NABO News

If you own a boat or use Britain's canals in any other way, join Nabo (the National Association of Boat Owners) and get your voice heard. They have a more campaigning attitude than what I recall of the IWA (Inland Waterways Association) without being blind to the many good things done by British Waterways employees.
The website www.nabo.org.uk is informative. At the moment Nabo is encouraging everyone, members or not, to lobby Government ministers and their own Memebers of Parliament about a number of issues.

Nurse Ratched's Place

Nurse Ratched's Place

A wise, witty blog about nurses, nursing and a few other things.

Gas cookers on boats

For years we've been complaining that LPG equipment for boats is much dearer than the equivalent model for the home.
I'm told (too late) that all gas cookers are supplied with two sets of jets - one for LPG and the other for natural gas. The jets are fitted according to which the customer requires.

Can anyone confirm this?

Living Aboard

Every so often someone is featured as "getting away from it all" and living aboard a narrowboat. I hope they're not disappointed.
Narrowboats are, to state the obvious, narrow. Uncomfortably so.
They have toilets that need emptying, or storage tanks to be pumped out. Both of these require access to the appropriate facilities, listed in canal guides as "Elsan disposal" and "Pump out" respectively. Elsan (or whichever make of chemical toilet you have) is aptly nicknamed "bucket and chuck it" so don't wear your best suit when pouring the gunge down the approved receptacle. Pumping out by a boatyard costs money.
You'll have to sacrifice a lot of possessions because of the lack of room.
If you can't find a mooring, don't buy a boat. The standard private licence permits cruising 365 days a year but you have to state where your mooring is and the authorities do check. If you wish to cruise without a fixed mooring, British Waterways will let you have a higher-priced licence for what's known as "continuous cruising."
('But you just said the standard licence permits 365 day cruising!') Yes and you still have to pay for a permanent mooring even if you're only there one day a year, or get the higher-priced licence. Continuous cruisers need not move every single day but if you remain in one spot too long some official will remind you of the small print in the terms and conditions.

Boating is mentioned at last

Time was, most people on hire boats were new to the boating scene. The relatively few private owners were delighted to pass on the knowledge that helped to make 'canalling' more enjoyable.
Now? It's the hirers, on average, who seem to know most about safe considerate boating. Too many owner-steerers act as if rules apply only to lesser mortals unable to finance private ownership. (I first put 'number ones' in that sentence, before recalling that the term strictly applied to owner-operators of carrying boats. They knew 'how to go on'.)

The last hunter-gatherers

Deep-sea fishermen have been described as the last hunter-gatherers of the Western world. Unfortunately Western technology has enabled them to do what traditional hunter-gatherer societies managed not to - that is, wipe out the very species on which their livelihood depended. Who'd have thought, a generation back, that the Grand Banks cod could be fished to extinction or that herring would all but disappear from Scottish coastal waters?

It helps to be Jewish

Now we know how to take the mick out of funny foreigners without being accused of xenophobia or racism. Just play a character with stereotypical "funny foreigner" characteristics. When people complain, let your metropolitan trendy friends explain that you are not sending up the funny foreigner. You are making fun of the twits who think foreigners are funny, simply by being different from us.
One warning: You have to be Jewish to get away with it.

Jews have suffered millennia of persecution, meeting the worst excesses of bigotry and hatred during the second World War (1939-45) in Nazi Germany. Therefore, the argument goes, they of all people are the least likely to display bigotry. They are immune from criticism on that score.

Now imagine: Instead of Sascha Baron Cohen inventing the pseudo-black Ali G to satirise whites who try to act "black", think of the outcry if a Briton of any other religion invented a stereotypical Jew character (grasping, devious and given to hand-washing gestures) as a way of satirising anti-Semites. His explanation of motive would likely not be taken seriously. Suppose, instead of the fictional Borat from Kazakhstan, we had a Kazakhstani satirising anti-Semitism by behaving like a modern-day Shylock domiciled in Tel Aviv.

Recall, if you're old enough, the TV series Till Death Us Do Part. The bigoted Alf Garnett character was supposed to make the audience laugh at his stupid prejudice. Many in the audience were not that sophisticated; bigoted themselves, they loudly praised the BBC for "finally having the courage to say what we all think" through the character's words.

You could, I suppose, satirise bullying by going round thumping people smaller and weaker than yourself and loudly drawing attention to your actions. I bet the courts would still find you guilty of assault no matter how many times you and your friends said your intent was to ridicule bullies.

Veiled hint

In the interests of equal-opportunity offence, here's my take on the furore over Muslim women's dress.

We are told that Muslim men in the East insist their womenfolk be modestly covered lest their loveliness inflame other males. This implies that Muslim men lack the self-control the rest of us exercise without thinking. In Western society we can be surrounded by gorgeous women in revealing clothing but the women generally remain unravished. Even by Muslim men, the ones allegedly so easily aroused.

So why must a Muslim woman living in the West cover up? It's a common observation in any large British city that many of them simply don't. They wear the same fashions as their white contemporaries, give or take a few details. If this exposed them to sexual harrassment they'd switch back to the traditional dress, wouldn't they?

Let's dig a little deeper. Imagine you are a man from a culture that likes to keep its women subservient, that insists they go nowhere unchaperoned by husband or close male relation, that carries a mental image of streets full of raving sex maniacs itching to jump on the first female exposing an inch of skin. You move to the West: your womenfolk see for themselves that local women walking abroad with hair blowing freely in the wind, legs exposed well above the knee and bosom displayed, do not immediately suffer sexual assault.

Wouldn't you, as a man, be worried? All those customs and attitudes you brought with you suddenly exposed for the myth that they are must surely cause your women to question the other restrictions you place them under.

It's not lax Western morals alone that upset the fundamentalists. It's the challenge our society offers to their preferred view of the world, a view in which women have their place and are kept firmly in it.

Good times, bad times, afloat

Defra cocks it up, BW and other organisations suffer. Does this mean a return to the good-old-bad-old days when boating felt adventurous? When the bottom of your craft wore thin from scraping on the mud, even in centre channel? When you needed that gangplank? When parts of the North Stratford made you think you were in mid-canal but you were actually scraping the submerged towpath? When you had to carry a spade so you could dig a hole for Elsan disposal? When water points were so far apart we all carried a spare five gallon container of water to ensure health and tea?

Sadly it won't mean a return to the good part of those times, when an outboard strapped on the back of a bathtub qualified as a powered boat and you only had to pay for a licence to enjoy the freedom. We're stuck with the "my floating cottage has more facilities than yours" boaters and senior staff aiming to squeeze every penny from waterside development at the risk of destroying the very atmosphere that attracts users in the first place.
Back then the only BW staff you were likely to encounter were dedicated craftsmen performing miracles of repair (and occasional renovation) with inadequate funding, while giving the impression - deliberately - that they spent the entire day frying sausages.