Found this little video. Not necessarily my taste in music, but very listenable, and love the sentiment.
On the waterways past, present and future
Quick update
So if it’s the swans that float your boat, mum’s managed to keep five of her beautiful eggs safe. One was taken from the nest and dropped – we think there are mink in the area.
On an equally sad note, we think Amanda’s plucky duck has met a sticky end. A bunch of drakes looked rather guilty, swimming around a floating (lady duck’s) corpse. Sad really.
LILO – Low Impact Life Onboard
Today we took one step closer to fulfilling the other side of our dream. If the truth be known, my side.
Owen and the boys like the engine – boat engines seem to be a bit of a sign of masculinity around ‘ere – and the boys love the adventure. We all love being so close to nature, but it’s me driving the green thing. I think. I hope they’ll call me on this and tell me I’m wrong, but I doubt it!
So… today we went along to LILO, which was, I have to say, one of the most productive days I’ve spent for a long, long time.
On British Waterways
I wanted to make something clear that’s been at the back of my mind, troubling me .
Earlier today I wrote a post about the consultation on the change to charity. I don’t think the consultation has been well handled, and the communications could be handled a lot better. I do acknowledge that a lot of this is down to DEFRA.
Most of it, however, is down to feeling a bit like a ping pong ball, being batted between different organizations and departments – and the recent consultation shows how and why that’s happened: our waterways were never part of a joined up plan, and have become better over the years.
And communications is close to my heart, so perhaps I’m overly critical – when was any government communication easy to understand?
So just to redress the balance, here’s a link the BW sent me this morning with some of the good stuff that they’ve been up to over the past year: http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/media/documents/02-chairmans-speech.pdf
The consultation on the waterways – part two ends today
As a liveaboard constant cruiser, I have some very real concerns about the transfer of British Waterways to charity status. My dealings with them as they are have been straightforward, and their gold license offers better value for a boat of our size than the corresponding EA license.
The first concern is the lack of, and disjointed, information that’s reaching boaters. Very little has been done to address this, and apart from a single event, in London, on a school night, I have seen nowehere that we, as boaters, can ask questions.
I had a very nice public response on Facebook from John Benyon about the consultations – but that was pretty much a get off line and get in queue. I’ve had no response to anything since.
Today is the last day of the public consultation. I have seen nothing on TV, heard nothing on radio, no emails from governing bodies suggesting that it was an important time to respond. It’s not just important – it’s vital for everyone who walks along the riverbanks, who canoes or kayaks, who rows on the river, sails on the river, lives alongside the river or lives, like us, on the river.
With regard to specific questions raised by the second, equally badly run, consultation on the transfer of British Waterways to a charity - my thoughts:
Pssst…pass it on.
Things are never straightforward online. That’s why they call it the web.
If you’re following this blog, you’ll have guessed that things ‘houises’ take for granted, like waste and water, need thinking about. So Peggy Melmoth wrote a jolly useful article for the Boatshed Grand Union.
She also has a blog called Narrowboat Wife, where she reposted the article. I had to search hight and low to find her name – she nearly simply was ‘Narrowboat Wife’.
Someone who I only know via Twitter as @WorkboatPug liked the article.
Workboat Pug: Oxford(shire)’s Mobile marine engineering on workshopboat ‘Permanent Revolution’. Also the inventor of the corn-dolly figurehead fender.
And rounded it up in a daily Twitter ‘newspaper’ paper he collates – a paper.li, Tweets from the Fleet. Always some good finds in there.
Which is where I found it, and if you’re a boater, or thinking about it, here it is: Where’s my nearest…?
A word to the wise though – I haven’t seen it, so can’t properly recommend it, and as they’re all Oxford based, it may only cover their bit of the waterways.
Now, why is it that Oxford boaters are so much more gobby than the Reading ones? It could be that we’re just a tad more refined here? Or all having too much fun to be online. Except me. I’m always attached to my machine. Even when I’m not. Note to self….
Webs. Like spaghetti.
The week that was
This week was madness.
The shower on the boat, which I’ve resistsed blogging about, was finally functional again. O’s done a great job. We now – again – have the one thing that I can’t survive without!
Trying - and failing - to get a decent picture to accompany an article I was writing
More on that later.
The esteemed magazine Towpath Talk has welcomed extra cash for moorings. Yippee! We’re desperate: we pay a marina to be our ‘permanent mooring’ but until we find residential moorings are continuous cruisers – the marina, won’t let us live there. But honestly. How on Earth does the government expect to put more boats on the water? Really, don’t get me started! We pay huge amounts each month for a marina space we can’t live in. The marina’s pretty good at letting us stop in and take advantage of facilities, and serves as a permanent mooring to meet BW’s continuous cruising regulations, This life is not for the fainthearted.
British Waterways is having problems. The people tweeting are fairly responsive to anything factual, but completely completely faceless and disengaged on anything of any import. The move to a charity is causing worries, especially as the people about to run that charity have identified clearly that there are no funds in the coffers. As a BW customer already paying over a a thousand pounds a year to license my boat, it strikes fear into my heart. Although we’re mostly cruising along the Thames which is EA ‘covered’, so that makes life more complex. We have seen some moorings up in Hungerford which look interesting, although for my job, it makes getting to London a little harder – and the children don’t want to leave their schools and friends. But we chose this life, and that’s, I guess, the trade off. We’d be nearer my parents as well, which is a good thing.
Boating Tweeters: a chance to chat?
With my other (work) hat on, I’ve been involved this year with Tweetcamp. Not in a PR capacity, but behind the scenes with odd bits here and there. There’s an awesome team and if 2009 was anything to go by, Tweetcamp will rock!
I haven’t really blogged about here, because, frankly, the minute the tickets went up, they were gone! But thanks to some additional sponsorship money, there’s a few more tickets been made available: http://tweetcamp2011.eventbrite.com/
It’s an unconference, where people using Twitter get together to expand on the things they’re doing with, well, Twitter.
The event is free, food and coffee provided, and I’ve heard rumours of schwag bags. And t-shirts!
Now it’s very late notice, I know, but I do wonder whether it might be worth some of us who tweet from Britain’s waterways – and care passionately about them – might not use the event to get together and talk about how we can use Twitter to grab the attention of those that be. They don’t seem to be able – or willing, sometimes – to engage boating communities, yet in general we all have the same interests. In theory, anyway!
Maybe that’s a bit too ambitious, with just one day’s notice! The reality is, I’d love to meet some of the ‘wags’ whose banter I enjoy on a daily basis. Tweetcamp might just give us the chance to do that.
