Boaters on the Eastern end of the Trent & Mersey Canal are familiar with the gaunt, derelict towers of Willington Power station, which are 50 years old this year and have been silent for for over 10.

When I moved to Willington this year I immediately decided I liked them. They are 'monumental'; they define an era and shout of past glories when coal was cool.  (Incidentally, at what point did supporting the miners cease being cool and become a hot potato for the protest industry?)

To my surprise I find most of the locals are just as ah-bless sentimental about the old towers as me.  Why should this be, when those towers don't actually do anything?  I wonder if it's because there's a powerful need for people to have a focus to their towns or villages, to have something to look up to, as it were, and the towers have an inspiring 'cathedral' feel, something that the local St Michael's Church - charming and ancient as it is - just doesn't have.  

Populist philosopher Alain De Botton touches on this sentiment in his essay 'A religion for atheists':

Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us.  It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals.  Their archi­tecture performs the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them.  We begin to feel small ­inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

But the towers are clearly doomed.  The local press this week highlighted plans by RWE Npower to construct a giant new 2GW gas-fired power station on the site.  I say 'giant' - and its output will be as prodigious as the massive 8-towered Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station just down the river - but as a modern gas-fired plant its profile will be much slighter than the present towers.

Power station village keen to keep its cooling towers - Derby Evening Telegraph
What new £1bn power station could look like - Burton Mail

This press coverage was the result of a three-day consultation exercise by Npower in local village halls.

The company sent over some warm and friendly staff making soothing noises to the locals.  They promise up to 1,000 temporary jobs in construction of the building, and maybe 100 ongoing jobs.

The proposed new power station looks low-profile, and there's no 'cathedral' aspect to it.  For all its power it lacks monumentalism.  Indeed, I think it's almost TOO SMALL! 

One of Npower's reps called the design 'standard Euro boxes'.  The local Labour MP Mark Todd - who's standing down at the next election - and his anointed successor both came to the exhibition and I overheard that they both asked if it could somehow be MORE IMPRESSIVE.  I think they meant architecturally.  Yes, they were told, it could be, but it will cost, and who's going to pay for that in the current recession?  

(When I heard that I thought:  What would Mr James Brindley or Mr Thomas Telford have said?) 

But you and I are canal lovers, so I asked a bigger question of Npower's project manager Mike Peel:

"What role will the Trent & Mersey Canal play in the new power station - in either its construction or its ongoing operation?"

Mike Peel sounded nonplussed.  I don't think he'd even entertained the possibility.   After all, all water for the new low-profile cooling towers will be taken from the nearby River Trent, and they saw no other role for water.

Of course, a gas-powered station won't need a canal, not like the old coal-fired stations.  In the longer term it won't even need the railway sidings they are planning to build (temporarily) just to bring in building materials.

But if I was British Waterways I'd be looking for a way of persuading Npower to let them transport a lot of the power station's building materials, upriver on the Trent and then from Shardlow to Willington via the canal.

It wouldn't necessarily be profitable, but it would surely be good publicity for water transport in general. 

And with the life of the new power station being only about 25 years, it would be a serious reminder that the canal itself could well still have a purpose after all the gas we are sucking from Siberia has run out.

In the meantime, here's an aerial view of the site, taken from Npower's website.  It was photographed before Mercia Marina was developed; notice the empty field (centre-right)  where now Mercia Marina's new 'nature reserve' lake and island (shown in the foreground in the picture at top) now stand. 

I'm in a quandary about the Oxon Boat Painting Company, based at Stretton-under-Fosse.  My list of other websites (my 'boatroll') only lists waterways blogs and other canal-related websites that have RSS feeds. 

However, while the Oxon Boat Painting website does have a feed, it's of ... Granny Buttons!

That's a real compliment, thanks.  But out of modesty I couldn't possibly put myself on my own blogroll, could I?  It would be recursive.  (Clearly I'm not too modest to just ignore it.) 

I guess I should give them a mention anyway...

Tiny little things can make a difference. I notice that BW has started using a mini-version of its logo in the web browser address bar.  Interestingly, the logo appears not only the official British Waterways corporate website but also in the consumer spin-off Waterscape site.

