He’s small. He’s muddy. He’s mad as hell. He’s … Mallard With A Mohawk! This morning we did a couple of miles in the boat, with no locks at all, though there were three swing bridges. Paula gets a bit embarrassed making the traffic wait while our boat sidles through a swing bridge, so she decided to drive while I worked the bridges. The most fun thing we passed was this this boat. Our goal was Stockbridge Wharf, on the…
I did mention that the Leeds and Liverpool lumped locks together in staircases, where the upper gate of one lock is the lower gate of the next. Depending on the number of locks, these are referred to as a two rise, a three rise, or, in an insane overindulgence of the canal maker’s art, the Bingley Five rise. You look at it an you think, what the hell were they thinking when the built that? The water level rises 59…
It was raining on and off today, so apart from a quick run to Argos and the hardware store, I stayed home, and wrote a blog post for Cloudmark, which should appear in a few days. Paula did another shopping trip while I was working. There is not real equivalent to Argos in America. There’s a tiny storefront with a huge warehouse behind it. You order the goods from a catalog, write down the numbers, hand in your slip at…
Today we are in Saltaire where the Cult of the Alpaca runs deep. To understand this strange obsession we need to understand Sir Titus Salt, Bart. Here’s an introduction from guest blogger Charles Dickens (TL:DR Salt buys alpaca wool, make cloth, gets rich): One day — we won’t care what day it was, or even what week, or month, though things of far less national importance have been chronicled to the very half minute — one day, a plain business-looking…
This morning I was hoping for a repeat of yesterday’s weather so I put shorts on. That was OK for the first couple of hours, and when the rain started at least I wasn’t getting my jeans wet. We had arranged to travel with Festina Lente again, and they very kindly waited for use while we filled out water tank. Ey up, first lock is a three rise with no lockkeeper. Well, I’m glad we had company for that. Lorraine…
Today we bid a fond farewell to the thriving metropolis of Leeds, home strange brick towers… …and the cheapest office space in Europe (coincidence?), and headed up the east face of the Leeds and Liverpool canal. The Leeds and Liverpool took forty years to build, mostly thanks to Desmond (god of cost overruns) and they still got it wrong. Instead of spacing the locks out evenly like the great flights at Caen Hill or Tardebigge they are clumped together in…
I know that if I put this picture first, the rest of the post will be an anticlimax, but I have to do it. Leeds is a town where none of a pig goes to waste. Apparently if you chop up pig rectum, dip it in breadcrumbs, and deep fry it, it tastes just like calamari. Of course, no Yorkshireman would go shopping for something as poncey as pig rectum. Up here they call an arsehole an arsehole. You could…
We set off bright and early for the run into Leeds, but were stalled at the first gate, Woodlesford Lock. “There’s trouble at t’sluice,” the Canal and River Trust man tells me, “But it ain’t bad.” We had time to look around the lock while he worked on it. It’s a contender in the Best Kept Lock competition, with flower beds sponsored by local businesses, a community orchard, deer statues, and a bug hotel. Also a tuxedo cat, because cat…
Last night all our twelve volt systems except for the fridge and the inverter went down. That meant no lights or running water. It wasn’t anything obvious, so we summoned our engineer, Clive, who made it up from Milton Keynes about 2:30 today, having stopped off to pick up a solar panel for us on the way. He got increasingly frustrated as various bits of circuitry turned out to be still live and he could not find what was broken,…
There’s a Yorkshire saying, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” Brass is slang for money up here and muck refers to the filth of unregulated industry: coal mining, steam powered factories, and industrial pollution generally. It was early anti-environmental framing, stating that you have to put up with a filthy environment if you want to get rich. Curiously, the people who were most impacted by the filthy environment were not the ones getting rich. Dirty industry, and in particular coal mining,…