Arthur Marshall

I met him last year or so bringing a boat up from Stone to Middlewich for someone. Year before he'd been booked to take someone's boat down to the Nene. I remember him as a young lad just starting out - he's a lot better at winding you up slow these days!

If you can track down Rob the Lock, who wanders about on his bike round the locks through Stoke generally being a helpful and useful person, he's been known to work all the locks up to Middlewich for people before now. Slipping him a bob or two doesn't go amiss - keeping his bike up to scratch costs him a fair whack - but he never in my experience has asked for money for anyone.

Or nip up the Macc to Heritage Marina.

It's as likely to exacerbate tribalism and exclusion, which is the current trend.

I'm 70 in a week or two and don't have any problems really. I don't live on board any more, but do try and get away for a couple of months at a time. The only that may finish me with narrowboats is if the current engine repair fails - I can't afford another major cost after this one. But I should be able to afford a smaller & therefore cheaper cruiser...

OK, so my physics lessons were a long time ago...

I don't think it does, does it? If I remember my physics, it displaces the volume of the submerged bit, not the weight. That's how old Archy of bath fame got the volume of the crown, he could then check that volume against the equivalent of gold and lead, and the weight differences told him what the sparkly thing was made of. I think.

I would presume that if this did ever happen, the personal tax allowance would be adjusted to the same amount. So anyone earning more would pay tax which would reduce the amount of benefit accordingly. You would also be able to scrap tax credits as well as a lot of the benefit system and save a fortune in admin. If at the same time you imposed rent controls, simplified the income tax system to almost zero and slung it all onto indirect taxes, which can't be avoided, and you'd get rid of most of the civil service too... But maybe this should now be in the politics bit!

You mean crops wouldn't be left to rot as they are this year? There might be people to staff care homes for salaries Britons won't tolerate? That sort of bankruptcy. The comparison with the wages in other countries is irrelevant - the cost of living would be comparatively less there too, so you have to balance it against the cost of living here. And the odd fact is that a considerable quantity of Europeans prefer to stay in their own countries rather than put up with the treatment they get from the population of this one.

That's all right then! Not being argumentative, but there is no such thing as a grammatical imperfection, as there are no rules of grammar, merely custom and usage. Sometime a slightly odd phrase can be used deliberately for effect - I confess to having been a bit sarcastic, for which I apologise. And you are if course right, all boats behave differently and how one does should be taken into account when passing others.

Precisely, so why start an argument when I implied I went past moored boats at the same speed you apparently do? I've been past Golden Nook often enough to know how long it takes - I used to more near Ellesmere Port. And why, also, assume that no one else has a fishlike hull? I realise that you believe your boat is more perfect than anyone else's , but this may in fact not be the case. And even at a sensible speed, above tickover but not enough to make well moored boats bash into each other (and, for that matter, badly tied up ones too, because I care about them as well, which you rather appear not to), it still takes about an hour to get past Golden Nook. Which, however much you love boating, is very, very boring , especially when you realise you're going to do it all over again on the way back... PS the thing about not well tied up boats is that some owners only get to their boats every few months, so they get a bit loose. You have to be a bit tolerant about these things, however out of character it may seem.

Less than half an hour for over a mile of moorings? You're actually going faster on tickover than I go past them on slow drive! You must get sworn at a lot... Can't make many friends at that speed. Only other explanation I can think of is that you actually moor there, somewhere in the middle, so you only ever have to go past half the line! And no, I've always moored at farms (which is what Golden Nook is, by the way), so how could I be different? GN is an aberration, there historically but both BW & CRT have intimated such a huge online mooring would not be allowed now. I like seeing the boats as I potter past, but one endless line of parked boats after another is, I'm afraid, a pain in the posterior. I like cruising and so does my engine. The odd line of ten or fifteen is a pleasure. I don't mind the ones at the bottom of the Shroppie, by the way,but it's always a relief to get past them. The ones that are a bit annoying are the online marina moorings, when not only do they rake their money in from the offline ones, but then they also clog the system up with a mile of online, I presume at a slightly lower price. Two and a half mph. Faster than I'd go.

On my farm mooring we pay mooring permits rather than the landowner. Golden Nook is one reason I was glad to leave my previous mooring on the Shroppie. I admit that my speed increases as I go past them, muttering about springs as I go. In my opinion, noone who moors in such a place has any right to complain if boats go past at a sensible two and a bit mile an hour. Tickover would be ridiculous, would take a day to get past them. Horrible mooring. Have heard CRT wouldn't allow it now, though the bottom of the Shroppie is nearly as bad. Shame, cos it's a lovely canal apart from the boats.

Re the T&M, if it's winter timetablefor the Harecastle Tunnel you have to phone up to book passage and only open a couple of days a week.

Looks fairly obvious, the mooring where the post is, is for services, and there's a one day mooring to the right. It should be plain where, if you moor, you're going to obstruct those who want water, so avoid it. What one day is, is a matter of conjecture. It could be two nights and a day in between if you get there later and leave early, or it could be 24 hours from when you arrive. Noone knows and both are arguable.

You mean we'd be able to staff the NHS, get the fruit picked, have a care system for the elderly that worked, and stuff like that? Truly a terrifying prospect.

We're not really often unpleasant to anyone, unless they're unpleasant to us first!

Contrast that with when they came out first I had trouble with loading them onto my particular android thing and he sent me a load of rewritten stuff to try to get it working. Plus he offered upgrades for life, which all went by the board when RCR took it over. I'm really not sure why they bought them. I suppose he got a fair return for them. Bit like the old CanalPlanner, which was great but you couldn't move it from on computer to another.

Something like a trombone cleaning snake, which is a long flexible bit of springy steel with a brush on the end, might get round the corners and the edges be rough enough to clean round the end of the pipe. Doesn't work on mine unfortunately as I've got two right angle bends in the pipe and it rebels at the second one.

My tank is the front end of the boat so does suffer from a bit of rust, most falling off the underside of the deck. But the end of the pipe does rust up too, and I have to get in there ever few years and attack it with a screwdriver to open it up again. Luckily the hatch is big enough to get through, but it's still claustrophobic down there.

The guy who wrote the original maps was really helpful. Last time I had a problem, after RCR took them over, I found them uninterested, probably because they aren't computer bods. Be good to know how you get on with them.

Might even out the costs a bit, too.

Have you tried downloading /reinstalling again? I don't know how Apple stuff works, but on Android you get the basic bit of the program as an .APK file which if you rerun it, reinstalls the map data.