Hello Joe

Ariel unofficially joined Linnet's gang a year ago, and since then we have been delicately primping and preparing her for the grand day when Butty goes up to expand Ariel's coal run.
However, the snag is that Ariel is ready and Butty is not.

So I am proud to introduce, taking up the slack until Butty is ready, Birmingham Canal Navigation's boat No. 108, better known as Joe (and many variations thereof)

She is only on lease to us, and is owned by Phobox Ltd (http://www.phobox.com/) but she is already a much loved member of the gang. This simultaneously presents us with the first and last problem.

I don't want to give her back.

"MINE!"

That though is something to be dealt with in the future, for first Joe has to get to and through her first adventure. Easter at Ellesmere Port..

Part 2 - Journey of the Boating Bunny

Safely ensconced in the slammer with his favorite tinkly toys and some water, we were dropped off at Manchester Picadilly station and first had to cross the busy road in front.
Clutching his house tightly and leaning into the weight of my own luggage, I scampered across the road when it seemed least likely I would be mown down by a taxi.
Paddy was not impressed with this jostling about and showed his displeasure by stamping his feet and throwing himself to the back of the slammer, tipping it violently backwards.

This displeased him even more and he shot to the front of the house and, grabbing the wire in his teeth, rattled the door.
I righted the house as best I could and tried to placate him by tickling his nose through the door. My efforts were rewarded by a second rattle and a stamp, before he turned his back on me and vented his temper on Tinkly Ball.

We were, by now, at the escalator to the main forum and boarded it behind a young couple locked in a passionate embrace. Paddy moved on from Tinkly Ball and was now throwing Mr Rattle about the house (he's a wicked character is Mr Rattle) and, at the noise, the young woman ahead opened her eyes and glanced down. When she saw it was a cute little fluffball clutching a toy in it's mouth with a butter-wouldn't-melt expression on it's fuzzy face, she broke away from her energetic tonsil investigation and oohed and awwed over Paddy, to the chargrin of her young man.

Paddy has an incredible radar for anyone who may fawn over him, coupled with an unrivaled sense of timing and a love of attention.
Realizing he was onto a winner here, he maintained the cute bunny mode and furthered the adoration by delicately placing Mr Rattle down and putting a paw to the bars of the slammer.
At the top of the escalator though, his paw slipped and he fell face first into his water bowl.
He stamped his anger and growled, which attracted the attention of of some children.

Gone was the murderous expression, to be replaced by an angelic looking soggy puppet. Timing impeccable, he flicked his paws and began cleaning an ear. Possibly the cutest trick in his repertoire, and boy does he know it.

Pursued by the children ("aww! Can we stroke him??") I strode onto the ticket office. I shooed the kids away in short order and joined the queue for 'Todays Travel' plonking the slammer down and, placing my bag on top of it, shunting the whole lot forwards with my leg where necessary.

With no one to show-off for, he sat down and apparently began overheating. I admit to panicking at this moment and after getting a ticket I rushed him out to the main platform where it was slightly cooler and alot less crowded.
Immediately he perked up, proving to me that he wasn't really overheating but simply nervous by the crowds.

A little gutted that I would have to forgo my normal coffee, I got onto the train and settled down with Paddy in a doorway, away from other passengers and in the coolest part of the train.
Once sat down, I arranged the bags to form a crude barrier and opened the slammer. After a moments hesitation, he bopped out. Sniffing energetically, he viewed his surroundings. The door to the connecting corridor opened with a hiss and a burly football fan resembling a shaved bear in trainers with bald head and tattoos everywhere came through and froze on seeing Paddy.

Paddy froze too, then made the decision that this was too much to deal with and stamped back into the slammer grumpily.
The man promptly crouched down and softly asked if he could stroke Paddy. The answer affirmative; he reached his hand to the edge of the slammer and waited, speaking quietly all the time.
I watched fascinated as this huge mountain of a human crouched in front of Paddy's house as if there was all the time in the world, and only Paddy was important.
Hesitantly, Paddy bopped to the front of his house and snuffled at the gently offered hand. Deciding that the man was OK, he bopped out further and reached up to put both front paws on a palm twice his size.
The man grinned and gently tickled Paddy's ears with his free hand.
The doors hissed and a man of a similar vein to Paddy's friend stepped through.
"Where have you.."
he began, only to be silence by a softly spoke but emphatic:
"fuck off. I'm talking to the bunny"

