In more than fifty years of James Bond movies there have been all sorts of chase scenes: cars, fire engines, speedboats, space rockets, scuba gear, helicopters. However, I don’t recall there ever being a James Bond movie with a canal boat case scene. That’s possibly because their average speed is a brisk walk, and you can outrun one without difficulty. However, there ought to be some sort of warped Bondian logic that would make a canal boat chase make sense, if only because they are going to run out of other vehicles. Say SPECTRE steals a barge full of a deadly bacterial toxin, and the only thing that can save the world is Bond with a barge of Dettol disinfectant.

Bond Girl (wearing improbably small bikini in incomprehensible disregard of the British climate): They’ve taken the Birmingham Main Line. We can never catch them now.
Bond: We’ll take the Soho Loop and cut them off.
Bond Girl: But the Soho Loop is longer. How about the 37 bus?
Bond: Watch this.
Bond pulls lever, and thanks to Q’s engineering, rocket motors at the front and back of the barge lift it onto the tow path, and robotic legs emerge from the bottom and it sprints off to ambush the Spectre barge. However, the Spectre boat is picked up by a crane and is about to be lowered on top of Bond and Bond Girl. There follows about ten minutes of crane vs robot leg action, until Bond finally shoots the bolts holding the bottom of the Spectre boat in place, and the entire cargo of deadly toxin is emptied into the barge full of Dettol. Cut to Bond on beach in Tahiti with Bond Girl in even smaller bikini…

Don’t laugh, it’s no more stupid than most of the Bond chase scenes.

Birmingham, it is often and correctly claimed, has more miles of canals than Venice. One reason for this is that the original Birmingham Main Line canal was designed by James Brindley, who tended to minimize canal construction cost by following the contours of the land, and only occasionally putting in locks when there was no alternative. When this canal was falling into disrepair and getting clogged with traffic, Thomas Telford was commissioned to deal with the problem. Telford was a later generation of civil engineer, and his solution was to drive a canal through the landscape, rearranging the land with cuttings, embankments and adding tunnels and aqueducts so that the canal would be straight and level. The result is that the remains of Brindley’s old canal extend in loops on either side of Telford’s and sometimes cross over it on aqueducts where the two are at different levels. Here’s us crossing under a canal.

If you want to make a fast exit from Birmingham, Telford is your man. We rather wanted to make a rapid escape from Brimingham, so we roared along the wide straight New Main Line, through graffiti strewn industrial districts with no moored boats anywhere, and made a left through the Netherton Tunnel. This is the superhighway of canal tunnels, 27 feet wide with a towpath on both sides. It was a replacement for the Dudley tunnel which was single track with no towpath, too low for most modern boats, and with no ventilation so you can’t use a diesel engine in it. We pretty much roared through the Netherton Tunnel, too, as the only oncoming traffic was a bicycle on the towpath. Then on through more graffiti strewn industrial districts on the Dudley Number Two Canal.

Birmingham is a dump. This is nothing new. Cue flashback music. Back in 1978, I was stuck in a traffic jam on the Hagley Road, and my first wife, who was driving, turned to me and said, “Birmingham is a dump, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” I said, and then, “I saw this job in America that I could do advertised this morning. Should I apply?” And so it began. Cue end of flashback music.

The goal for today was to moor somewhere with no graffiti. We turned sharp left onto the Dudley Number One Canal, through a twelve foot deep lock, our deepest yet, and finally ended up in a relatively new and soulless but blessedly graffiti free business park called the Waterfront.

We chatted with the couple moored on the boat next to us, and traded boat tours. The female member of the couple described Pegotty as looking a bit sad on the outside. This doesn’t worry me too much. If a boat comes pre scraped up, I don’t have to worry about adding a few more scrapes. She, on the other hand, keeps their diesel engine spotlessly clean. Personally I think diesels work better with a good coating of grease, and diesel engineers seem to as well *cough* Clive *cough*.