming to visit! 

Speaking of mates, some may've noticed that our mate James does not believe that we are in fact travelling on a boat because our photos have no water in them.  Well, I'll show him!  Except I can't today because I am typing this...guess where...yes, at Polly's house, and I don't have ny camera with me.  I do realise that this sounds wholly suspicious, but to be honest I quite like the idea of inciting some splinter group of conspiracy-theory-blog-readers.

We move on soon from the outskirts of South Manchester into Cheshire, the first stop being Lymm.  On the water.  Honest!

We Are stuck at a Padlocked-Locked Lock

And are waiting to be resued by British Waterways, who apparently should have left the key dangling from the lock (?!). But didn't (?!).  Oh well, it's pretty and it's rainy and I have a Cadbury's Whole Nut and some tea bags in.

That's it, really, just thought you might like a it of up-to-the-minute news.

From the Sublime to the Frankly Shite

Rochdale. Sorry, but your canal system sells of, and probably contains, poo. The rolling hills, old stone bridges and cow-moos of Littleborough gave way yesterday, within an hour and a half of cruising, (which isn't much on a canal boat) to rusting beer cans, old fridge freezers and the incredibly original suggestion that I ought to get my tits out shouted at me by a group of grown men from a bridge. At one point I used the boat pole to move a school blazer out of our path and found myself wincing at the thought that I might find a person inside it (I've watched too many episodes of Inspector Morse). Having lived in big cities all my life I am in a perfect postiton to harbour romantic notions about how the countryside is great and the city is crap. But I don't. I know cities can be crap but they can also be wonderful, buzzing-busy, colourful places to be. I have a feeling that the countryside is ace but I don't know, because I've never lived there. All I do know is that Rochdale, a small city nestled within a still-living and breathing countryside, came as a sharp shock to two people who had just spent 10 days in the middle of various Nowheres.

Or maybe it was just the canal-bit of Rochdale that was angry and dirty. Because within the dross of the day there were still things that reminded you that life still had its sparkly side: Like the 4 teenage girls who sat on the side of the lock I was in with the initial intention of menacing me – a literal captive in a giant stone bath of freezing cold, smelly water – but who were overcome with fascination of how we managed to live in a space that small, especially since there was “no proper fookin' wardrobe!”. I had a good chat with them until they wandered off smiling back at me like a nurse humouring a mental patient. Or here's a good one; the floating rubbish that actually had plants growing out of it – you can be sure life is a inherently bloody optimistic thing when you see plant life managing to grow out of a bit of rotty brown polystyrene floating in the canal. Ooh, and I shouldn't forget Johnny the giant friendly cyclist with the four foot dreads who kept us entertained with his bumbly, cosmic natterings as we negotiated a particularly deep and shit-filled lock in front of a bemused but persistent (and large) audience of locals.

And the weather was absolutely glorious.

On balance though, it all made me go a little bit off the idea of tipping up in Manchester for a few days this weekend. But thankfully a visit from Nick and Jenny yesterday evening as we moored up next to the motorway in Slattocks (apparently named after a contraction of 'South Locks', but it sounds suspiciously biological to me) has dispelled my reticence. They drove out from Chorlton (half an hour for them, two to three days for us) to spend the evening. It was great, and has made me ever such a little bit excited to blow a temporary kiss goodbye to the lovely countryside and get to the big city to go out to play.

Only the 39 locks to go then...

Goose Incident

We were setting off towards the mooring for 'The Summit' yesterday teatime when this ruddy great goose flew directly into the low electricity cables over Alan and my Dad's heads.  They were standing perilously (and some would say ill-advisedly) near to the edge of the lock they were operating.  The poor goose missed the cable...with every part of its body except its neck which boinged off the wire with a noise that would've been comical had it not been so scary.  It fell out of the sky with an almighty thud (they're big aren't they, geese?) right next to Alan, missing his head by a little over two inches.  Then it waddled off, all confused and wiggly.  I know I haven't made it sound scary, but for a split second it was.  I tell you, it's non-stop high drama on the canals.

