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Not having a go. Just pointing out that it takes two to make a row. He wound you up, you wound him up in return. It seems to me that a simple statement as I suggested would have defused the situation pretty quickly but you weren't interested so you were as complicit in the canal rage as he was

Joined WilliamJ's boat for a short ride on Leeds and Liverpool down to Leeds. Earlier in the week on his journey from Shipley he'd captured on video (clicky here) this attempt to cast him adrift. William doesn't have a youtube account, so I loaded it on mine. There were about six culprits, three of whom were trying to undo the ropes and three more standing guard. Extraordinary behaviour, but in the end he was still tied to the bank, so difficult to know what The Authorities could have done about them. My old granny - who had an inappropriate phrase for every occasion - would have strode up to them and said "you silly gooses"

No there isn't normally a 'free-for-all' on the towpath. My reading of this situation is that this group of boaters are taking the p!ss big time having discovered they are not getting challenged by CRT for overstaying. You say they mentioned a 'relaxed attitude' to overstaying on this site. Whose attitude is 'relaxed'? CRT's presumably. These boaters' attitude seems to me to be more like 'this is OUR mooring and you are the interloper, so we feel free to shuffle you off the best bit which you seem to have bagged while we were busy doing something else'. My gut feeling is these CMers need to be moved on by CRT or they will probably continue with this low level harassment of non-liveaboard visitors, never mind the fact that they seem almost proud and boastful that they are getting away with flouting their licence terms and conditions. Who is to say had you not come back when you did, your boat would not have migrated even further up the cut? My guess is they are slowly colonising this sweet spot by the tube station, shops etc and are beginning to regard it as their own private stretch of mooring, which is why they felt free to move you out of their way. No doubt I'll get slaughtered for saying this, but it is how it looks to me from your descriptions of the situation.... MtB

A little list I made earlier on when I had some time on my hands and was feeling ponderful, about all of the little things that I have discovered and learnt since moving on board! 1. All of your clothes will smell faintly of ‘real fire’ or coal, regardless of how recently you washed them. Initially this is an inconvenience but eventually you come to rather like it. 2. If you own any white, cream, or pastel coloured clothes, they will soon take on odd black smudges, regardless of how careful you are about keeping them away from the stove, hod, or anything else coal related. This remains as an inconvenience and does not fade. 3. When visiting another boater, it is uncouth to ask to their toilet, unless you are at least a fifteen minute walk from another toilet facility (for women) or a wooded area/ bush (for men.) 4. If you have boater visitors over for more than four hours at a time, you will find yourself spending the latter half of their visit thinking that surely they must need to pee soon/ is your bathroom so nasty that they are too scared to want to use it/ how much more tea can you ply them with as a kind of pseudo-scientific experiment, just to see what they’ll do in an emergency. 5. Visits from other boaters will seldom exceed four hours without them either departing/ needing to go back to their boat for a minute/ having to ‘pop back to the car for something,’ see point four. 6. ‘Townies’ fill gaps in conversation by talking about the weather. ‘Boaties’ fill gaps in conversation by talking about water levels. 7. Pump out or cassette? Oh hells no. Don’t even go there. 8. It’s okay to insult a man’s wife, children, career choice, hair, or dress sense. But engines must always be coo’d over and spoken of in hushed approving tones, regardless of their size, condition, or maker. Shhhh! She’ll HEAR YOU! 9. If you are expected to go to work in anything approaching smart casual, you have likely got a pair of boots ‘for the journey’ that are generally covered in orange clay- like towpath mud, and also a pair of ‘smart shoes’ that are clean, patent leather, and walk less than ten steps a day. Plus a bag to keep each pair in, separately. 10. You become obsessed with what you can convince your stove to burn... Large, unwieldy or inflammable objects of rubbish will all be graded highly, according to your success in convincing the stove to eat them. 11. Ecofans. Having an opinion is mandatory. Having ever tried one is not. 12. If you have a posh new shiny boat, you are probably king of the marina. Conversely, that may also make you ‘king shit’ and/ or a N00b/ ‘more money than sense joker’ out on the cut. 13. ‘Online’ no longer just means that you have internet access, and committing the faux- pas of confusing the two meanings in conversation is verboten. 14. Portholes or windows? See point seven. 15. It seems perfectly normal to you to have both the stove/ heating going full pelt, and all of the windows open. 16. If you can’t manage to have a thorough shower, including shaving your legs, washing and conditioning your hair, and brushing your teeth in under four minutes/ four litres of water, you have failed as a boater and should probably consider moving back onto land. 17. Whenever you go to work in an office, visit a friend in a house, or have cause to use a hotel, you need an extra bag to haul along all of the things you want to charge up from their mains while you’re there. 18. Irons, microwaves, hairdryers and hoovers are all for posh people. 19. You used to own ten big thick jumpers for use in winter. Now you own two big thick jumpers, and a bottle of Febreeze. 20. And... You can make ten cubic feet of stuff fit into four cubic feet of space. 21. You keep a mop on your roof because everybody else does, but you’re not quite sure why... 22. When everyone else on the train home standing up is swaying about and clinging to railings, you are in the middle of it all freestanding, swaying with the flow and not falling down (until you do!) 23. Your mailing address is the same as your parents, for the first time since you were 16 years old. 24. Rosie and Jim are Bad People. 25. You probably started life on your boat with a novelty neckerchief, captain’s hat, pirate bandana, or “I’m on a boat, Mother F***er!” t shirt. By your third week therein, you have experimented with how that burns on the stove (see point 10) and roll your eyes and snort derisively at the fresh faced wannabe’s who have taken your place in committing aforementioned fashion faux-pas. 26. You have a beard. This is neither negotiable, nor gender- specific. 27. You can answer the question “is it cold on a boat in winter?” sensibly, only a finite number of times, before deciding to mess with people and saying “yes, it’s terrible, I have nearly died of hypothermia twice this year already, and I don’t know how I’m still alive...” 28. You thought you’d save money in winter by using the open bow as a fridge/ freezer for your food... Until you realised just how much alcohol you could actually store there if you stacked it all up right. 29. Upon hearing ‘man overboard!’ you reach for the camera first, and the life ring second. 30. When other people fall in, you are never there to see it/ photograph it. But you know damn well that when YOU fall in, there’ll be a group of Japanese tourists there, immortalising it on film and upping it to YouTube within the hour. 31. You can cook and serve a full Sunday roast for four, with less than two square feet of counter space to work on. 32. You stop thinking to yourself, “there’s some funny people on the cut” around the same time you realise that you are just like them, actually. 33. The 8pm engine/ generator off collective: You’re either with them, or against them. 34. You know that you have to disown any of your former friends who are apt to order “a pint of lager, please” in the pub, and you’re okay with that, actually. 35. Your hands and nails are NEVER clean, no matter how much you wash them. 36. You WILL have some kind of nasty toilet emptying related incident within your first few weeks away from mains plumbing. No one can teach you how to avoid your own personal initiation into boat toilet hell, you’re just going to have to grit your teeth and wait for it to happen. 37. When you started out with the boat, you had a little list of about five things that you needed to do/ buy/ sort out. However, due to a phenomenon I like to think of as ‘boat mathematics’ you learn that for every one item you cross off of said list, another two appear. Three months down the line, your list has about 30 essential and time sensitive things you need on it, and your earnings for the next two to four years are already committed to it. Oh well, spaghetti hoops for dinner again... Anyone have any they'd like to add?