We changed trains at Stoke on Trent and I managed to get a seat with a table all to myself. I plonked Paddy down, opened the slammer door and settled down with my book.
Paddy came to the front of his house, but did not come out. As a general rule, he wont actually come out unless told that he can. The exception is if people off him food.
Shortly down the line, I became aware that a solitary child was watching the rabbit. Her stare was disconcerting, so I did not look at or acknowledge her.
About 5 minutes of this passed when she seemed to reach a decision, stomped forward and thrust her hand at Paddy's head.
Quick as a flash, the rabbit sank his teeth into her finger, stamped and retreated wild eyed to the back of his house.

The girl legged it away and I could only comfort Paddy, dumbfounded at the child's behavior.
My fellow passengers also commiserated with me and offered Paddy sympathetic pettings and sandwich crusts (gratefully received)

A few minutes later, a woman stormed down the train.
"Did your rabbit bite my daughter?"
She demanded.
"Yeh"
I replied evenly. This sort of response seems to deflate people a little.
"Why are you letting a dangerous animal loose on the train?"
We both looked at the rabbit, who was dozing half on the table, half in the house.
"He's hardly loose ma'am" I replied "Besides which, why was your daughter loose on the train? Your bloody child smacked the poor animal between the eyes without so much as a by-your-leave to me"
The woman eyed me for a moment, stalked off and returned a minute later with the child.
"Apologize! What have I told you about animals? You ask before gently pet them!"
The child muttered an apology at me and, slipping her mothers grasp, legged it down the train with her mother in hot pursuit.

After this I decided that it would be best if Paddy remained shut in the slammer for the last bit of the journey.
I poked him gently and he sleepily looked at me. I hooshed him in and shut the door.
After a moment he realized what was happening and wheeled around to face the door.
Jamming his nose to the bars, he tried to push it open. When this solicited no help from me, he threw a tantrum, grabbing the bars with his mouth and shaking the door with gusto.

So much gusto, in fact, that he worked the catch loose and the door fell off, spilling water everywhere.
I mopped up, reprimanded him and fixed the door on, glancing at my fellow passengers who were grinning.
Normally his audience radar would kick in now, but the red mist of rage had descended on Paddy.

He had been taken from his comfortable boat, stuffed in a box, carried through a crowd, smacked on the head and now he was being shut it. It was too much to take.
He grabbed the door again and threw his weight on it, straining the catches, then he shook it, and with a clatter it fell off again.

We repeated this four times in quick succession, by which point the catch was broken and the whole carriage was watching me battle with the furious bunny.
Addressing him in the low tones normally associated with psychopaths, I tied the house shut with a dishcloth and a hair tie.

Enraged at being thwarted, he stomped about the house making it rock violently, all the while emitting angry growls.
He kept this up into Rugby, where I thankfully disembarked from the train to meet my long-suffering mother by our junk filled estate car.

I went to put Paddy's house on the back seat by our puppy, which is where he normally goes during car journeys. Paddy growled and threw himself , attracting the dogs attention.
Murphy, for that is said dog's name, thought this was an invite to play and leapt on the house.
Paddy heaved himself over. The slammer rocked, the dog swayed and scrabbled frantically for for purchase like a cartoon character on a moving barrel.

When the dust had settled and I managed to stop laughing, I untangled to puppy and righted the slammer.
Paddy sat frozen in a blind fury, covered in water and with his food bowl on his head, the contents scattered amongst the wreckage in the slammer.

Paddy had to ride home in the boot after that.

Part 1 - Reflections on owning a Boating Bunny

Most Rabbits lead fairly uneventful lives. They are born, become fluffy, go to a pet shop and get sold as cute gifts for children.
Inevitably, the children get bored. This normally happens when their pet is no longer a little fluffball, but a fully grown rabbit.
At this juncture, the lucky rabbits are the ones who are taken to the vets for a quick release. The unlucky ones die semi-wild in cramped, filthy conditions, giving up on the once-a-week hutch cleaning and ten minute social interaction thrown at them whenever someone remembers their existence.

Only recently did the tiny hutches, originally designed to be used in conjunction with an outdoor run, become illegal. It finally dawned on The Powers That Be that people were just stuffing more than one rabbit in there and leaving them to it.