(For those who don't know, the little browser icon is a 16x16 picture called the 'favicon', and websites can install their own.  

Granny Buttons has a favicon - it's the little girl who used to be on the packet of Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons (before some wicked old marketing witch cast a spell and made her vanish, back in 1992).   In my favicon little Miss Buttons is wearing an orange dress, but she has a full wardrobe of  other dresses to call on, including red green and blue.

It was a while back when I installed my favicon and I can't remember how I did it!  Can anyone else give an easy guide to creating and installing one's own favicon?)

Where was I?  Oh yes, what with both Waterscape and British Waterways using the same BW 'bridge and bulrush' logo as their favicon,  it set me thinking about the relationship between the two websites.  

The split was presumably introduced to keep the hoi polloi waterways users away from the important developers and businessmen BW want to attract. 

Type 'www.britishwaterways.co.uk' into your browser and you'll have to choose either 'British Waterways' or be sent away to something that's 'not British Waterways'.

I've never felt easy with this.  It seems to me that Waterscape is simply the Provisional Wing of BW, and the fact that it now uses the same web browser favicon just reinforces the point.  Its the same organisation, the same people, just a different set of lip service.

Maybe they are trying to highlight that 'British Waterways' is about the moneymaking, business development side and the bit that actually spends the money and administers the 'leisure and heritage' is for 'users'. 

But it just tells me that Waterscape is the ordinary punter's entrance, the turnstile, the section where they let Joe Soap in.  Waterscape is where you go cap in hand to queue up, to renew your licences, to pay them money, to be fined if you don't do something right.

The main BW website was presumably intended to be the 'tradesmen's entrance', but look closely and you'll see the address is: www.britishwaterways.co.uk/home.  You're left with the impression that it's the front door, the marbled hall, the elegant reception area.

Creating Waterscape as a separate entity didn't make sense to me ten years ago, and it doesn't make sense to me now.  In which area are we 'customers' and where are we suppliers?

Perhaps they got the idea from The National Trust.  See, if you are a bigwig - a politician or a potential developer say - then you go to The National Trust. 

However, if you are just a visitor, you go to Historiscape, the NT website for their ordinary users and members.

Or not.  Whatever, but I notice that the National Trust website doesn't have a favicon.

Update: It's now been pointed out several times that my browser has a glitch - and that ALL of the sites mentioned here has its own favicon. 

No matter - THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT FAVICONS!  It's about my view of the split between BW and Waterscape.   And of a possible parallel with the National Trust, who - it should be noted - run a waterway themselves.

Brush Mate ... a simple plastic box in which you hang paint brushes, and containing a chemical pad which prevents the paint from drying on the brush. Phil Speight recommended it to me.

... After a long term trial I can report back, and I can honestly say it is simply superb.

I first used it in May, when I was retouching Herbie's gunwales with black paint. Finishing the job, I just hung the brush in the box - no cleaning - and every time I need to cover up a scratch I just take the brush out of the box and off we go.

... The brush has now hung there for 6 months and the paint is still wet on the brush!! I really should change the chemical pad now I suppose. Replacement pads cost about £3. The box itself which holds four brushes costs about £12.

Not only does it make keeping touch up brushes ready for use really easy, it also saves a lot of time and mess in cleaning brushes AND saves on brush cleaning fluids. Looking after brushes is not the most enjoyable part of painting, and failing to look after them is expensive. This gadget does away with all that.

You naturally look for the downside, and Neil of Herbie does give a couple:  That it will strip the varnish off brush handles, and that it only works with oil-based paints.

He forgot to mention another:  That once you have one colour of paint on the brush, that's it; the brush is wedded to that colour, until you clean it as normal.  Still, I guess that's too obvious to mention.

Who knows, perhaps Gordon Products, the makers of Brush Mate did pay underhand for that sort of testimonial.  Doubt it, though.  One thing that marks a good blog is the sense of veracity that shines through, and it does with Neil's NB Herbie blog.  This sort of feedback is really handy for boaters.

All this follows on from Neil's original post last year about Phil Speight's boat painting course last year, and Graham of Jannock's  own experience of the Phil Speight course the week before last.

