Jolly Boating Weather

It’s July; there’s a heatwave in England; anyone from the Gulf might consider wrapping up warm because 30°C might feel a bit chilly. By August the weather in Britain had changed a lot, to sun and showers and comparatively swutting freezing.

The Goat had spoken to Mr Richard and organized a week or so on the good ship NB Great Escape. Richard and his family don’t get to use the boat as much as they’d like, and are happy to lend the vessel to competent friends, of whom the Goat is evidently one. Tentative additional crew members ended up having other stuff to do, and thus the Goat and Beloved Wife were the sole crew for most to the week. Initial plans for the Avon Ring were revised. Up Tardebigge flight then down all the locks of the Stratford Canal would seem unreasonable with a crew of only two. Stratford-on-Avon would have to wait.

Droitwich Spa Marina is a new development at the northeastern end of the newly reopened Droitwich Canal. The marina was built in about 2012, and has all mod cons including fuel, water, power hookup, civilized ablutions, and secure parking for both boats and cars. The Goat picked up the keys from Mr Richard (in the rain) and then, inexplicably, headed off to Norf Landun.

The Goat and Beloved Wife

The thing is, at very late notice it had been revealed that by happy coincidence there was an English Civil War re-enactment at Forty Hall in Enfield slated for the very weekend that the Goat and Beloved Wife arrived in Ingerland. The preceding weekend was Eid, during which the Goat collected a minimal amount of his seventeenth-century clothing from the Crumbling Villa to take with him to the muster. Meanwhile, Beloved Wife scanned the interwebs for 1642 costume patterns, and had a local Dubai tailor run up some wimmin’s costume. As Beloved Wife enjoys camping about as much as drinking bleach, she asked the Goat to sort out a hotel. Holtwhite’s Hotel represented the nearest reasonable option at 1.3km from the campsite, so it’d be possible to stagger back on Saturday night when the beer tent finally closed.

As it happened, the rain stayed off all Saturday. The Goat was not equipped to go into battle, and instead stood innocuously beneath a tree out of sight of the crowd, taking pictures with his secret seventeenth-century digital camera.

The Gentlemen of the Pike.

Pikemen in action.

Give fire!

More musketry.

Muskets on stun, lads. We want them alive.

The big guns.

More artillery.

It seems that Mr Lawful Good of Cowplain took one for the team, awaking on Sunday morning with the regimental hangover. He couldn’t face the second day’s battle because he’s a shandy-swilling southerner. Before the rain started, the Goat suggested that Mr LGoC pack up his still-dry tent. Then after an English myocardial infarction breakfast of podium finish, the Goat and Beloved Wife drove to the campsite, picked up their passenger, and headed off to Cowplain in the driving rain.

More driving followed. At last the setting sun broke through the clouds and the rain had stopped when the car finally rolled into Droitwich. Which was shut on Sunday evening. How unreasonable and inconvenient.

The boat’s food supplies were duly raided, and on Monday morning NB Great Escape cast off and set sail for Droitwich. The Droitwich Canal is something of a baptism of fire for novice boaters, with a narrow exit from the marina, some extremely narrow and low bridges, a staircase lock, locks with side pounds, and locked swing bridges to be de-padlocked to allow boat access. It’s got the lock, er, lot.

Beloved Wife had agreed that food supplies should be limited to breakfasts, with lunches and evening meals taken in waterside alehouses. A plan with no drawbacks. Waitrose, conveniently located next to the canal in the middle of Droitwich, was duly raided for haraminal products and breakfast was taken.

Great Escape shared most of the broad locks to the Severn with NB Lilia in order to save both time and water, and clearly with two boats, the manpower working the locks was at least doubled. Lilia went downstream on the Severn; Great Escape turned north and headed upstream until mooring overnight adjacent to The Wharf Inn. Oh, no food on Mondays. No matter; the inn had menus from a couple of local takeaways, and the Goat and Beloved Wife eventually enjoyed the large Chinese meal delivered to the inn and washed down with ‘FUBAR’ Pale Ale.

NB Lilia emerges from a lock and bridge

Circular weir, or "Don't divide by zero!

Lock sharing with Lilia

At last Stourport Basins. Access from the Severn is through two staircase locks that are inexplicably not in line with each other, and thus a long narrowboat may be tricky to align without some gentle percussive manoeuvring. They’re very tricky indeed on the way down with a howling side wind, as the Goat was to discover the following day.

After mooring for water and availing themselves of full-size loos, the Goat and Beloved Wife headed into Stourport for liquid lunch and, in the Goat’s case, a steak and kidney pudding. Stourport appears, incidentally, to have a chip-shop souq. Three of them all in a row, plus various other restaurants and takeaways that doubtless also serve chish and fips.

