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Advantages of the BCN over Venetian canals. Can any one think of more? Any one can become a commercial boat skipper in Birmingham. Gondolier jobs are a closed shop, passed down in families. The smell of sewage wafting over the Venice canals. The smell of skunk wafting over the Birmingham canals. Global warming and sea level rise will doom Venice to sink below the waves. The Birmingham level is at 453 feet. Sipping a very expensive coffee on St Mark's Square, overlooking the Grand Canal, compared with sipping a cheaper pint of beer in the Tap and Spile, overlooking Gas Street Basin. Venice has the Campanile overlooking the Grand Canal. Birmingham has the Post Office Tower overlooking the Farmer's Bridge Flight. Venice has cruise ships in the Grand Canal. Birmingham is protected from wide beam monstrosities by flights of narrow locks on all the approaches. Venice is on the Adriatic, so sea life can get in to the canals. In Birmingham, sea life is safely segregated from the canals in the Sea Life Centre. No risk of your boat being pulled down to its doom by a kraken, or damaged in a dolphin collision. Listening to the beautiful, melodious Brummie accent, compared with the jarring drone of Venician Italian. Your Watermate key won't open any Elsan facility in Venice. The artistic endevours of Birmingham's many painters are displayed in public on every canal side wall, or other vertical surface, not hidden away in galleries, churches and museums as in Venice. Venice has no tunnels, or locks on their canals at all. In high summer, on some parts of the BCN, you can go all day without seeing another boat on the move. In high summer, Venice is so overcrowded, the authorities want to limit the numbers allowed in. Birmingham has never been a major naval power, or used its boats to carry fire and sword to other cities. The overblown lines of a gondolier, versus the elegant lines of a narrowboat. Venice might have the Bridge of Sighs over a canal, but Birmingham has Spaghetti Junction soaring over its canals.

It's hard not to draw the conclusion that composting separating toilet owners are simply lazy and cling to the green angle to obfuscate. Anyone prepared to dump their shite in public bins and their pee in the hedge or the canal should consider what a world we'd live in if everyone did that. Lazy and selfish, it only works if hardly anyone does it. Apologies to the one in a hundred who actually compost and take their pee to the Elsan, but come on - if you do that you might as well take a cassette the the elsan. It's notable how many of the shite in the bin / pee in the hedge crowd still insist on describing their toilet as composting - you're fooling nobody. Dumping your excrement is Pre-Victorian and went out of fashion due to the associated diseases like cholera - it's backward third world behaviour, it's not even remotely green.

Almost certainly 1 paid CRT employee and 5 volunteers, especially when you see the ages they look. Something similar to this appeared on Facebook a few years ago when a group of us (all volunteers) were cutting the offside vegetation. We'd moved to the towpath to stop for some lunch and a nearby moorer photographed us standing around. He wrote something derogatory like 'this is what we pay our licence fee for'. Some people seize every opportunity to have a go at CRT and I agree much of the time it's justified (especially with the erection of unnecessary signs). And I have to admit I did find this photo of the sign erection funny 🙂. But a lot of CRT haters take it seriously and really do think it's their licence fees being wasted.

Lemme guess, you've been fooled into buying a composting toilet - only to find it doesn't compost anything.

Reminded me of this that circulated around BW during the 2009 reorganisation, one of several initiated by Robin Evans

Isn’t a t-stud just one big centre cleat? The cleat hitch that you show is how I tie the rope to our t-stud anyway.

If it takes six men to fit one sign how many broken paddles can be fixed for the same cost?

Ive just been out walking the dog and walked past a couple of locks. Some locks seal on the top gates, some locks seal on the bottom gates, some seal a bit on each, some even change top to bottom each time the lock is used. Leaving any gates open therefore carries a significant risk of empty pounds. Leaving gates open might save a little time and effort, but sorting empty pounds consumes a lot of time and effort. Its selfish.

You can't just go by price. What about the culture and beauty of Birmingham, compared with a dump like Venice?

This appalling behaviour has resulted in other people's boats being damaged, others affected by being held up when the lock was out of action, and probably some of the following weeks hirers having their holidays cancelled at short notice. And these morons will just look back on the experience and recall what a great laugh they had. As with many other aspect in life it's just a few that spoil things for the majority.

There is a difference between biodegradable and compostable....biodegrading plastic bags simply turn into millions of parts of plastic becoming microplastics...bad for the environment, whereas compostable bags are normally made from corn starch or potato starch so are more benign. Nuclear waste is biodegradable too but that does not mean its safe....unless you wait for hundreds of years. Do keep up there at the back will you?

The flip side of steel plates over windows could be that, if it looks like fort knox, someone might think there's something worth trying to break in for, compared to the boats not obviously highly secured. And it's also an indicator that nobody's at home.

