magpie patrick

bear in mind 1) you have to manage a boat and a six year old. I'd caution against the L and L or any canal with too many locks for this reason (the L and L locks are heavy and wide) unless you have three adults on board. 2) Six year olds want six year old activities, and stopping in a village to play in the local park usually goes down a treat 3) they won't enjoy what you expect and you will see the world through new eyes afterwards. Slightly off topic, but when I took a friends six year old to a rugby match, he was excited at seeing "the ball kicked through the big H" but what really made an imprsssion was the disembodied voice from the tannoy and the floodlights.

They are not Brindley's, he built the basins with just the two large locks, as no one in their right mind would take a horse dran narrow boat onto the Severn before it's locks were built. They have another snag too, I single handed down them and you need to get the lower locks ready before you can leave the upper ones. Not a problem in itself but the corollary of that is you need to get the boat into the lower locks before you can go back and close the gates on the upper ones. A boat following you can't easily see the bottom gates of the upper locks are open because of the bridge, and by the time I'd got back they'd started emptying the upper lock...

I'd take issue with that, research by Newcastle University in the early nineties indicated anything up to a 20% premium, and as 20% premiums don't appear overnight I think it's safe to assume there had been some hike in the value long before. Probably from the early seventies although even in the 1960s developers were building houses that backed onto canals and were not putting fences up, so at the very least it was a selling point.

Sadly, after so much talk, we won't be there, Val has come to the top of the waiting list for a minor but important operation, now scheduled for May 6th, and it was only a moments thought to say postpone our holiday. We'd love to meet you all, so please keep us posted on future events. We're still going to the Upton Folk Festival by boat, getting the boat back on May 5th

The locks on the C and H should take a 57 footer at full beam which means the 60 foot narrow boats have got through. However one lock on the Huddersfield Broad Canal (Sir John Ramsdens Canal) is said to be very short When I considered taking Ripple through a few years ago, she's 62 foot, a senior BW bod told me to try, I may get through, but he recommended going up not down. Sadly I never tried

It should also come out of a hand pump ( a beer engine to the purists) which our first pint of the trip usually does, at either Bell or the Old Forge. But chilling makes tinned beer just about acceptable, and we haven't got a hand pump on the boat

Well, if like us you've no land hook up you can't leave the fridge on. I made a double error a few years ago of leaving the fridge on and not turning the batteries off at the isolator. Result, three domestic batteries so dead they were right offs, and a bill of over £300 for replacements. I bring the beer in a cool box when we go on board, it's cheaper