From the Severn to Stourport

Parked in Stourport Basin

The guidebook says that the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal is extremely pretty, and the section to Kidderminster certainly is. Having spotted The Weavers, a canalside public house that promised inter alia no TV, no music, no SKY sports, no lager (and thus, presumably, no yahoos), Great Escape turned around in a nearby winding hole and moored next to a 24-hour Tesco for replenishment of hop-flavoured supplies and use of los facilidad. The ship’s log suggests that local yobs may be troublesome overnight, but the Goat did not find this to be the case. The Weavers looks like a Victorian alehouse that’s been established since forever, but the elves over at Google Street View show that in 2009 the building was empty and To Let.

So back to the Severn, with the Goat rinsing some towpath dogshit off his hoof rather than inadvertently tracking it all over the boat’s carpets. Another brief pause in Stourport for the loo, and then off down the Severn at a heady five knots according to Clarissa the GPS. The plan for a lunchtime stop was thwarted by a gigantic yellow narrowboat being inconveniently moored all over the pub’s landing stage, and there was nothing for it but to continue downstream, sheltering from the occasional rain showers beneath an umbrella, eat ham sandwiches, and drink bottled ale from a pewter tankard that the Goat had accidentally borrowed from Mr LGoC.

Worcester is very pretty from the river, particularly with interesting clouds. Less picturesque was when the said clouds emptied all over poor Beloved Wife as she worked the unnecessarily heavy Diglis Basin lock gates. The Goat could have done it, but as the boat was inaccessible whilst in the locks this sadly wasn’t possible. Of course, the rain stopped the very moment Great Escape was out of the locks and on to the Worcester & Birmingham Canal. So up a couple of locks to Worcester Marina for an overnight stop. Formerly Lowesmoor Basin, half of the marina has been filled in and turned into industrial units sometime since the 1980s, and it’s a bit congested. It’s amazing how being watched by amateur and professional narrowboaters concentrates the Goat’s mind and boat-handling as he executes three separate U-turns to reverse Great Escape into its parking spot. There were power hookups but no showers, and the loos are only open during office hours. However, the marina is behind a locked gate and the boats are therefore inaccessible to stone-throwing yoofs.

The river Severn and Worcester Cathedral

In the three days spent in Worcester – where the sauce comes from - the Goat and Beloved Wife were able to sample many pubs, several of which date back to the sixteenth century. Also there was the Commandery (a complex of buildings dating originally from the medieval period and with oodles of history) to visit, a little shopping, and Worcester Cathedral. In the Commandery, visitors are each issued with audio guides. It is recommended that one does not attempt to listen to the commentary for all six of the highlighted time periods in each room. At the cathedral, a very nice guide was happy to tell anyone who’d care to listen that he was a direct descendent of one of King John’s many illegitimate children by one of John’s dozen or more mistresses. That was King John (he of Magna Carta 800 years ago this year) lying just over there right in the middle of the nave. The Goat started to take photos and was instantly descended upon by a Valkyrie from the Women’s Institute who informed him in no uncertain terms that he should go and buy a photography permit first. Genuine honest mistake.

Worcester cathedral and ruins of the Priory.

Window in the cloister.

Cloister and bells.

Nave and choir.

On the last evening, Mr Thrash and Dr England (the well-known superhero) arrived by car, and this party of four then headed into town for beer, cider, pies, beer, and cider. The plan seems obvious: sleepover party, followed by a morning of lock-winding and sedate travel back to Droitwich. And after refuelling the boat, the Goat drove Mr Thrash and Dr England back to Worcester so that they could pick up their car and drive home. Forty minutes from Droitwich to Worcester and back, including becoming confused by Clarissa’s lack of knowledge of Worcester’s new and improved bus lanes.

Tudor building in The Shambles

The deal from Mr Richard is that his boat be left in a state of readiness: clean, full of fuel and water, all used food replenished, and the chemi-khazi empty. The Goat and Beloved Wife set off by car towards Nanny Goat’s, with a detour to Mr Richard’s in order to drop off the keys and to confess to any breakages, of which there were none except for the boathook that was replaced with a new one.

As for the second week’s holiday…? That can wait for a later blog post.

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"I am the One Per Cent"

This blog post isn't the
Tales of 1001 Nights...

Apparently, 99% of boat owners on the British inland waterways are over fifty, which makes my friend Richard one of the 1%. But because he’s not a merchant banker or a US congressman, and has to work for a living, he’s happy for friends to come and crew his narrowboat on tours of the inland waterways of England.

