Arthur Marshall

That's one thing that really isn't worth worrying about. Yes, it happens once in a blue moon, usually to someone buying a remarkably cheap boat moored on the towpath. If the bloke selling it knows where the pump that empties the shower is and how many batteries its got, you can be fairly sure it's his. If he's got a three year old BSS certificate with his name on, you can be sure of it (though Alan will probably point out he could have run it off himself with a computer and a printer). Let's face it, you don't ask the bloke in the cake shop if it's really his cake, do you? It's just Alan scaremongering again. He likes doing that. Most people on here have bought boats, some of them quite a few over the years. No-one has been sold a stolen one yet. I bought mine on a handshake, no idea who the bloke was and nobody's come back for it yet - most of us did it like that thirty years ago.

Can't see that it would. The whole point of hiving off BW was to get the canals out of public ownership. I don't think anyone cares much about us boaters, evidence being Michael Fabricant apparently being our chief government supporter. No-one's taken him seriously for years. So licences will go up, so will unlicensed boats, the system will carry on falling to bits slowly, Parry & Co will get their bonuses, pensions and retire. I'll probably be dead by then, though, so it won't matter.

Neither the government nor the central bank changed the value of money recently. The "markets"did it. The only value money has is the confidence that it will buy a certain amount. That's a sort of consensus of all sorts of things, from what people choose to buy or not buy to government policies on all sorts of things, and whether outsiders think the people in charge of a country are competent. If the aforesaid confidence runs out, you end up buying a loaf (if you can find one) with a wheelbarrow full of fivers. It's just a handy concept, based on usefulness, and once you stop believing in it, just like when you stop believing in fairies, it stops working. And you're back to barter. This is probably a discussion for the current affairs bit, really. As far as rights go, much the same. No-one has any, really. There's just a consensus that it would be nice if people had, say, food or housing, or, for that matter, life. But not everyone believes the same.

It's no good arguing logically with people who get their truths from YouTube. It's like someone said, when people stop believing in religion, they don't suddenly become rational, they just believe any old rubbish instead.

I believe everything I see on YouTube. Everything on YouTube is true. That's why it's on YouTube. It wouldn't be true if it wasn't on YouTube. Sometimes, I get the truth from Facebook, but mostly I just watch YouTube, because everything on it is true.

Er? I have money. It goes jingle. I am a taxpayer. I write a cheque to HMRC. The Government gets it. It's taxpayer's money. An entire nation went to war for "no taxation without representation". Just because it isn't hypothecated, doesn't stop it being our money. And money doesn't originate from a government, either. It's basically a concept whose value depends purely on general confidence, over which a government, as we have recently seen, has little control.

Never thought of that. The water would still have to rise a metre up to the shower tap level though, before it could come down again. In my plumbing, anyway, so I think I'm safe, but I can see the danger. Glad you pointed it out.

Are any CRT bins emptied once a week? Once a month is more like it.

Just leave all taps on the boat open, including the cold, drop the shower head to the floor to make sure that it drains. There's no stopcock between my pump and the tank, so any water in the pump on that level just drains back to the tank. I've not had any problems over winter yet, but I don't have an accumulator or anything complicated like that! If the plumbing is plastic there's room for a bit of expansion even if it does freeze a bit of residual water, so it's unlikely to split unless there's loads in there, which there won't be. And with the taps open, it can expand along the pipes, anyway. Even if the pipes split, that's a cheap and easy repair. It's the Morco that you need to be sure of.

The debate about boaters payments is a bit irrelevant, really. Unless you're going to drain the system, there has to be maintenance of banks, sluices and locks or farmers are going to get upset when their sheep are under water and householders ditto when their cats drown. So if you're going to spend millions doing so, you might as well make most of it work properly. And get at least some of the money back from us rich suckers who like playing on it. You can argue about how much, but to maximise your income you have to take into account the law of diminishing returns. Including the taxes paid by those who work on the system, both individuals and companies. But boaters are never going to have much of a say, being either regarded as wealthy people playing with toys or "continuous cruisers" and liveaboards gaming the system How much you pay makes no odds. You don't influence government policy by paying a lot of tax, your council by living in Band H. It doesn't work like that.