OY!!! SHUT IT!

Blimey Chris, you need to get your prescription renewed I think. MtB

Still can't make sense of the original story, or why you obviously think it's a) clever and b)funny. You go past a queue of boats waiting for a lock, moor up right by the lock and then complain that they think you are queue jumping? If the lock is shut for a while, I presume they are all tied up, so you are in an identical situation except you're on what would in the UK be the lock mooring? Looks like sheer arrogance and deliberate rudeness to me, and I'm not at all surprised by the reaction you got. Luckily, you met some people who didn't suffer from the same complaints and bothered to be polite.

So, heading down an unfamiliar river at night with a bit of flow on, you're heading unknowingly into strong weir flow instead of toward the lock. Some boater rightly concerned for your safety shouts Oy! Oy! OY! OY! OOOOYYYY!!! So what do you do, clever clogs? Really Chris gloating over your childish behaviour is letting the side down , you make Hudson owners look like paragons of virtue cheers, Pete.

Anyone know the French for 'agent provocateur'? Please sir what is the conventional courteous way of hailing?

Well perhaps a little but it was a very nice tree and I would have gone a long way back to find such nice shade. (which I reckon was what was making M Grossier so grumpy, being in 35° heat with no shade and the ecluse shut for lunch) And yes, I was aware of the potential for interpretation but that's not really my problem. I always thought it was the french that had no respect for queues. The english in the queue didn't seem to have a problem - or maybe they were sitting there seething waiting for someone else to have a go. le tease? Moi? mais non, je suis le petit chat.

Oh… Titter … Titter… I idly wondered, after reading you're carefully crafted story, if you might perhaps have been aware that your Oh so legitimate lunch time manoeuvre could have caused a few to be concerned about that very British concept of queue jumping. The "Oy" was possibly even anticipated so that you could in true Mr Pink oratory fashion deny such devilishly underhand behaviour, and be so amused at a possible furore of misunderstanding. It's so easy to set up a rage isn't it. Well done. I hope you are enjoying being a Brit in France.