I wanted to go, and Beloved Wife said that I could, suggesting that I make a fortnight of it and see friends and family. This was in lieu of Plan A: Nanny Goat’s proposed visit to Dubai over Eid. Not least because Beloved Wife’s employer still hasn’t made up its corporate mind what days will constitute a Public Holiday, we abandoned Plan A and invoked Plan B.

Plan B had me flying into Birmingham International, taking a train to Nanny Goat’s and staying a few days, then borrowing her car and touring southern England. After returning the car with a full tank and my seriously depleted wallet, I would take a train to the midlands, go narrowboating for several days, and then get off right next to a railway station. The airport would be a short rail journey away, and I’d fly back to Dubai.

And guess what. Everything went exactly as planned. It’s amazing what a little forward planning can achieve.

Ducks in a row.

At the airport, something odd did occur to me. Airport security has always been a bugbear of mine because of the illogical rules. This one involves half-litre bottles of water. These are not allowed on board aircraft because they might be liquid explosives, so we’re told. We’re also told that we may dispose of them in that basket full of bottles of liquid piled just there, right next to the security desk. What, I ask myself, would happen in the terminal if some ne’er-do-well did succeed in getting a bottle of cellulose nitrate into this basket? At least the aircraft would be safe…

I now fly with minimal-to-zero metalwork about my person, even resorting to draw-string trousers so that I don’t have to risk a wardrobe malfunction when I take my belt off. The full body scanner at Amsterdam flagged the wristwatch that I’d forgotten to take off, but that was OK because it was obvious what it was when the alarm bells rang.

Travelling around England for a few days did result in Beer. I fear I broke David over a long afternoon session in two Bristol pubs, for which I ought to apologise, but it was good to catch up since we parted ways way back in my Doha days.

I deposited rare spices from the Orient with some friends who might appreciate such things, and eventually headed back to Plymouth in the rain. Nanny Goat’s car does 42 miles per (imperial) gallon on a steady run, which is just as well given that petrol costs a rather shocking £6.15 a gallon. For readers in the Middle East, that’s around AED7.80 rather than the usual AED1.72 per litre. Americans might be shocked and appalled by the British reality of $8.20 per US gallon.

The narrowboat lives in a marina in Droitwich, which is an excellent location as it’s near the Worcester end of the Worcester and Birmingham canal and the river Severn, so Birmingham, Tewkesbury, and Stourport are all potential destinations, each with their own charms.

This time, we were heading for the Birmingham Canal Navigations, so it was up three locks out of the marina, up six more to Stoke Prior, and then the remaining thirty on to the BCN Main Line level. Tardebigge Locks constitute the longest lock flight in the UK, and they’re all self-operating. You operate them yourself, which is why Richard really needed a small crew.

Waiting for a lock to empty.

We had a Bard. That's plusses on all Inspire Competence rolls.

An overnight stop opposite a pub in Stoke Prior and a hearty breakfast later, we set off, arriving at Tardebigge Top Lock three and three-quarter hours later. It might have been quicker, but we’d been following a boat all the way and had to cycle every lock. Once on the summit level, it was easy cruising at about three miles per hour all the way to Gas Street Basin, which is right smack bang in the city centre.

Gas Street has become rather trendy since my last boat trip there back in 1987. Trendy bars and restaurants have popped up but, after a shower in the civilised full-size facilities kept under lock and British Waterways key (which all boaters have, and nobody else does), we ate, and then found the gloriously eighteenth-century Canalside Inn and its stock of Real Ale. 

The double-hearthed fireplace inside the Canalside Inn.

In days of yore (from 1773), the Worcester and Birmingham canal and the BCN were not joined up, and cargo had to be manhandled from one boat to another at this very spot. The Worcester Bar was a water-saving measure, I can imagine that if this building were an inn at the time, they’d have made a fortune. Eventually, in 1815, a seven-foot-wide 84-yard length of canal was constructed to join the W&B to the BCN, and later the lock gates were removed, allowing free passage.

Gas Street Basin is to the left; the BCN Main Line is to the right.

Just beyond Gas Street, we turned right and headed down Farmers Bridge flight of 13 locks. These pass beneath later buildings that have, in some cases been built on columns over the canal. It’s all very industrial. Then there was a right turn at Aston Junction on to the Digbeth Branch Canal and six locks, plus tunnels and bridges.

The canal is easily the oldest thing in this picture.

Two hundred years of wear and tear.

