Sun 10th Aug - Leek to Froghall

it rained most of the morning, but I made it out to the car boot (as documented) and to get more diesel (5l in tank, 5l in reserve) from the garage. The fuel gauge is now a lot more healthy than an extra 15L should have contributed - it's even more non linear than I thought, but still better than nothing.

Around midday it cleared enough to make it worth leaving (although I would have done by that point anyway, I think), back down the Leek branch, down the three locks and under the Leek branch towards Froghall. It's a lovely run on the canal, another steam railway competing with space (a station platform is on a ledge about the canal at one point - very close to where i nearly lost my chimney on a low bridge.

Very close to the end of the canal there's another tunnel, this one subject to historical subsidence and very low in the middle, passable to some boats but not others. At the last lock there's a profile gauge;



It's actually the new box handrails that met each edge, even with the chimney & boiler flue removed; I reckon if I'd removed (ideally moved) the headlight I may have made it through, but it didn't seem worth the risk (although the water point was on the other side, and I was dangerously low). So at least I've proved myself as a non-obsessive-completist, or possibly just a wimp.

I turned just before the tunnel mouth, moored and went for a wander, then cooked dinner, and ate out on the front deck.





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Car Boot Sale Report

One undoubted advantage of having access to the internet is finding local events - specifically car boot sales (although I should try to do it with folk clubs too, but that would involve some kind of planning ahead on my part). So there I was, 9am, in the drizzle... quite a good haul, though, and have added to the menagerie of instruments on the boat (none of which are worth anything, if there's boat burgulars reading this). The new item is the tiny blue accordion; quite a handy beast, actually, 12 bass and 22 treble notes (not quite the ful two octaves, frustratingly). I'd been thinking abotu bringing one and hadn't, and this one is quite playable. I do wonder if anyone else has driven a canal boat along the Caldon Canal whilst playing 'Theives like us' by New Order on the accordion...

The guitar & mandolin also both came from car boot sales, I realise, the guitar isn't bad sounding (and a bargain at £8 a couple of years ago), the mandolin was £25 and is very beaten up, but also very old, possibly a century's worth. I've noodled occasionally, but I really should do some blasted recording, or learen some new tunes, or something...

Leek Pub Report

It was Saturday night, after all...

First Stop was the 'Quiet Woman', which turned out to ber a fairly default modernised pub. The pub sign has a headless woman on it, but the landlord had 'no idea' of the real origins of the name - the current building is victorian. He's heard stories that it might come from a woman who was killed by the round table for telling their secrets, but doesdn't belive them., They had a covers duo - 'Red hot and Blue' who knocked out a fair range of songs - , Sunday Afternoon, Midnight Hour, Man in the Moon, all sorts- vocals, guitar & backing CD.

Next pint in the Wilkes Arms, a Proper Real Ale pub. Being vegetarian I get a pint of lager if I'm lucky, but it doesn't stop me liking real ale pubs - nice vibe, barstaff (dreadlocks & musician respectively) and jukebox (Freebird, then something by Hendrix). I would have stayed for another...

...had I not spotted a band (Bak A Gen - possible worst band name ever, I did wonder if they were a Genesis tribute band after seeing that) loading in to The Unicorn earlier. So third pint was with 60s/70s rock covers - more Kinks, of course, lots more R&B stuff. A tight three piece, both live acts reminded me of the fun of playing gigs with a band, and also how much better a musician I'd have to be to be able to do that. I've my niche, though, that's OK. A chat with the bassist/vocalist and he also plays mandolin in a folk band... there's definitely some connection about those upside down strings.

So sorry Phil, no detailed beer report, the best I can say is that the Grolsch was OK and the Stella (as usual) generally rank. But a fun night out, nevertheless...

Aug 9th - Stockton Brook to Leek (in the rain)

I managed a walk around Stockton Brook before the rain kicked in, apparently the
railway only closed eight years ago (according to a local, although wikipedia says the station itself closed in 1956) - the track is still there, even, albeit very overgrown. I had hoped to walked along the track through the village, so whilst I got up on to the track from the canal easily enough, the only existing tiny path being away from the village. If it was used for goods until recently they may be keeping it for possible reopening, but it's a shame the village ignore it rather than opening it up as a village footpath.