I don't think it's anything to do initially with where the money comes from, I think that's the reverse of the situation - the money, rightly, should reflect the balance of the users.. Some of still think of it as British Waterways - a name in itself implying the waterways were the prime concern. It deliberately isn't for the Trust, which is why any hint of navigation was chopped from the name. Most of the BW prime users were boaters, most of the Trust's aren't, and it's fair enough, then, that the bulk of the funding should come from taxation. I doubt whether 10% of the Trust's target users are boaters, so why should we pay more?

I've just been asked to play for a ceili next year and been presented with sixty tunes I've never heard of, so my melodeon will be getting a battering after Christmas. The trouble with music on boats is it carries miles over water.

Your last paragraphs - "I wish it wasn't like that, I absolutely love the HNC and the Rochdale (and the other Northern canals mentioned), but something has to give if you don't have enough money and resources do do everything you should be doing, and these are the first canals up against the wall... 😞 I still don't think they'll be closed because of various pressures not to do so including from bodies who paid for their restoration, but unless CART get more funding -- from government and/or boaters and/or all the other funding sources -- it's difficult to see things getting any better any time soon" are exactly what some of us have been saying for twenty years. I don't think I've ever said it with glee, and all those who have already quit are saying how much they relished the life on the cut that they had. But it's not just the infrastructure decay that's changed. Over the last n years, boats (probably like yours will be) have grown huge battery banks and all sorts of electronic gadgetry, so the big difference between then (when all we had were 12v systems and one or two batteries) and now is the endless noise from engines and gennies, and the assumption by a minority that everyone shares their taste in the music blasting out from either a ghetto blaster on the hatch or giant speakers beside it. The peace and quiet that lots of us, both liveaboards and holidayers, came on for has mostly gone. Even the traffic noise has doubled in volume - it's rare you can ever find silence now. Funding can't change that. I had a trip up the Llangollen that nearly made me decide to pack it in two years ago, simply because of the appalling behaviour of other boaters. New boaters won't notice of course (it'll be the norm), and those like yourself (I think) whose experience is just of hiring won't experience this until you start spending more time on the cut. It's still nice, but it aint what it was, and it's not why we came on in the first place any more. Sometimes these days, it's a relief to get off the boat, get in the car and go home. I never said that even ten years ago.

I think the fifteen or more non moving boats on my mooring keep it in business! They're no bother to the farmer and keep the money rolling in.

Can you actually fit two permanent bedrooms and a bathroom (presumably with a bath) in a sixty footer and still have room for a kichen and somewhere for several people to sit in comfort and watch the telly? The cruiser stern will knock ten foot off the cabin, say five at the pointy end, 45 foot at most to play with. I'm used to small boats so I'd be interested in the answer. I think a piece of graph paper and a pencil is required here.

I certainly don't treat them with disdain. There are often perfectly good reasons for them not venturing out. Some simply like somewhere nice to go on a summer afternoon. My point is that they have no reason to care deeply about the state of the canals, and, in fact, won't even be aware of it. That's all.

I think they're probably quite appalled at the state they're in at the moment, what with towns being flooded when embankents collapse and being evacuated in fear of reservoirs going the same way. But I don't think a few thousand boaters paying three times their current fees would make a great deal of difference, any more than whacking council tax up by thirty percent would get the potholes in your road fixed. It's down to what bits of infrastructure a government thinks is worth splurging taxpayers' resentfully contributed money on. Neither roads nor canals are going to make a profit in themselves, you have to consider the service they provide. And, like it or not, the bulk of the service users of the canals are walkers, cyclists, fishermen and dogs looking for a toilet (ie, apart from the last, taxpayers). The majority of boaters that go out at all, go out for a fortnight a year, and most of those either only go a few miles or go round a ring. They don't care about the rest of it. The majority of boaters on my mooring don't care at all because they haven't moved off the mooring for years. I think there are 3 that are away for more than three weeks in a year. Some of us have seen this coming for twenty years, and many of us have tried to get some action. We haven't just whinged on here. You can see how successful we've been. The only way to get it funded properly is to use it for relatively cheap city housing and charge accordingly.

I don't think mine's a Springer. It's been mistaken for one before but while I have no idea who built it, the shape doesn't quite fit, and it's flat bottomed. And I agree you have to include static boatlivers, dumpers and anyone who steps regularly onto one as a boater.

Where's the fun in that?