As a PDF it prints out onto 5 sides of A4 paper, but looks like its supposed to be a 12-page 1/3-size A4 booklet, plus a full-page UK waterways map showing the regions.  You'd need an origami diploma to fold it correctly for your pocket.  I presume it's available on paper, prefolded and stapled?

It starts with an organization chart of the BW board of directors, so you know who to blame when you want to let off steam. 

That's a good move, although responsibility's not always clearly delineated.  For example, guess from this chart who's responsible for deciding to install, er, just for the sake of argument, lockside bollards that make it safer for inexperienced and single-handed boaters? 

(Now now, don't cheat by looking at my earlier posts!) 

Each 'waterways' division shows a picture of the manager and his office contact details, a list of the waterways in his purlieu and  of 'useful contacts' (names and phone numbers) in the following departments: 

• Boating trade
• BW moorings
• Licence enforcement
• Marketing/communications
• Volunteering coordinator

I think it's significant that they now include 'volunteering' as a section (see my earlier post Every volunteer project has won).

One particular complaint of mine: the official BW Customer Service Centre number is 0845 671 5530. 

How much longer must we put up with phone numbers starting 08...? 

BW will protest that this is a local-rate number.  It's not!  When you are out on the canal you will usually be using a mobile, and most services charge 20p/min or more.  Some calls can cost up to 40p/min for 0870 numbers, which is effectively a premium rate. 

I rang this number yesterday to test it.  It took about 90 secs to work through touchtone hell and another 100 secs on hold while I waited for a human.

Ka-ching! - over 50p even before I'd spoken to a human.

The BW emergency number remains  at 0800 47 999 47, which is also a premium rate for boaters.  I'm told that during the day this goes straight through to the same national customer service centre (bypassing touchtone hell), so if you are going to pay to call BW customer service you might as well cut out the touchtone middleman - you are going to be speaking to the same people anyway

But at night this freephone [sic] number redirects to the West Midlands Ambulance Service.   Their HQ overlooks the canal at Merry Hill (Google Maps link here) so they are actually closer to the water than BW's HQ.

One problem  is knowing when to call for emergencies and when to leave the problem as a message.  The trouble is, it's not always easy to know if it's a desperate emergency, an important maintenance issue, or simply something to add to BW's 'to-do' list. 

I've often seen a problem which I'd like to report, but which I'm not willing to pay 20p/min to hold on the line to do so.  How do I know if I'm the first to see this new crack in the brickwork or that old car in the canal or the other tree fallen in the water?

For these occasions the new Getting In Touch leaflet will make our job a bit quicker and easier - albeit not necessarily cheaper.

Says a press release from British Waterways today: 

The 1007 foot long iron trough lining of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is being drained and cleaned next week ahead of next year’s visitor season. ...

EVENT:  Draining of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct prior to major works inspection.

VENUE:  At the northern end of the aqueduct.

DATE:  12.30pm, Monday 9 November, 2009.

The iconic structure was last drained in November 2003, ahead of its 200th birthday celebrations in 2005. On that occasion, a full paint system was applied to protect the metalwork from rusting. The towpath was refurbished and an all weather surface applied.

This dewatering will allow a thorough four-day inspection of the structure to take place. The aqueduct is drained by the removal of a large plug located in the middle of the structure.

When released, it sends a huge torrent of water cascading into the River Dee almost 130 feet below. The aqueduct holds 1.5 million litres of water and takes around two hours to drain.

The aqueduct seems to be drained for inspection every 3-5  years or so, the last time during a major restoration in 2003/4.  (See: Granny Buttons: Pontcysyllte Aqueduct restoration)

One person who'll almost definitely be there - and NOT at the northern end -  is Sheila Halsall, whose Visions Quality Cards business specialises in waterways postcards.  She'll be down below, on the bank of the River Dee.

She can supply you with a postcard of one of the aqueduct's previous drainings, shown here back in January 1998.  You can also see it on her Flickr site here, where she adds:

This in one of only two postcards which I have reprinted more than once. I try consistently to come up with new postcard images. However I have not been able to be at Trevor again to see the "plug" being pulled and the aqueduct drained.