Once back I drank some tea, drank some more tea and decided that I wasn't going to bother to wait for the rain to stop before I left, and it didn't until well after I reached Leek, or rather a quiet little canal terminus just behind an industrial estate in Leek, which swallowed up the last half mile into town as soon as it could. It's marvellously contradictory, it feels like I'm in the middle of nowhere on the canal and yet a mile away there's a town centre and all that goes with it. I think I quite like it, although I could do without the desolate industrial estate route.

There's no boatyards for diesel on the Caldon, not that I can find; I bought 10L in Morrisons garage at 50% more than canal price, as things are looking a little low - I really should have stocked up when I could, or rather I really should have checked...

It's stopped raining for a bit. Time to go and look at Leek's nightlife... (quiter pubs have been recommended include 'The Quiet Woman' - I have fears about the story behind that one in sexual politics terms. ;-)

Fri 8th Aug - Barlaston to Stockton Brook

A lateish start (10am) and a definitely late finish (8pm). Did the run up & through Stoke; I had planned to stop once on the Caldon (and through my first ever staircase locks) for a wander around Hanley, but found nowhere good to stop - well, I did, but the towpath was closed for reconstruction, so I wouldn't have been able to get out if I had...

On the way into Stoke I spotted a boatyard that wasn't shy about diversification:



'Tacle [sic] & Bait Air Guns Boats & Engines Country & Western Line Dancing'

The Caldon winds out of the Stoke area - another shallow, slow canal, but lots of corners you have no idea what's around... hero had been one lock ahead of me on the way up to Etruria & the first few locks, but they waved me past later, struggling with draft. Not only is it shallow anyway, but appears to be low anyway - one pound between locks was very low, I filled it a few inches after leaving the lock and grounding as I pulled in to do the next one.



I'd been warned about the lift bridges - one walking couple offered to do one for me, but the next was down to me. They're hydraulic ones operated with a windlass, so not counterbalanced well enough to be lifted by heand and held up with a pole. Instead I took the boat close, crossed & lifted, and pulled the boat past by hand. Worked on this one, but may not always.

Tomorrow - up to Leek (somewhere that has to be visited, not least from childhood railway reading about the Leek & Manifold Railway), then back down towards Froghall, the end of the canal. There's some respectable contour lines on the map, I'm looking forward to them a lot.

Kairology

The Plume of Feathers in Barlaston is nowhere near as good as it's Weedon namesake - I fancied a quiet read, but in the pub; the lounge bar was closed, and the public bar was full of shouting, aided & abetted by jukebox, tv and quiz machine all blasting away. Certainly not the place to be reading 'Pip Pip' by Jay Griffiths, an extraordinary book that throws so many ideas & facts at you it itself can go at quite a frenetic pace...

It threw up the perfect concept, though. Along with Chronos, the greeks had Kairos (Choas?) - things happen when they should, you eat when you're hungry, and time goes slowly or quickly depending on what you're doing. Hence kairological time, which is very much where I'm living now (I suspect closely aligned to Pagan Mean Time) - canals, festivals and friends. I'm well away from chronological time, which governs my job, employment - from the nanosecond timing of colour subcarrier to timecode in hours, minutes, frames, to the count in to a live show. It's a fairly fundamental (and possibly obvious) part of a holiday, or travelling (at your own will), but I haven't seen it quite so well crystallised before. I've been told of another book by Jay Griffiths too, which I'll certainly be looking for at some point.

Thursday 7th Aug - Stone to Barlaston

This is the view out of the window - therw's a very picturesque field opposite, the bank has brokenm down either side of the tree and it's a general hangout for geese & ducks. With the main line to Stoke & Manchester a field away (which I myself used earlier) it may not be the quietest of nights/mornings...

I left London late lunchtime, thankfully didn't have to wait too long for the hourly bus to Stone, and was here in time to buy veg & perishables in the supermarket and an 8' pole in the chandlers to attempt to prop open lift bridges. I realise I could have brought along a spare 8' length of 2x2 timber I know I have at home, but wouldn't have been entirely practical... ;-)

Looks like there's more traffic around now than a couple of weeks ago - useful as there's more chance a boat will be coming out of a lock I want to go in to, but also more chance I'll see an empty lock be hurriedly filled as I approach it, as happened on the Meaford flight this evening. I'll assume they didn't look.

