Peter X

RiverRo, I'm not sure if this will delay you, best to check before you book a flight whether the canal will be open: https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/notices/16159-grand-union-regents-and-hertford-union-canals Essentially, it appears that as of Monday 16th the long Paddington Arm pound was so short of water that the locks leading down from it, i.e. GU lock 90 (top of the Hanwell flight) and the Hampstead Road locks you need, are closed until further notice. Does anyone have more up to date information about this closure; whether it's still so and when it's likely to end?

Insurers are generally fine so long as the owner is present, and are used to covering new owners who may have little or no boating experience, and don't specify what your crew must know. So if doing this trip with someone else as crew to assist, while it's best if they do have prior boating experience, any old friend is better than going single handed. If you hire a professional boat mover, I think they will be qualified and have their own insurance. As the boat has a working engine, no need to tow it, that probably would ring alarm bells with insurers! If you do have to tow it, whoever steers each boat should know what they're doing, and you should be towing on cross straps or maybe a short line between the locks most of the way.

I have a rechargeable LED torch with various brightness settings and rarely go boating without it. Not only a backup tunnel lamp (magnetic, so just place it on the steel facing forwards to suit the steerer), but good for walking a dark towpath or seeing into odd corners of a boat, or when under working boat covers in the dark.

One more thought: you will be popular on this forum because you're actually removing a boat from London! Novel idea.

Quote from another item on the BBC site: "A 66-year-old man was arrested on Saturday in connection with the theft, Thames Valley Police said." Sounds like a boater to me. Another topic on this subject, started later but has a lot more posts so far:

An appropriate playlist for the weekends, but not what you'd want to hear: Elton John: Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting Sham 69: Sunday Morning Nightmare Boomtown Rats: I don't like Mondays

This is the kind of thing that I sometimes help people with as a hobby, not professionally. I do it on the basis that the owner is aboard, I just get food and lodging for the trip, and while I know how to steer a boat and operate locks, and do my best to assist in resolving any problems encountered, I don't have much technical knowledge and make no promises that I can fix anything. A professional boat mover will normally be able to do most simple repairs. The bad news is that I'm too busy at the moment even to offer to do this short trip, mostly because I'm going away boating for two weeks soon. I have a small wine harvest to do soon too. But I can offer some comments which I hope are helpful: From King's Cross to P&S Marine two days should be plenty; four locks in the first couple of miles, then the long pound of the Paddington Arm, turn right at Bulls Bridge junction, stop overnight maybe somewhere around West Drayton, and I think it's 11 locks up to Watford on day two. Plenty of room in all the locks for your boat, and my guess is the engine will have adequate power, you're not going via the river. If you're new to canal boating it's a good idea to have someone to turn up and teach you the basics on the first day, I hope maybe someone else off the forum could offer ? If they just accompany you for the first three hours or so to Little Venice that covers the four locks and the (short) Maida Hill tunnel. But if not, I suggest you download and read the boater's guide on the CRT website, try to make sure your engine is in working order and you have basic equipment such as windlass (and spare!), lines, mooring items etc., then just go for it. If you meet other boaters at locks you'll find they're usually happy to answer questions, show you what to do, etc.

Just a few miles west of Thrupp, a solid gold (thus very heavy) toilet goes missing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-49700620 Putting two and two together to make five, we have the topic title. I notice that it's a work of art, but if so it's not original. In 1991 the US Army found one in Saddam Hussain's palace in Baghdad, with documentation that it had been made in Spain, which made me wonder at the time how a goldsmith would go about the job. I guess it would involve making a very big strong mould in several pieces, designed to break apart after casting; maybe a clay mould in a wooden framework? Correction, not that it matters a lot here but I think my chronology is wrong. 1991 was the first Gulf War, I think it was much later the Americans turned up in Baghdad.

Billy Ray Cyrus: Achy Breaky Heart

It seems that while plenty of shops do sell trousers (usually jeans) with ready made holes in them, the youngsters are learning new (useless) skills by making their own holes. This is a real webpage, amazingly: https://www.wikihow.com/Cut-Knee-Holes-in-Jeans

Wikipedia tells us that the estimated distance has been revised upwards to 124 light years, but it gets worse. That's in our Earthling light years, but the planet goes round its star (K2-18, these astronomers are working to a pattern here I think) in 33 of our days, so I reckon the journey here is about 1372 of their light years. Good luck chaps. And apart from all that water vapour, their atmosphere is thought to be mostly hydrogen/helium, so I'm not sure how they'd cope with our nitrogen, oxygen etc. when they get here.

I think I can suggest just the person to solve this problem... step forward (carefully in those) the Duchess of Sussex! Not only will plenty of people buy anything she's been seen wearing, but I've seen one of her old films in which she played the owner of a sports goods company, one of whose employees had bungled making footballs for a customer in Argentina by making those oval American footballs instead. Her character promptly identified a US college football team that played in the same colours and sold the batch to them. Good work, Meghan.

Did NASA include the obvious choice, released just before the Voyager launches I think?: Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, by the Carpenters