There is a minority though, ray of hope in the black clouds of humanity, that revere all things lagomorph. These are the people who work their fingers to the bone in rescue centers, or who spend months battling do-gooders for the right to have bunny sports, or who simply bend over backwards to make their faithful little fluffball happy.

I am one of the latter.

My first bunny was a hopelessly inbred and bad tempered rabbit called Sally, who was bought from a disreputable store because she was being pummeled by her siblings and the Guinea Pigs, and because she was just downright cute and cuddly.
She required almost constant medical treatment and she did not at all appreciate the fact that she got it.

When she moved onto The Great Meadow In The Sky, 8 years along the line, I was devastated and and vowed never to take on another one.
This resolve broke down a couple of months down the line when I realized that life sucked without the company of a bunny.
Eventually, in the Pets at Home reject bin, I located my next fluffy companion.

Poppy, as he was known until he went to be spayed a few months down the line, was a cute little hairball who quickly mastered the commands and tricks needed for a boating bunny.
When the vet broke the news that she was actually a he...

"I'm sorry, I can't spay this rabbit"
"Why not? Is something wrong??"
"Not really, there's just a pair of bollocks in the way"

...We changed the name from 'Poppy' to 'Paddy' because it sounded close enough. This change worked out well; when he's naughty, he gets called 'Padraig' and he knows it's time to behave.

His first boating experiences were on a boat I was helping with at the time; big Woolwich Aldgate. Paddy's accommodation was in the hold with me then.

Around the same time as this, the family boat Linnet was undergoing serious restoration at Malkins Bank. When we went up to help on the work, so did Paddy. His accommodation was the galley then; over the sink, as he was going through the stage of spraying urine when he was annoyed, when he was happy, and over anything that he considered his property.
After one incident involving a very happy leap-about bunny, and the unpainted back-cabin, he was moved to the kitchen.
Pissy bunbuns go in the bin.

When the time came for Linnet to go home, Paddy journeyed with her. On the roof during the day, getting off to help me with the locks, and at night he was back over the sink.
This became the standard procedure for his boating, with the exception of the sink bit as he grew out weeing everywhere.

Linnet doesn't move very often, so his boating became rather limited when Aldgate no longer needed my assistance, and Paddy had to be content with just living on a boat.

I met my beloved though, and he owns Ariel. I quickly became Ariel's bitch, dashing from Linnet, moored near Rugby, to Ariel, moored in Manchester.

In the year or so of first working Ariel, I couldn't bring Paddy with me. He didn't have any gear on board, and the business wasn't stable enough to lavish time on him even if he had been set up on the boat.

This changed though.

The work is routine enough and Ariel was visiting Linnet, allowing me to load her with bunny gear. When Ariel pulled away from Linnet to go back North, Paddy was in his play-pen on the fore deck.

He enjoyed his trip to Manchester; during the day he either bopped about in his hay filled play-pen or rode in a basket on the hatch, and at night he was on the side bed in a cat crate known as 'the slammer'.
At the end of the trip though, Paddy faced the the stumbling block of his previous boating escapades and the biggest adventure of his little life.

Getting to and from Ariel is simple matter for a human who can comprehend the noise and heat of the train, the station and the tram, but how would Paddy cope?

A decade without docking - part 2

When Dad saw the state of the hull, he couldn't believe that little Humph could be in that state and blamed my lack of pressure-washing skill.
Then when his pressure-washing failed to remove the barnacle like rust attachments, he did what any other man would do, and blamed the pressure washer.
After spending much time fiddling with the settings and cursing to the pressure washer in the same low agitated tone associated with the mentally unstable, he gave up and stalked off back to Linnet.

The next morning; I was awoken extremely early by Dad, who announced that we would be able to remove all the rust by hand with a wire-brush, and then bounded off to the dry dock with a tool chest to get started, leaving me staggering around with one leg in an arm of my boiler-suit, trying to brush my hair and knock back some scalding coffee simultaneously.

By the time that I made it to the dock, having had to be extracted from the boiler-suit by my long suffering and sainted mother, dad was grim faced and running out the extension cables

The rust bubbles were so bad that it had clutched the bristles of the wire brush and held onto them, and now the only way forward was to grind them off.