It's great to be back on the canal again - been away for a couple of weeks for guests, a festival and a couple of days at Climate Camp (welsh policemen friendliest, indeed nmost likely to treat you as a human being). Yes, leaving that early to get back to a diesel engine was kind of incongruous, but so was the extra driving involved by a very generous friend to get my pedal powered PA kit to the festival. In the latter case I tried (and failed) to get a lift with someone doing the same journey anyway, but I can't control whether people volunteer or not. Anyway, I digress... I'll be comparing CO2 emissions from the trip this summer to a flight, when I'm done, could be interesting.

Tomorrow - Stoke, I'll be trying to find some hidden beauty in there somewhere. Perhaps Etruria has an ancient meaning, but it sounds so much more appealing... I should be out the other side on the Caldon by the evening, anyway.

(this post brought to you by new web gadget. Turns out you get 3Gb on it to start with anyway - I'm still having fun & games woith setting up, after have to borrow a PC to get the text message on the SIM with the web password on, I find that for some reason the only website I can't get at when connected is the 'my 3' one that tells me how much data allowance I have left.)

Internet Shopping

When pay as you go 3G USB modems were £99, I knew I didn't miss the internet that much. Now they're £49, I thought I'd give it a go.

They had them on sale in PC World - great - walk in, buy, get going...

The DVD boxes they use represent the product had minimal information, although they did say something about top-ups lasting 30 days... no data costs or anything. So I asked someone, Who asked someone else. Who went to find the most junior member of staff to deal with me, who still knew nothing. The 30 day thing is diabolical - if you don't use the data credit you've bought within 30 days, you lose it. Yes, lose it. If they did that on phones they'd never get away with it, and if grocers claimed back the food after a week, or a pub took back what's left of your pint after 20 mins - how can they justify this, other than being money grabbing? A letter to Ofcom should be written, but probably won't.

They also had no information ANYWHERE about data costs, and they actually had to ring '3' themselves to find out. So, if there's any PC World employees reading, £10 gets you 1Gb, £15 gets you 3Gb and £25 7Gb. Or rather, that's how much you can go up to within a month before paying more, before they grab it back after 30 days. Presumably the bulk discounts on higher amounts are to get as much money as they can upfront, whether you use it or not...

All hardly ideal, but since I mainly want to use it for August, I decided to get one anyway. At the till, they tried to charge me £69. Ah, we've brought the wrong one out, they said. The manager went to have a look, then told me there were two models, and they only had the more expensive one, although he couldn't tell me what the difference was, or what the other model was - so sounds like backpedalling bullshit to me, as he 'as a courtesy' overrode the till and sold it to me for the originally quoted price.

Of course I didn't dare say I was going to be using it on an Asus eee linux laptop, as it's not supported, even though PC World sell them. It works, after a bit of faffing, but since I'm not going to put any credit on it until next week to avoid being done over by the 30 day rule, all I can get get at so far on it is the three.co.uk website. Whether it continues to work, and I continue to fill up the internet with rubbish remains to be seen, let alone whether it was worth getting on for an hour of hassle in a tin shed on the Great West Road...

Mon 21st - Armitage to Stone

The annrow stretch of 'Armitage Tunnel' - was a tunnel, now a glorified road bridge.




I woke up early, so left early, shortly after seven, so passed through & beyond Rugeley to the accompaniment of the Today programme and a John Shuttleworth show found on BBC7.



Swans that know their place (you might need to click for the big pic for this to make sense):



At Great Heywood I forsook the turning to Wolverhampton and a shorter trip home... For the rest of the day there were occasional locks, but when I got to Stone itself there were four deep locks, all requiring driving the boat in and climbing up the ladder - more of a trial due to mud on clothes than anything else. I avoid this in double locks as the boat tends to wander off from under you, so it at least feels safer in single locks. I couldn't pull the baot in after hopping off on the way in due to bridge across the mouth, and one one instance there wasn't anyhwere to get off. The other boaters were the usual mixture of very helpful people and people who didn't know what they're doing... the former included two women on the boat behind who kept on catching up with me, and would finish off the lock for me (then working another boat down or emptying it s they could use it), which was lovely of them.