Anyway, very much in one piece, we have ended our 3 day sabbatical (or laze-about) from cruising and left Walsden (having completed the family-visit-set with my remaining two aunts and my nan), and today encountered our very first downward locks, having done nothing but climb since we bought the boat. The deeply exciting development we have had in the last forty eight hours is the sudden and unexpected onset of summer.  Last night from teatime onwards (after a downpour of near-biblical proportions complete with almighty thunder and lightening - which hit a nearby pylon causing it to crack in an orange and black explosion of fire and smoke**) and for all of today, we have had beautiful sunny, hot weather.  This, commented Alan and I to one another earlier as we ate Jaffa cakes on the stern, is what we signed up for.  We are currently moored up in Littleborough where another of my aunts lives (yes, I know, we are like muck, we are everywhere) and our port window (that's left hand side, land lovers) looks to the western sky where the sun has just set behind one of the last heaving rolls of the Pennines we will see.  We passed from Yorkshire into Lancashire earlier and I had a funny feeling I couldn't place as we cruised past the waymarker.  I later identified this feeling as one of guilt for not having taken more notice in school history lessons.  You know, War of the Roses and all that; I was passing not just a county boundary, but a piece of history.  People probably died and all that.  Most of my political history is cobbled together from my knowledge of Shakespeare which means it stops abruptly in the early 1600s, contains many inaccuracies due to old Shakey's liberal attitude to artistic licence, and is full of holes where I zoned out when reading his plays (let's face it, who has actually read every word of one of them?). 

Tomorrow we are aiming for Rochdale.  Or, should I say, we are aiming for the first nice bit we see after Rochdale.  No offence to any natives, but it's a bit of a hole, isn't it?  When we crossed The Summit this morning (at the profoundly un-Debs-ly hour of 8.30 am) two of the boaters who were crossing from the other side said "oooh, don't go that way, it's 'orrible".  I was already feeling a bit melancholy to be leaving such a beautiful and familliar spot anyway (in which I had also quite enjoyed snuggling into the tightly-knitted comfort blanket of my mum and dad for a bit) so this comment did not fill me with a huge amount of excitement.  We have just been spoilt by 20 miles of beautifully kept, tranquil and dramatic canal.  By contrast I am told that Rochdale's length of the canal is distinguished by its large - and let's hope artistically arranged - collection of floating rubbish ("weed-hatch-heaven" said the lock keeper.  I shan't explain that comment, it would only bore you.). So we'll speed through that and move ever onward to Manchester - which is bound to be cleaner isn't it?

Still it's a bit of a milestone, this; as of today Alan and I have crossed the Pennines on Little More.  From Thorne, Doncaster to Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire in May then Sowerby to the Lancashire border in the past eight days. The tickle-y feeling I can feel in my tummy is, I think, a good dollop of pride in the achievement alond with a little dash of regret that this bit is over.

More anon...

**And where, dear reader, was Alan during this deluge?  Why, 800ft above sea level at the local Stoodley Pike monument dodging the lightening which was hitting ground around him while I sat on the moors 100ft below getting wet and fretting my arse off!   Check out the Pike - we climb it most times we visit these parts. It's got a good story to it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoodley_Pike

PS Here's a picture of what it looks like out of my port window.  (Which side is that, then....?)

Sadly, the Beard Count Still Numbers One

Although we did see a magnificent Gandalf-inspired face-warmer the other day, but it was on a walker and this beard count relates strictly to boaters (I still haven't worked out what to call the drivers - any ideas?).  But anyway, in the 48 hours or so since I last saw you - in between it pissing down so much that the canal level rose - we have also had some magnificent sunshine, albeit confined to one afternoon and right now, when the morning sun is honeying the dark greens of the hillsides and glinting off the backs of the midges that will be biting me later on.  It is very beautiful here, raining or not, and perhaps because we watched a bit of The Fellowship of the Ring yesterday during a particularly earnest downpour but tis place really does look a little bit like Middle Earth.  For those who don't believe me, there will be photos of where we are currently moored at the bottom.

Photos also of some of the members of my massive family:  This stay in West Yorkshire has been a very lovely chance to see them.  On Friday my nephew Jay and my sister Michelle came to stay over.  They arrived in....well you don't need me to spell out the weather..and spent the evening drying off by a very hot wood fire on the boat and eating biscuits.  I also felt it necessary to get out the damson gin for the old but never tired medicinal excuse.  (Jay and Alan weren't allowed...). 