...got a big boy to hide behind now Nicky? good-oh. Indeed, and inverter and copper. If you throw £5,000 at a piece of bread you'd expect it to just roll over and die, sod the toaster.

Greenie awarded for that. Something similar happened to me recently. Never having seen female genitalia before I was truly shocked and had to lie down in a dark room to recover!

A word of warning! During these unseasonably hot times, there is a propensity for people to strip off in the intimacy of their boat to alleviate the effects of the weather. We know of at least two boaters whom were innocently exposed to what originally was thought to be a wild animal on board a passing boat, a voracious beaver no less! It was only when the owner of the beaver turned around a displayed what was described as a 'full moon', did the shocked boaters realise that they'd been flashed. The resulting trauma led the two unfortunates to seek solace in a nearby house of therapy. It was there that copious amounts of larger were consumed to calm their nerves and dispel the moments of laughter! Be warned and if you do come across anything similar, remember to place your hands across your eyes with a suitable gap to allow subtle viewing without the suggestion of being a voyeur.

Perfect.... very funny

Only seems fair to edit this post as well

I wouldn't bother, I think the Poles have their own particular national dress and wouldn't be interested .

Remove all clothing and splash cold water over protruding parts. Post photos to show results.

This is the exact reason I have not published the multitude of reference books I have produced, not because of legal implications but of moral ones. I have spoken with hundreds of 'historic' boat owners during the past 40 years or so, both previous and current and they have all supplied me with information without charge. It would therefore be wrong for me to sell this information whether it be for profit, perceived profit or no profit. I am however always happy to answer specific questions and I spend hours constructing boat histories for owners (but never to prospective purchasers) and I always decline any payment. I know that some people may consider my standards to be imperious but that is just the way it is. My 'historic' narrow boat photograph collection stands somewhere in the region of 5000, and they are all taken by me. This collection includes all extant G.U.C.C.Co. Ltd. narrow boats from 1990 onwards, most extant F.M.C. Ltd. narrow boats as well as countless others.

Don't waste any money on preventive stuff just yet as you may only be treating the symptoms not the cause. Are there any other boats moored near to you and if so are they having the same problems with moths? If not then chances are it could be something inside your boat that is causing it, and that they are coming from within and not from outside. There are many different species of moths which feed on different things, but all will lay their eggs close to or within their chosen food source, so you could be getting ones which have hatched. So I advise you try the following; 1, Check all of your clothes for signs of holes or chewed bits. 2. Do the same with carpets, rugs, mats and especially underneath furniture or anywhere where it is dark. 3 Thoroughly check inside your cupboards for spilt food especially cereals, flour etc, 4, Check behind appliances also. 5, Thoroughly inspect packets of food,, not just internally but the packaging too. I recently had somebody who had supposed to have done this, but they had missed a bag of flour peppered with tiny holes which had been bored into the packet, 6, If you have any dried flowers check these too. If you find the source and remove it your problem will be solved without having to spend any money. If you are getting more than one or two moths then they are almost certainly originating from within.

A notepad and pen, leave it near the door you normally leave from, and note down all the things you wished you'd brought with you. Next to the pad, a large basket for all the things you brought and wished you hadn't. Then when you next go to visit relatives, take both the pad and the basket with you, steal what you need and dump the contents of the basket.

Dou you mean having an engine above the floor rather like a narrowboat?

MRI uses a VERY strong magnetic field to interrogate the spin state of hydrogen nuclei, using a radio-frequency. When the nuclei are pulsed with the radio frequency emission, their nuclei flip spin states, and then relax back to normal, on a timescale of around 0.01-1 second. In effect, you are seeing where there are hydrogens in the person. Different things (protein, water, nerves, bone, etc) will have varying densities of hydrogens, as they are made of different things , and the relative densities give you a nice map of what is what. In no way does the magnet do anything to the structure of any of these. Some molecules might "align" as they have a dipole (would need HUGE magnetic field - and they would go back to tumbling 10,000 times a second when they come out of the field), but no atom to atom bond is changed. Therefore, as all the energy released from combustion is from the breaking of C-H and C-C bonds(in the case of hydrocarbons), and making of O-H and C=O bonds, there can be no effect whatsoever on fuel consumption by a magnet. Am I qualified to state this? Yes.. I'm an Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. I use NMR (the small scale version of MRI) to analyse molecules every day. If you feel you get better performance, etc with this thingy installed, then I'm happy for you. But, there is no scientific basis for it.