Alcohol eh? The government approved heavy drug of choice. Rather a lot of people equate how much fun they're having with how drunk they are, it's a fact! Then some of them find they can't enjoy themselves without being drunk. Then some of those become alcoholics who can't even function without it. A slippery slope for some. I used to love getting completely fall down drunk when I was a youngster, in the pub every night for 5-6 pints of real ale was just normal and even at college I had a couple every lunchtime. Got bored of it eventually.. or maybe it was when I had kids... or maybe it was when the weekend hangover lasted all week. Don't drink at all these days or go to the pub to be bored stupid by drunk people who think they are amusing. Sober people should probably be banned from pubs, we ruin the atmosphere.

Which, if you are going to the elsan every few days anyway, seems to negate all the effort of separation in the first place. Mind you, "tree huggers" do seem to occasionally struggle with logic !!

I remember doing Atherstone back in the mists of time, without vollies turning up and interfering with my peaceful and unhurried boating. Those were the days.....

Good for you, another rare land owning separating toilet user... but it's notable that you and others extolling the virtues of separating toilets still avoid addressing the wee issue unless pressed and don't have an acceptable practical answer. Or do you transport 3 months of festering urine to your land too? I suggest the vast majority of liveaboards are not land owners or they wouldn't live on a boat. IMO it's irresponsible to encourage people to install toilets with no acceptable means of disposing their waste products.

Give us a puff, please.

Have you fitted the oil pump upside down? If you have it will not pump because it is running the wrong way. It is designed to fit either way up dependant on the direction of rotation of the input shaft. There is enough oil in the box I suppose?

Especially if they are open-topped bins not covered ones ... All you'd need is a lifering as a seat and a roll of paper in your pocket.

Tesco certainly prefer Birmingham ...

There is a tendency for newbies to narrowboating to see it as hidebound in tradition, with nobody ever thinking about the way things are done. The truth is the opposite and a large tee stud on the bow with a pair of bollards at the stern actually works best on a 'normal' narrow boat (partly for the reasons Bee points out above). We don't need to 'prove you wrong' or convince you in any way. Go ahead and fit these cleats you like to your own boat if you like them and try them out. Let us know how it goes. I very much doubt you did this before posting and are claiming they are an improvement from personal experience.

I like T studs at the fore end as you can easily throw a loop around a stud while standing on the bank, ordinary cleats are harder to catch and reaching out to a cleat is risking wet feet and more, to place a cleat at the wider part of the boat means falling over the rope every time you get in or out.

Big thank you to the Atherstone vlockie who helped us and the boat in front all the way up the flight this morning. 👍🙂

Sounds about right, but you're missing the efficiency generated by adding in private sector incentives (the NHS fires the rower before hiring him back via a newly-formed private contracting agency specialising in rowers with NHS experience that's run by the Director of Steering's old schoolfriend at twice the previous annual cost) "Creating a market for canal service innovation" consisting of paying inflated fees to contractors with good relations with government ministers might be the best hope of the CRT keeping its grant though...

Have you been to a classic commercial vehicle show lately?

There was a boat race between a Japanese crew and a crew from the National Health Service (UK). Both sides practised long and hard and the Japanese team won by a mile. So the NHS ...faced with this problem setup a working party which reported that the Japanese had eight people rowing and one steering and the NHS had eight people steering and one rowing. So they brought in management consultants and the management consultants confirmed the diagnosis, suggested the NHS team be completely restructured to make it more efficient, more cohesive, streamlining and all-round better performance. A strategy document was drawn up and the recommendations encouraged restructuring for the entire organisation. As part of the restructuring, a number of appointments were made including three Assistant Steering Managers, three Deputy Steering Managers, a Director of Steering Services and the rower was given an incentive to row harder. They had another race, this time the NHS team lost by two miles, so management laid off the rower for poor performance, sold the boat and gave the Director of steering services a large payout for making the ‘hard decisions’ and concluded they had too many management consultants and not enough managers!"

I've never found that. It's urban, but even quite a lot of that is through parkland and wooded areas. There are sometimes 'gentlemen of the road' gathered under bridges drinking cider or whatever, but you can either ignore them or say hello as you pass - they are not a problem. I hesitate to mention it, but I suspect some of the negative perceptions one hears about owe more to some people's fear of the ethnic diversity of the local populace rather than any real risks. In my experience some of the locals will ignore you completely, some watch from a distance but don't engage, others will come up for a closer look and are happy to engage in a chat, or to push on a balance beam if invited to do so. I've never had any hostility or objects thrown or anything like that in Rochdale or on the 18.

You mean a "windlad" 🤣😂