Nobody told me to turn left at the bottom and I overshot and we were heading towards Typhoo Basin before my crass mistake became apparent to everyone. I had to reverse out, which is interesting in a long boat that doesn’t steer in reverse. Nevertheless, we caught up with a working boat and butty (an unpowered towed boat) that were taking coal to canalside pubs along the Grand Union. The butty has to be worked through locks by hand, and it’s a long and slow process. If you fancy this, the Narrow Boat Trust is always looking for crew.

Nuneaton and Brighton.

We ended up following NB Nuneaton and the butty Brighton along the Grand Union Canal until they managed to run aground on a mud bank beneath a bridge. We sneaked past with a couple of inches to spare, and then towed them off.

A very tight squeeze.

Having passed a newly-built Dutch barge, which was for sale, I inferred that we were now on broad canal. Sure enough, as dusk fell we encountered a flight of five broad locks at Knowle. Having got to the bottom of these, we sought a mooring right outside a pub. Huzzah!

The following morning, it was necessary to climb back up to the BCN Main Line level. From Kingswood Junction there’s one lock up to the Stratford Canal, then nineteen more to Kings Norton Junction. The last one is a stop lock. It’s a guillotine lock that nowadays is welded open. The Stratford Canal is very picturesque right into the heart of Birmingham’s sprawling suburbs.

Rush hour on the Lapworth Flight.

Brandwood Tunnel sports William Shakespeare's likeness.
Appropriate for the Stratford Canal

Kings Norton stop lock.

As this was a holiday in England, remarks about the weather cannot be avoided. It was dry almost all of the time except at night when we were safely indoors enjoying a small wood-burning stove, port, and card games, right up to the Kings Norton. Then a large umbrella had to be deployed. The rain had stopped by the time we got to Bournville. Mooring just next to the railway station, we had another social evening, and early the following morning I grabbed my stuff and headed off to the station at the start of a long trip back to Dubai.

The remaining crew went and explored Birmingham again, before turning around and heading back on their own long trip down Tardebigge, and home.

Hey Richard, how would it be if I wanted to borrow your boat for a week next year?

]}:-{>

Norse saga. Part IV – Norway Horsey

Wednesday 14 August

Twilight moon through some rigging.

We had an early departure from our subterranean Stockholm hotel, whose corridors looked exactly like those on the ferry. We didn’t have time for breakfast, but as that wasn’t included in the room rate it wasn’t a loss. The train to Oslo was not a sleek bullet train, but it seemed to travel fast enough through some very pretty fields, forests, and lakeland scenery.

Unfortunately, some yoof sitting exactly opposite us could have been the star of all Swedish translations of Tom Stoppard’s Talking Heads plays. This motormouth didn’t let up for six hours. If it wasn’t his mates (who couldn’t get a word in edgeways) it was his telephone victims. Even the next carriage, full of screaming brats, was inaudible: drowned out by Monologue Man.

The hotel turned out to be rather further from the railway station than originally planned, and then owing to map-reading challenges, wasn’t actually so far after all. We checked in, dropped our bags, changed, and then headed out for an afternoon snack and to be amused by the buskers, who included a double-bass player, and someone playing Bach’s Toccata in D-Minor on a piano accordion. The Living Statues don’t seem to get the idea at all, especially the ‘statue’ bit.

Oslo Fortress is free to get in, which was just as well because the various exhibitions where admission is payable were shut this late in the afternoon. The setting sun offered excellent light for interesting photographs.

Main entrance to Oslo fortress. There's a bridge over a dry moat and a wooden drawbridge.

Looks like someone's only blown the bloody doors off.

Inside Oslo fortress.

Oslo fortress: sea view.

And down on the quayside, the Mazda MX-5 Owners Club was having an informal meeting, so we chatted to the owners. Beloved Wife thinks she knows what her next car might be.

The light blue Miata/MX5 looks like it does the occasional track day. The dark blue one is more desirable because it has a retractable hard top that doesn't use up any space in the boot.

A lot of people were strolling on the sea front, and there was some kind of stage set up. It turned out that the Olso Philharmonic was about to perform Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony to an open-air audience, so instead of immediately heading for food, we hung around and listened. Additional soloists included Olaf Ericsson on the Harley-Davidson, and some yapping from Bark.

After sunset, which occurs just after 9pm in Oslo, the temperature dropped markedly. Immediately following the concert, we headed off to the nearest plausible restaurant. Chinese green tea, Hot and Sour soup, and Pork and Chilli were all extremely welcome, as was the 30m walk from the restaurant to the hotel.

Thursday 15 August

The hotel breakfast is comprehensive and excellent. At last, bacon! And fried eggs too. Then to the sea front for a ferry across the bay.