My first experience of four on a boat - including a seven year old - was surprising only in that it was so easy.  Especially when you consider that my sister and I are, well, sisters.  We surprise ourselves sometimes (and our parents, who brought the miniature Deb and Shell up) with how much we like having each other around.  Weirdly the boat didn't feel too small either.  Bloody Tardis, this boat (although having said that, don't think you can go bringing your vanity case and giant ghetto blaster.  If my sister can travel light - well fairly light in that she didn't bring a waterproof the ding dong - anybody can)*.  Saturday saw two of my aunts, who live up the road (we have staged something of a Brummie takeover of these two small towns in the last few years) come to visit.  My aunts (and let us not forget, my mum also) are Birmingham born but Irishly-raised and have a special knack of entering any given situation and being completely hilarious.  That is all I will say in explanation of the photograph below of Jean (right) and Marie (left), except to say that it was spontaneously posed, they were keen for me to put the caption "ladies in search of a man" under it, and they are both gorgeous.  Now I only await the visit of my nan Josie (the fount of the hilarity-gene) and my other Aunties Eileen and Carol. And soon we'll be moving on.

Onward to Manchester, in fact. We plan to be there for this weekend presuming anyone is actually around. If they aren't, we will perhaps save the intimidatingly named (and rightly so, I am told) 20-lock climb of The Summit for another day, and stay to enjoy what my father will no doubt refer to as “Walsden's Three Day Summer”.

Oh, and please enjoy the Newbold family portrait (Clockwise from the left: Dad, Alan, Jay, Michelle, Mum and me) in front of the boat. We hadn't even had any shandies.....

Ta-Ra-a-Bit!

* “Ding Dong is Jay's new term for a halfwit, or dullard. I think it is rather good and will be doling it out liberally in future!

 

Right, please don't tell me what kind of weather you are having!

I mean it, now.  We have had rain, mist, fine mist, humid and warm mist and a type of fine rain I refer to as "very thick mist"; I may be in a boat, but I am also in denial.  Not that we are letting the lack of Mediterranean sunshine get us down ("Global warming?"  says my dad who lives around here "I'd like to see some bloody global warming"), because for one thing, despite the mist I actually got a sunburnt nose yesterday.  So it's just like being on holiday in Greece, really.  But! it is important, says Alan incidentally, not to think of this as a holiday, more as a Way Of Life. I won't expect the weather to be glorious then.  This is probably true.  But I am not working (weeeeeee!) so it does feel like a bit of a holiday. 

If it is a way of life, though, then it's one that is seeming to suit us both very well.  Yesterday we travelled from Hebden Bridge to Todmorden, a distance of a little under 5 miles, but with a mean 10 locks.  It took us 5 hours, even with the help of my dad who joined us for the day.  But such is the not-so-much-laid-back-as-laid-up pace, that the hours glide by almost hypnotically with weird tumbled down cottages, ancient woodland, ancient people (walkers, mostly), wildflowers galore and the odd canalside pub (with their odd patrons).  Sitting at the tiller (less a Steering Wheel, more a Steering Stick, maritime fact fans), watching it all go by while you sup a hot cup of tea and attempt to stuff a ham sandwich sideways into your mouth in one go is, I'll wager, a little known pleasure.  If you come to visit us, I'll give you a go (but you'll have to have your own ham sandwich, you aren't having a go on mine).

We are in total cotton and agriculture country now, rolling farms and little ex-factories (not yet turned into "luxury canalside housing") punctuated by what can only be described as really wild bits.  Check out this immense curtain of creeping ivy we saw hanging free, from the branch of a beech tree 40ft up.  If the triffids had hippies, then this would've been one hell of a big kaftan-sleeve.

Oh, and as promised I also give you the deepest lock in Engand.  The photo doen't really do justice to the sheer pant-filling deepness of it, or just how rock hard I am for steering into it.  More soon, we are off to travel 3 miles to Gauxholme now where the people are lovely and the beer is cheap (and the folk night we went to last night was underwhelming). 

And I mean it, if you are nice, you won't tell me how sunny it is where you are.  I'll only be sad, or cross!

PS My lovely mum, who has just popped in to say hello to you all - and to have a cuppa made for her, cheek! - has pointed out that she took the triffid photo.  Not bad, eh?

Don't let a tabletop fall on your ankle

It hurts. Trust me, I have tested this out today because I wouldn't like to lie to you. But never mind my brush with broken ankledom, which was brought about incidentally by tiredness, because I really am very tired. What I want to talk to you about is how tired I am. Seriously, if you ever decide to pack up your entire life, split it into three carefully thought out sections; one for putting in a cellar, one for putting into a fully-furnished-flat-arrangement for tenants, one for putting on the narrowboat you plan to live on; be sure to leave more than Wimbledon finals weekend to do it in. Heed me not and you'll be up all hours the night before you leave and set off on your adventure having had only 3 and a half hours' sleep. Trust me, I have tested this out because I wouldn't like to lie to you.