I've moored at the top of the locks, in what hopefully are two week moorings, as that's what I'll need... heading back to London tomorrow to finish off a PA system, amongst other things. It's going to be a shock, after more than a week continously on the canal, and two weeks travelling in total. August should see at least three weeks on the water, if not more.

Stone's an interesting place, with a fiendish one way system and a station that trains don't stop at (frustratingly). They take their football (Stoke City, of course), seriously around here, though, even in the violin makers:



Once back, I'll head up to Stoke on Trent and branch off up the Caldon canal to Froghall, then back down, and on up to Harecastle tunnel (followed by a shedload of locks, according to the guide) and Middlewich, where I start heading south again on a section of the Shropshire Union. Then of course the Llangollen there & back, back on to the Shropshire, then Wolverhampton & Birmingham. After that back to Braunston, where I can choose to do the South Oxford & thames again - the upper Thames is tempting too, but I do need to see how time goes - I will be almost certainly be back at work by then, and whilst I'm happy to canal sections on long weekends, I'd rather do the Thames in one stint (cost of extra licence, and overnight mooring being significant). We'll see...

Sun 20th July Polesworth to Armitage (as in Shanks?)

Another lateish start and lateish finish - a shame, as I do like early mornings on the canal - thankfully evenings can be just as pretty, and I'm amazed that everyone seems to be moored up by six, mostly, anyway.

Tamworth was fairly long and tedious (as were the indecisive showers), lots of bog standard houses backing on to the canal - nice for them, obviously. The new flats alongside the two Glascote locks are built on the site, of the Reliant car factory, I was told by an oldish guy, who used to make deliveries to Brentford in his working days. A little further on, just before the Tame viaduct, I passed Andrew Denny on Granny Buttons, optimistically in shorts and t-shirt whilst I was still in wet weather gear after the morning's rain. On up through the Coventry canal (or was it Birmingham & Fazeley - there's a certain amount of identity crisis around here), stopping off in Whittington for food at the co-op, then passing Streethay boatyward without anyone suggesting I stretch my boat, despite their reputation.

All I remember about Hopwas (great name) was a line of shiny canal boats all occupied by people doing jigsaws. Whether this is or isn't representive of the place, I'm not sure.

Somewhere in a line of moored boats was this one - a recurring nightmare for us all:



Fradley Junction took me on to the Trent & Mersey canal - still an 'old' single lock canal - and a very bizzare experience. There's three locks going up out of the junction, and a bit of a queue, especially by the top one. I was third, and helped two hire boats up and one down (one of the hirers attempted to sink their boat by opening the gate paddles on to the bow, but confounded by the fact that it was a 'Canaltime' one with no front deck). As I was finally working my own boat through (another hire boat waiting behind) an old guy who had been hanging around started issuing orders to the kids from the hire boat. 'Sorry mate, it's my boat in the lock' I said, ansd which point he turned on me, told me I was a 'very selfish man' and how I was holding 'everyone' up. I couldn't quite believe this, especially when he then warned me not to go too fast past his boat, which had been sitting moored above the lock showing no inclinations of wanting to come down at any point. I'm 'selfish', and yet worked through three other boats, and he'd helped nobody.

I suppose my point is that people on the canals are generally so great, that behaviour which might not get a second glance in a city is completely out of place here. He's the kind of guy who isn't going to see anyone's viewpoint but his own, he's got a right to enjoy the canals just as much as, say, the Daily Mail has to exist or Westlife have to make records, sadly - but it's the old liberal conundrum. I just wish he chose to enjoy canals 'his' way somewhere else.

More generally, I'm finding I'm surprised how many people don't have clear in their mind the concept that the crew of the boat in the lock are in control, say when paddles are raised etc (and which ones as well) etc. I suspect this is more crystallised for single handed boaters than others (who won't ncessarily see what's important to us and what isn't), but it's still a fairly fundamental rule in my book, even for hire boats - who I'm trying very hard not to get bigotted about. ;-)