Peter X

I offer here a quotation from http://www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk/copyright/ ... and am fairly confident that doing this does not place me in breach of copyright law! MYTH: "I received it in an email - so I can use it." To have a copy is not to have the copyright. Technically even the text in e-mails you receive (or write) are all copyrighted to the original author. You are committing an offence by forwarding or extracting this information. But in reality if someone tries to sue over an ordinary message that has no commercial value, they would be unlikely to succeed, but you should always ask first. Phil Spencer's e-mail has no commercial value, in that he could not hope to argue that someone would wish to buy it. In theory he could publish a book of memoirs at some point in the future and use the e-mail in it, but I think a judge would take a cynical view of that idea. As others have suggested, I think NBW are just giving an excuse not to publish, and that if you send an e-mail to lots of boat owners and particularly to various waterways magazines (whether paper or Internet or any other media) there is a clear implication that there is permission to publish. If you write a letter to a newspaper, they surely won't feel the need to contact you before publication unless you specifically ask them to.

Motorbikes? Haven't a clue, someone else can answer that. 750LLtd and PLT are both the new QMP, in that QMH owns 750LLtd which owns PLT which owns the freehold of the marina. PLT is not (yet anyway) the new PLM because PLT so far just owns the marina and is hoping (in PL's fantasy world) to get a NAA. Nothing has yet been said to indicate that PLT will be doing anything else, e.g. hiring out moorings, running the café, or any other activity in the marina; that's still done by PLM. QMH is the same as it ever was, letting the days go by. Except that it no longer owns QMP which is still being liquidated, but does own 750LLtd. QMH doesn't have Talking Heads; its head says nothing and the minority shareholder talks out of another part of his anatomy.

I felt a little sorry for Tim & Pru in the latest episode on the Llangollen as they chugged across that first aqueduct in the pouring rain, both standing out on the stern deck with their guest for the benefit of the filming schedule. Only a little sorry because I'm sure they knew what they'd signed up for, and they were out on a boat while I was on land. If that had been me on my brother's boat, we'd have moored up and waited inside for the rain to ease off. Or if we were short of time and needed to keep going, he'd be out in the weather steering, with me in the warm dry galley making tea etc. That's one of the advantages of being crew. No doubt the working boatmen kept going through any weather unless progress became impossible, but the point of leisure boating is to enjoy it. When I was a boy I had an O gauge train set then moved on to OO gauge; my children went from the big "Duplo" bricks to normal Lego, and my grandson's Lego seems to include lots of very tiny pieces. Toys are getting smaller!

I wonder what other companies, directly or more likely indirectly, Mr Steadman is a majority shareholder of, and I would be nervous if I were a creditor of any of them. Castles made of sand seems to be his business model.

This latest development adds to my feeling that Mr Steadman doesn't know what he is doing. Having got the freehold back from the IP, he hands it to PLT (director RR), which is owned by 750LLtd (director RR), itself owned by QMH (director PL but 75% owned by Steadman and 25% by PL). What a pointless complicated mess, with PL still lurking in the background, a man whose presence will not be helpful to the cause of getting a NAA. Note that we're only told that PLT is the new owner of the marina, not that it is the operator. PLM might be on the verge of going broke, but it seems to be the operator for the time being. If as I believe, the rights and obligations of leases automatically transfer to a new freeholder, then the QMP 20 (the long term leaseholders) can expect PLT to provide them with any access to the network specified in the original leases, and sue PLT if that access is not provided? Similarly, the cheap-as-chips long term lease which I suspect PLM holds for the marina would still exist, and if PLM were to be liquidated its IP would demand that PLT provide access to the network? Logically, although of course this is Pillings Lock we're talking about, PLM's lease would contain this obligation. All of which suggests to me that the newly formed PLT is already in deep trouble. It desperately needs a NAA pronto, but even when the Stamp Duty and documentation has been sorted out so that RR can get a meeting with the CRT, he then meets Phil "Show Me The Money" Spencer, who will not be at all desperate to grant a NAA.

