oarfish

Anything that will take an external antenna should do the job, I used a few while dodging 3's device detection before they completely ruined the one plan.

Were I given full house purchase capital.. nowadays I would probably buy a yacht and up the frequency of my sailing lessons. Living on a boat certainly costs me more money (mostly due to commuting / hotel stays for clients) but I got to spend the last 2 summers buggering about on the Thames and will be CCing the Northwest / Wales / over the Pennines next year. It's very much worth the few inconveniences you have in a reasonably equipped boat. A lot of people do seem have a romantic desire to live on a boat, but the practicalities of their day to day lives means this very rarely happens.

CCing the Thames is great fun in summer, if you don't mind coughing up mooring fees. A few bankside councils have been kicking off with the floating shanty towns, so it might get a lot more difficult to stay anywhere longer than a couple of days soon. Oxford has been like this for a while due to the over-reaction of the authorities to people taking the piss. We had marina places for the last 3 years but barely spent any time in them except for Dec-March. > I love my job, but if I could manage a half day on a Friday we'd have so much more freedom to go explore! I try to get at least Monday or Friday working from home, it makes cruising life so much easier. I would definitely want to be tucked up in a marina or off the river in winter though, it gets pretty nasty out there.

This advert on Gumtree http://www.gumtree.com/p/1-bedroom-rent/looking-for-accommodation-and-a-unique-experience-have-you-considered-living-on-a-narrowboat-/1084053161 is a fine example. £1200 PCM in a reasonably new looking boat. This isn't some of the desperate poverty / chaotic lifestyle stuff that happens on the canal in London, this is well off middle class people knowingly taking the piss. Probably off somewhere sunny for the winter. I don't think it would bother me much if it wasn't for the fact it's CC in central London and they are trying to cash in on an increasingly bad situation.

I was considering those this year, but figured we might as well keep moving. There's a fair few miles round there without locks, all nice and commutable to Manchester.

The dishes are big if you want decent bandwidth, unless things changed recently?

Yachting is a sausage fest. I think it's a little more evenly distributed gender wise on the canal but the age distribution looks about right - at least outside of urban areas.

Same, also took a bit of pestering. They do offer it in store if you are VAT registered etc. Other than their messing up the block list things have mostly been fine out in the sticks and in towns. It's close to satellite prices, but at least there's no Jodrell bank sized dish to deal with.

Software development, but only work 2 days a week from the boat with my current client unfortunately.

EE is about the only suppler now if you need serious internet from a router not a phone, and it's not cheap if you want more than 20GB a month.

If you are not on a mooring, best give up on the idea of a fridge unless you like the sound of your generator / engine. Find out how old the batteries are, or get your surveyor to check them. Best to assume you will have to replace them in a year or so anyway. Does the boat already have an invertor or is it 12V only? Running domestic appliances needs posh electrics.

The only non milspec fuel cells currently available need either methanol or hydrogen. Neither of which are good things to be carrying about and acquiring on a boat. Diesel fuel cells do exist, but are not on the consumer market yet. There are a couple of startups messing about with butane fuel cells too, but they are aiming for very low power demands like phone / laptop charging.

Real ale drinking, Morris dancing, birdwatching and rural life in general are 'unrepresentative' of national demographics; not just narrowboating. It's a self selecting lifestyle / hobby, I'm not sure beating ourselves up about it is useful.

Portholes do the job. You can easily remove the glass to get more airflow in summer and clean off the inevitable spider poop. Porthole bungs keep you warm in winter and provide privacy and sound insulation. Unless the local scroats have trained monkeys or a midget contortionist they won't be getting in by forcing a window. Also they look more boaty.

I bump into this too, while paying through the bloody nose on a business account. It seemed to only happen in some areas. You can only assume that until this recent colossal screwup the cost to their reputation of having intermittent local blocks (often of general social media content) was less than the potential cost of mumsnet offspring seeing a pair of breasts and complaining to the media.

After putting solar through our mastervolt via a tracer MPPT the amp counter seems to be even more inaccurate than usual. I assume this is something to do with the sampling rate being too low for the noisy solar. Other than that it all seems to work fine.

I prefer my isolated towpath scratty and wild looking to the overly manicured front lawn look. Nobody complains about it on the river.

48, just moved up north a bit. The bank further up is very poor holding when its wet.

3 one plan (even on the old contract) now uses some sort of IMEI database to enforce the 'phone only' bit of the contract. I used an obscure 3G router for years on the one plan until one day it was blocked. The only viable mobile contacts for high use internet I could find now are on EE business and are not cheap.

Have a 25 KG anchor and 10m of chain and it's fairly comical amount of metal to have lying about in the front of your boat. Could possibly chuck it overboard without injury but there's no way in hell it's ever coming back up.

Getting a bit busy round there though, what with the drum circle on the Island. At least the towpath didn't resemble Kensal levels of dumped boater rubbish like last year. Henley's ticket machine no longer lets you pay for mooring, and collection is sporadic outside of festival time. Maidenhead also pretty irregular now. Was amazed to have someone collect a fee in from an island at Cookham in July.

6 street robberies and a home invasion makes me a little prickly about the subject. Never had anything major happen while cruising around northwest and London. Apologies for any excessive sniping.

Snip

I was a resident. I believe the modern terminology would be 'lived experience'. I don't take low level harassment and intimidation from scroats lightly, having been the victim of several violent robberies that started off like that while living in Manchester over the years. There was no way in hell I would be walking back to my boat from work there. DeanS has a pretty high level of optimism. You gentrify an area by moving the lumpenproletariat out, not giving them things to play with.

Was this actually on the Ashton, or New Islington marina on the Rochdale? We lasted about 2 weeks at that marina before buggering off. Not a big fan of marinas in the first place, but the natives were already pretty threatening (spitting, trying to tailgate me) even before it opened. I can't imagine it's much better now. You can't just stick a water feature full of people living an alternative lifestyle in vulnerable boats and a couple of arty tower blocks near one of the roughest places in the country and expect it to magically gentrify. It has a lovely view of the methadone pharmacy and Argos. Felt safer in East London.