Now armed with grinders, Dad and I started. We had hoped to take one side each, but the rust had a rooted objection to being removed and put up a hell of a fight, so much so after dad had taken down the worst chunks, I had to follow with a hand wire brush and a second grinder.

After one side had been cleaned back, we were able to take stock of the damage. The pitting was appalling, and in places there can't be more than a couple of millimetres stopping Humphrey from springing a leak bad enough to warrant the loan of a dry-dock pump to keep him afloat.

Dad regarded it gloomily and muttered something.

“What did you say?”
“I said it's not going to be economic to fix this”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Means when he sinks, that's it”

I stood agape, and quickly ran through my head what damage a wire brush would cause to a human if hurled in a flat trajectory at about head height. Having decided that that would not be the best course of action, I ordered dad to go and have a cup of coffee, and think about what he'd just said, while I carried on with renewed vigour.

After his coffee break, dad was in a more positive frame of mind and, with the strength of someone severely pissed off, I had completed the stern single handed.

When the war on the rust had been completed, we did a second examination of the hull, and dad decided that Humphrey was indeed worth fixing when the time came, and pronounced that the bottom wasn't likely to drop off just yet.

My euphoria was short lived, however, when he added that we'd need to go around the hull again; this time with wire brushes on drills.

The next day saw the hull wire brushed, dad and me looking like extras from the black and white minstrel show and then, finally, the first coat of black on the hull.
By the time a further four coats had been applied, and a fresh annode replaced the sad piece remains of the old one, Humph looked rather smart and ready to be returned to the canal.

He was duly re-floated and poled down the marina once more, to more comments and tittering from the monosyllabic, Forest Gump impersonators that tend to swarm out when ever a boat moves in the marina, in the hope of seeing a crash.

They weren't lucky with Humphrey; who returned to Clampett's Corner (as it is known) and tied accommodatingly abreast of Linnet, to allow Ariel to sit in his mooring while she is discharged of Butty's repair kit.

But that's another story

A decade without docking - Part 1

In the beginning, my family bought an old wooden narrowboat and made her their home, then went and rescued an old wooden jolly boat to keep her company. The narrowboat needed repairs and restoration to her timber, and a new stern to replace the crap metal one she had been given.

This was The Great Undertaking Of The Stern.

While this was being done though, they would need somewhere to live.
The sensible option would have been to rent a house, or a flat, or buy a cheap caravan of the use-it-just-this-once- then-send-it-to-the-scrap-man variety; instead they decided they wanted a boat building.

It would have to be metal though, two wooden boats were enough trouble.

This is how Humphrey came into being. Built by Rick Parfitt, he is a pontoon style boat made of old gasometers.

“Where are we going to get the steel from?”

“I hear that the Warrington Gas Works is demolishing some tanks”

“Quick! To the car!”

That was twenty years or so ago, and Humphrey remained with the little fleet as a spare bedroom for those visitors who found sleeping on the narrowboat too cosy.

As is the way of wooden boats, our two synchronised and decided that they would deteriorate at the same speed and therefore require major overhaul at the same time. When the pumps are going so often that the electricity meter is glowing white hot and illuminating the psychics on the lawn shouting “follow the light!” then docking a sound metal boat tends to get pushed to the back of the to-do list.

After a decade of patiently waiting his turn, Humphrey was poled into the dry dock at Crick, causing much droll amusement with the moorers.

“Just one Cornetto!”

We ignore them all, smiling through gritted teeth. Once he's in the dock, the water is pumped out and there he sits, proudly showing off enough green fuzzy plant life on his hull to warrant a lawn mower, let alone a pressure wash.

Once in the dock, I am left to the job of pressure washing him down. It is tedious and dirty and the pressure wash machine is slowing turning itself inside out trying to provide the power needed to clean the hull, and midway through the procedure I am whistled at by some tit stood at the end of the dry dock.

I stopped and looked up, and an eager face peers back at me from under a baseball cap 60 years too young for it.
He seemed to know me, though I have no recollection of him, and seemed oblivious to the fact he was holding up the job. He tried to engage me in a lively discussion about the living quarters Humphrey has and the living quarters every human being is entitled to, which was curtailed swiftly and, I dare say, curtly.

Our little pressure wash valiantly struggled to clear the black forest growing on Humphrey's hull, and revealed tomorrows revenge for me- inch thick mill scale.

Oh gooood