I've been growing various fruit, veg and herbs in my garden off and on for years with reasonable success, but I never bother with all that technical stuff really, that's for the professionals. Most plants do pretty well in ordinary soil; I just get rid of stones, rubbish and weed roots, especially in the narrow strip I'm sowing seeds in. Potting compost is helpful to get seeds started, and mixing in lots of garden compost is a good idea before growing certain crops e.g. potatoes and marrows (both too large for a canal boat roof!) which like a rich soil. Herbs are Mediterranean plants which like warmth, so you may do better with them on the K&A than up north. They're fairly drought resistant; I have a lot of lavender in my garden which thrives although I never water it, but in a planter on a boat roof you'll need to. I would just water a little when there's dry weather, hardly at all in winter, and aim to keep the soil damp but not soaked. Definitely have some drainage, most plants don't like their roots sitting in water, and herbs in particular. Unless you're somewhere polluted, canal or river water is probably better for your plants than tap water I would think; it'll have some nice nutrients? When I did punting at Oxford, people used to say that if you fell into the Cherwell it was important not to drink the water because it contained a lot of excess fertiliser run-off from fields. Don't know whether that was true though.

I'm not so sure that Mr Steadman is that clever. He clearly has some money from somewhere but did he make it himself, and even then did he just get lucky? He was bright enough to set up the triumvirate in such a way that he ended up getting the freehold back and not being a director of a failed company, and via his 75% of QMH and QMH's 100% ownership of PLM he effectively owns the marina and "bistro" too. But in the end what has that arrangement achieved? If he'd just owned 100% of a single company, with a proper director capable of running a sane marina paying its NAA fees, and that company held the freehold on a mortgage to Mr Steadman, his interests would still be protected and surely he'd be doing better by now out of that without all the hassle? It looks to me as if he saw that John Lillie had the technical knowledge to build a marina, but didn't see PL's inability to get along with people and lack of business sense, and now can't bring himself to accept that he got that appointment wrong. That's probably the only hold PL has over him. As MtB says, Steadman may yet turn out to have some long-term plan we can't see, but I doubt it. There appears to be little or no possibility of a housing development either getting planning permission or being financially viable on land prone to flooding, so his best prospect is to continue as a marina. All the smoke signals coming from CRT suggest that 750LLtd is not getting far in its quest for a NAA and won't until Steadman dances to Phil Spencer's tune. The precise details of the tune have not been revealed, and there might be something in the Leicester Canal Act 1791, or the judicial review procedure, to stop CRT putting a price tag on the NAA as I'd hoped, but we do know CRT will make sure 750LLtd or any other vehicle owning the site will have to pay NAA fees from now on. So Steadman's best option from where he is now must be to dump PL as a liability, put in a proper manager, as he should have in the first place, to tidy up the mess, and pocket a modest return on his investment as the marina recovers. Just seen AndrewIC's post; I wonder if PLT, as I suppose we should call it, is a Roy-Rollings free replacement for 750LLtd, created to pave the way for a deal with CRT? This is of course, just an educated guess.

The technology no doubt exists for a boat to write its own log and even have a little screen to show all sorts of handy info about water and battery levels, imminent need for pump-out etc., with this information also being put on the Internet complete with a webcam to record anyone breaking in. But I suppose the potential market wouldn't justify the hardware and software development required for such overkill. Old technology is usually more fun though. If I had a boat and were a CC'er I'd pad the log out with all sorts of extraneous observations and decoration, just so that any CRT inspector would feel that filtering it to evaluating my boat's movements was too much like hard work.