But we are here, it is officially Day One. (Some would call yesterday Day One, but it was a weirdy, no-man's land between handing over keys to our flat and getting to the boat). We planned to go from Sowerby Bridge to Hebden Bridge this afternoon to kick off our epic voyage, but half a mile in we got turned away from a lock because the lock keeper had knocked off 15 minutes early for his tea. So we turned back and are now moored up under a lovely willow tree a massive 100 yards from where we started. Good job there's no bloody rush. Welcome, I suspect, to boating. The lock has a keeper because it is the deepest lock in England, so I will report back on just how rock hard I am for driving into it at a later date. If you're really lucky I might even write about locks in general...if you are well behaved, eat your greens and are nice to an elderly lady between now and then I might even try to make it interesting.

It is brilliant here though. The boat is mega-cute, the Pennines loom in their loomy way (until the sun comes out and then they seem to wink at you) and my mum and dad are just a few miles down the road (the first time they've been visitable without the aid of an InterCity train since 1992). Soup-perb! Ooh, soup. I'm quite hungry actually. I am going to go now anyway because I am about to get cramp in my leg from raising it up on a cushion. My ankle kills but hasn't even had the good grace to swell up, miserable bugger. Have a cuppa on me.      (...Or a CuppaSoup...)

Later, after soup:  A beardy man has just passed me on his boat!  I spent a week on this boat in the spring and only saw 2 beardy men, Stu the Boat (of whom more later) and my very own Alan.  But it is only day one and the beard count is already underway!  Lets go!

I Might See Some Bats, Mightn't I?

Bats, you don't think about bats, do you?  Not unless you're a bit of a batfan or the sort of person that keeps stuffed wildlife under your bed, or wears a compass round your neck when you go out to the shops and that.  Tonight though, at work, I was helping to run a bat walk and we saw a ton of them over the ponds on Hampstead Heath (which is where I often work, fact fans.  I love that job).  We had a bit of help, in the form of Bat Detectors.  Unfortunately, Bat Detectors are not black-macintoshed men with dark glasses and in-ear walkie talkies with a good line in locating flying mammals.  Nor are they a fictitious piece of equipment used by The Joker in the Batman comics.  I haven't made them up, though; there actually are real life gadgets called Bat Detectors.  You can buy them.  If you have 80 quid that is. They pick up the echo-location noise of the bats in the vicinity (vicinity - get me with the detective-lingo), which, depending on the type of bat detected, can sound like anything from a clicky noise to the sound of a particularly wet fart.  There were about 15 of us on this walk including two spellbindingly enthralled 10 year old boys.  The dusk falling over the pond, the last vestiges of light in the western sky, the faint outlines of the bats darting over the pond and the detectors making noises like a flatulent man in a bath made me ever such a little bit sad to leave my job, my familliar life and, would you believe it, London.

But it also made me remember that I'm bound to see shitloads of bats on the canal.

We leave in a little over two days.  I am slightly bricking it.

Where Have All the Cardboard Boxes Gone?

They used to be all over the floor by the tills of the local Co-op when I was little.  You can't get 'em for love nor money now.  Well, I tell a lie actually, Argos are selling them would you believe so you can get them for money.  I only want them for packing though.

Here's a fact: I know bugger all about boats.  Al and me have decided to move onto one anyway, though.  Little More is the 38 foot long, 6 foot 10 wide result of a half forgotten conversation in 2006.  We weren't drunk.  We said something about how we'd love to spend a summer and autumn travelling round the UK but that by the Autumn it might get a bit too nippy for that sort of malarkey.  We didn't want to use road transport, what with it being evil and that, so assumed we'd be walking and using the train, then camping to save cash.  But the thing about Britain is, it ain't southern Europe is it?  Too chilly come late September to be leaning out of the awning of a tiny lightweight tent in the brass-monkey-bluster to heat up a tin of beans.  Bloody miserable, in fact.  Hence the genius idea to bugger the tent and get another form of accommodation that you take with you - a narrowboat.  They're economical to run and there's no danger of taking a wrong turning and ending up on some godforsaken A road (hopefully).  I won't bore you with the fretful financial considerations because frankly they are none of your business but suffice to say, after a lot of stress and faff, on Monday (4 days from now) we move out of our flat, somebody else moves in and we take a small amount of stuff up to the Calder and Hebble navigation in West Yorkshire to move on to our boat for a bit.

The bit is anything from 4 days (if it keeps raining like it has been) to 4 months.

If you want to know how it's going, come back and I'll be telling you...