Peter X

This leads me to wonder; if as part of their conservation efforts CRT kill Canada Geese, could they perhaps make a bit of income from them, e.g. sell them to the restaurant trade? Or get some small food business to process the birds into portions for the supermarkets? As these birds are both vermin, and tasty if correctly prepared, if there's a cost-effective way to hunt them someone is missing a business opportunity here.

Don't worry, you are not alone... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4799157/Damp-Squid-The-top-10-misquoted-phrases-in-Britain.html

Am I missing something here? Your friend is taking a raft from Dartmouth to near Inverness??? Is it the British version of the Kon-Tiki? I hope he does have a safe trip, but according to my limited knowledge of the sea he won't unless he really knows what he's doing.

My apologies, I try to choose my words carefully and here I slipped up. I used duffer, which covers incompetence and perhaps laziness, when what I needed was a word encompassing all the various other ways in which people fail to do their jobs properly. Even now I can't think of the right word, except that I could have just used "people".

I think Richard T was getting Cockney rhyming slang wrong. Brahms means drunk as in Brahms & Liszt = pissed, but he appears to be using it to mean list. Personally I don't use it much being from south of the river, although my grandfather was born in Bermondsey and his father in Bethnal Green, so I probably picked up a few words through my father. Or by watching Minder!

Everyone who's paid by the hour or any other period of time, whether they be a surgeon or a street cleaner, is indirectly financially involved in doing a good job in the long run, because someone is watching how they do and that can affect their future earnings. A surgeon wants to achieve the best possible outcomes for patients partly for the job satisfaction that gives, but also for the very pragmatic reason that it helps his/her career. Conversely if too many patients do badly the GMC will take notice and that career could come to an end. If a street cleaner doesn't do the job, sooner or later a supervisor is going to realise it and they can lose the job. Sadly in all walks of life there are duffers doing their jobs badly who get away with it, often for a long time, but they all run the risk that someone will rumble them, and it does happen. The trouble at senior management level, not just in government quangos, is that all too often the duffers are in a position to cover up their failings, and have somehow got deals where if they're sacked for failure they get paid lots of money to go away. I'm not necessarily saying that this applies to people in BW/CRT, because I don't know, but if I were Richard Parry I'd want to know how Pillings Lock got away with non-payment for so long.

CRT should get along OK for a while because the current deal is that they get payments from the government up to about 2020 I think? If the standard of management is poor, and/or the government of the day in 2020 is unwilling to continue financial support, I suppose that rather than actually going bust CRT will just spend less in order to balance its budget. A charity can borrow money if someone is willing to lend, but unless there is a genuine expectation of future income to pay off a loan, that just postpones a problem; look at Greece. Unfortunately if CRT cuts spending to avoid going bust, that could result in further loss of income, e.g. if lack of maintenance means that important places become impassable this might discourage boaters to the point that licence income declines. The least bad option for a CEO of CRT faced with having to wield the axe would probably be the Dr Beeching option, to close a few parts of the system where the ratio of maintainance costs to income produced is highest, in order to be able to save the rest. In practice I don't think this sort of doomsday scenario will happen in the end, ultimately because the general public likes the canals and if a government watches while they crumble away it will get some flak from the press. Of course the future of the canals is just one issue among many, but it's all part of how people see politics.

Quite often a lot of the journey time is getting across London, e.g your barrister friend was presumably going to Temple, so something like Ealing Broadway to Paddington, Bakerloo line to Embankment then the Circle/District along. Even from Grantham he'd have to cover over a mile from Kings Cross. People often try to live on the right side of London for where they're going, e.g. Essex for the City, but of course lots of other factors come into it; friends and family, type of housing, future plans etc. I chose my part of Croydon for a combination of these reasons, and perhaps your friend did too.

It's important to do both, because a spambot could use either a link or non-obfuscated text. If they don't already, I'm sure they will as the spammers will be working to make their programs more sophisticated. For this reason, it's also a good idea to be inventive when altering an email address in case they start detecting common things like AT.

Definitely not. There are programs out there which wander automatically around the Internet recognising and storing email addresses from all kinds of webpages including forum topics, and lists of these are then circulated and used for sending spam. Once an email address gets onto these lists it won't come off; most Internet providers put a lot of effort into trying to spot and block the automated spam but some will get through. If you want to make your email address public but for actual people only, it just needs to be disguised enough that the dumb programs can't spot it. I suggest you separate the parts and disguise the @ symbol which the programs will be looking for, e.g. myemail {AT} yahoo.com should fool them.

Having done quite a bit of punting years ago, I reckon a punt pole would be a useful general purpose implement on a narrow boat. For those who've not used one, it's a 17ft pole of about 2" diameter, with an S-shaped hook on the end. Being designed for punting, its main purpose is to push against the river bed at varying depths, with a little sideways movement at the end of the stroke to help adjust course. However the S shape hook makes it very useful for pushing and pulling anything on the bank. With a pole that long you do have to think what you're doing when around bridges; I've seen one splintered apart when a dozy friend of mine poling downstream on the Cherwell caught the top end in the ironwork of a footbridge and pulled against the bottom end to stop the punt drifting on under him. Basically you don't want to be using one as a lever, especially on a heavy vessel like a narrow boat, but it would be a very handy thing for someone at the bow to have when turning.

It's not grim up north, it's busy because today you have the nicer weather. Here in Croydon it's overcast and raining gently.

Brentford to Paddington is actually zones 2-4, with the Bulls Bridge junction on the boundary of zones 4 and 5: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf It might be different among boaters, but I've always detected an attitude among people who live in central London that the higher your zone number the more you're roughing it, that living in the suburbs is boring and they can't be asked to spend another 20 minutes each way travelling to work. The difference in property prices between say Battersea and Croydon is insane, especially from the point of view of someone such as myself who likes a good size garden. I've read that some of the canals in West London are rather industrial looking and unattractive, but if it's much easier to moor there it wouldn't surprise me if they start to fill up a bit with commuters. Crossrail might make this a more attractive proposition when it opens?

They recovered various other bits from the Lutine too, not just the bell; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Lutine_(1779) What puzzles me a bit is why, after it had been renamed HMS Lutine, does the Dutch engraving depicting its subsequent wreck show the original French "La Lutine" on the stern? Wouldn't the Royal Navy have made a point of re-doing that?