Ferry 91 is a bus for the purposes of public transport tickets. I headed off to obtain day passes from a machine on the quayside, only to be thwarted by the demand for payment. The machine didn’t take cash, would only accept a card with an embedded chip, and then wanted nothing to do with the six-digit PIN supplied by my Local Global bank. It’s four digits in Norway, or it’s no way.

I got day passes for cash from a manned booth, and got aboard the ferry mere nanoseconds before cast-off, and nobody checked the tickets anyway. We’re supposed to activate the 24-hour tickets by wafting them in front of a card reader on board, but no such device was in evidence.

After disembarking (‘debarking’ is what you do to tree trunks) our first destination was the Norsk Folkemuseum, a large partially wooded area of reassembled historical buildings from Norway’s past. The stave church has been dendrochronologically dated to 1212, complete with dragons in some conflation of Christianity and Nordic myth, and was refurbished in the nineteenth. 

Gol stave church, resited in this museum.

Dragons!

Stave church interior.

Some of the buildings were populated by Living History people in costume. A nineteenth-century schoolroom demonstrated those infamous Victorian values: one of the punters’ children was visibly disturbed when he saw a naughty schoolboy being given a simulated caning. They don’t do that in Scandinavia any more: it’s the law.

Schoolroom. The lesson was in Norwegian, but the map seems to indicate the lesson was about Palestine.

Other delights included the bread-making, and a 1950 farm with real, live animals. Well, a pig. While the girls on a school field trip went to find the animals, the boys all climbed aboard an ancient tractor.

I was assured by a re-enacting farmer that this lady will never find her way on to a dinner plate. She's got a lovely porcinality, and is ideally suited for a petting zoo.

My great uncle had one of these, and when I was that young I too used to climb all over it.

We didn’t bother with the horse and buggy ride. The horse was, I had explained to me because I know about 0.0001% of what there is to know about horses, a Norwegian Fjord Horse. Small, strong, low maintenance, good temperament, and a very old breed. The animal’s mane had been clipped to show off a distinctive and completely natural dark stripe. Here, at last, is the reference to the Norway horsey mentioned in the blog post title!

The stripe is emphasised by roaching(US)/hogging(UK) the mane.

We chatted briefly to some costumed musicians and I tried to play a ram’s-horn recorder, a musical instrument that probably suits me far too well. I couldn’t get Bach’s Bourée out of it (too many black notes) but was more successful with the Horses’ Bransle. Then the re-enactors stepped outside for some traditional music and dancing.

Traditional Scandinavian dancing.

Fiddling about.

It was a short walk from the Folk Museum to the Vikingskiphuset. In this apparently converted church are three Viking longships, funeral artifacts, and the mortal remains of three Vikings. These were all originally unearthed from burial mounds in the 1920s, unless you count the grave robbers in the ninth century who had it away with the gold and jewels and scattered the human remains over a wide area.

The Oseberg ship.

Exquisite carving work on the prow.

Further to matters maritime, the walk from the Viking Ship museum to the Thor Heyerdahl Kon-Tiki museum looked like a long one, so we returned to the ferry and caught No 91 for a very short boat ride. Kon-Tiki and the Maritime museums all shut at 1800, and it was now 1710, so we chose Kon-Tiki and spent fifty minutes checking out the photo galleries and both Kon-Tiki (1947: balsa wood raft that travelled from South America to Polynesia) and Ra II (1970: papyrus boat that sailed from Morocco to Barbados).

Kon-Tiki.

Ra II.

And there was stuff about Easter Island too. Did you know that the famous stern stone-faced moai are actually from the waist up and not just head and shoulders? For unknown reasons, most of the carved body details are buried. Heyerdahl’s team took a shipload of plaster with them specifically to make a cast of a full-length statue, and this full-size copy is in the museum. The moai are, in fact, huge.

Naturally, because all the museums shut at spot on 1800, the queue for the 1830 ferry back to Oslo centre was immense and the ferry left full with a large queue remaining.

It was sunny, and there was a bit of a breeze, so the rag-and-stick brigade was all out in force. One racing yacht was presumably practising as back and forth it sailed. Downwind with the spinnaker deployed, then tacking upwind, and repeat. The amusement of standing in a queue watching the boats would have been much reduced had the weather been wet.

Tacking upwind.

Running before the wind.

The next ferry was due at 1900, but the local public transport actually sent a special extra at 1845 to remove us, and most of the queue, back to Oslo city centre.

So back to the hotel for a short break, then we headed out for a most excellent steak dinner at the Nyborg Steakhouse right near that main railway station. Not cheap, but nothing is in Norway. Then back to the hotel, picking our way between the hen parties and professional beggars on their mobile phones, to a well-earned tryptophan coma.

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