This is a bit of a tricky one I think. As you've subsequently said your lease is with QMP. Any costs arising from a claim against QMP being struck out would be owed to the IP, and I'd expect the IP to be trying to collect the money, he has a duty to. However (1) you included PLM on the claim form, so perhaps the order for costs would include some costs incurred by PLM, and (2) if the nature of your claim (about electricity over-charging wasn't it?) meant that the real defendant was PLM, again we might be talking about costs incurred by PLM. There's a very true old saying that justice delayed is justice denied, but you might be able to make this work for you; if you stall PLM for long enough, they might not have the money to pursue you, or they might forget about these costs while focussing on the much bigger problem of a blockaded marina.

A couple of thoughts on this: (1) CanalPlan is much more seasonal, to be expected because more journeys will be planned in better weather. Conversely CWDF is steady all year because them as can't go boating talks about it (including me). (2) If, and I do hope so, there is another series of Great Canal Journeys, could the intrepid duo please be sent around some of the least-used parts of the network to generate interest in those? Definitely not central London. Samuel Johnson's famous saying about London was wrong; I say anyone who is tired of London has spent long enough there to understand that Croydon is nicer and far, far cheaper.

The chance of some plan was remote When they tried to rescue that boat. If they'd given some thought To the need to support The bow it would now be afloat

This is the great thing about this forum, there's always someone with some real knowledge of a subject. It certainly chimes with my experience of using the railways to say that we need more capacity, although a lot of that experience is on the suburban lines into London in rush hour, where it's hard to see how extra capacity can be created. Having said that, projects like Crossrail are helpful in that they postpone the day when the roads in London seize up altogether. You could build a new Underground line almost anywhere in London and it would fill up with people. People said 15 years ago that Croydon Tramlink would be a waste of money but it's a victim of its own success, frequently overcrowded. While London needs more railways to enable it to get on with what it does best, generating money for the Treasury, the UK also needs the North to prosper doing what it does best, making things. The government (and opposition too it seems) appear to have reached the conclusion that HS2 is the best answer, and there certainly appears to be a need for more rail capacity along its route, but does that extra capacity really have to cost so much? I wonder whether a number of smaller ideas put together might be better value, for example: If there are bottlenecks on existing lines going north out of London, would a bit of extra track or other minor works make it possible to run more trains? Would longer trains be part of the answer? I think these have been introduced successfully on some commuter lines in recent years, making it possible for example to squeeze more passengers per hour through the bottleneck of the lines into London Bridge. Why the emphasis on top speed, when the distances are not so great? Back in 1991-93 I used to commute out via Paddington to Reading, and it seemed that the train took many miles at each end getting up to top speed and slowing down again. And all too often it had to slow down in between due to some problem or other on the line. I suspect that money spent on signalling, track maintenance and line side security is unglamorous but effective? Then of course there's the idea that business people should use Skype etc. more. The technology has its uses up to a point, but sometimes a face to face meeting really is best. Having said which, big organisations are very over-fond of holding unnecessary meetings. I've been in a lot of these where I've come out thinking "that was a boring hour I could have spent doing my real job". I also wonder what infrastructure improvements businesses in the North think would most benefit them? Do they see better rail links to London as a priority, or are they more bothered about getting through trains to Ashford and Europe?

I see what you're doing, but you must have puzzled a few people who don't know French. For those interested, Moi is the French for "me" or "to me", or in grammatical terminology the accusative or dative case of the pronoun "I". Tree's combination of this and other evidently deliberately bad English does make her posts more difficult to read, but it takes all sorts to make a world and she doesn't seem to be trying to offend people, so good luck to her. Although I count myself well educated, I'm determined not to join the spelling and grammar police. The policy I try to follow is that I'll only comment on it if someone's asking, or if something posted needs its meaning clarified, and even then it's important to be tactful. Most posts on the forum have something worth saying, but many of them are in less than perfect English, and I really don't want to be discouraging the authors. Text speak does really irritate me except when used in a text message, to the extent that on the rare occasion that I send a text message I spell words in full. I only send them rarely, but that's more because it's such hard work to type anything on a teensy Blackberry keyboard and I never use all my monthly call minutes. But if someone is lazy enough to post to the forum in text speak I can always just ignore it, it's not worth complaining about.