Twelve years on, she's now shooting digital, with much more sophisticated equipment. Fingers crossed the light will suit her! 

Update:  Sheila said I could use the photo here (thanks!) and adds:

I will not be able to replicate the shot I got last time.  The trees in front of the aqueduct have grown substantially in ten years, decreasing the view of the span. 

... The tree growth is hiding much of the span whichever side you are on.   I took some shots in the summer with my wellies on but the river was too high to do that three weeks ago and we've had a lot of rain since then. 

... I'll do the best I can and cross my fingers for a blue sky.

My inclination (could I afford the time and cost of driving the 180 miles there and back) would be to get much closer, looking upwards.  And I'd click-click-click as fast as I could as the water fell on top of me...

The bins were being used straight away when they arrived last week, but I rustled up a few people on Sunday lunchtime for a 'photo opportunity' and we took out and put stuff back just for the camera!  

Bins being lonely things and not the brightest of subjects, I wanted to show a lot of people - all at once - keeping the bins company and having fun chucking in their recyclables.

(I know it looks contrived, but, hey.  You try photographing rubbish without it looking, er, rubbish.)

Recycling is the new Victorian churchgoing, the virtuous lipservice that people criticise other people for not doing, but don't themselves practice. 

One of the problems is that there's little incentive for businesses to introduce it.  It's an expensive extra that people often are unwilling to have added to their bills.  Mercia has put its recycling bins on the way out of the main marina exit, so there's little excuse for us to avoid it now!  Everyone leaving their boats will encounter it. It won't take much effort.

I rang to find out what other marinas in the area are doing about recycling.  Sawley Marina says it's got a separate bin for paper and cardboard, but otherwise it's just the single landfill bin. 

Another lady at Barton Marina said they have a bottle bank and again a paper collection, but not for cans, cardboard or plastic.

Of the official BW facilities, only the one at Fradley Junction, a full day's cruising away, has some limited recycling, says the regional BW office at Newark.  BW's public sanitary station at Willington (just around the corner from the marina) only has single landfill bins, but I'm told that the BW contractor (Biffa) claims to try and recycle stuff from those.  (With compostables in the same bin, that isn't easy.)

Mercia's recycling bins have only two sections - one for glass, and the other for combined card/plastic/cans/polythene - which does make it a bit easier when you are gathering your waste on board your narrowboat.

One thing I'd like to see is perhaps a separate box for smaller electricals like lightbulbs and batteries (AA torch cells, not necessarily the full lead-acid boat batteries).  Batteries are a serious problem.  Not least, improperly-disposed batteries can be a serious problem - even a fire hazard.

For instance, there are numerous reports of fires at waste disposal plants (e.g. a fire at a Veolia plant in Derby two years ago, one at Birmingham earlier this year and reports worldwide via UKWIN).  Many of these have been blamed on old and decomposing batteries, improperly disposed.

[I got this info from someone at Veolia, but it's too contentious as Halfie points out in the comments; sorry I put it in]

I called Veolia's head office, who pointed me to their website's Battery Compliance page and the Electrical Collection Service.  All this is early days - I've yet to see a single battery collection box anywhere - but every business is going to have to introduce these services soon. 

Meantime, kudos to Mercia Marina for the most complete recycling I've yet seen at a marina.  Let's hope we boaters do our bit too. 

[Declaration: Granny B is advising Mercia Marina with its own PR here and there.  I'm giving this disclaimer now, but I will always try to be impartial in my posts here and this represents my own genuine view.]

I've disabled some of the latest features of commenting and the comments have reappeared!  Hmm! 

By the way, Granny Buttons runs on TypePad, which is not free, but which I commend. (A basic sub is about £3.50/month).  It has brilliant anti-spam filters, and I only seem to get one or two spam comments a month now.  Perhaps the new TypePad Connect feature still has one or two bugs?

But even the standard commenting system is good.  I can leave comments open and you don't have to enter those infuriating 'captcha' codes, nor even leave an email address if you don't want to. You can also enter basic HTML formatting like bold/italic, and URLs/web addresses should automatically appear as links.

Excerpt:

Over the course of two days, Phil took us through all of the steps needed to turn a bare sheet of steel into a decorated and signwritten boat panel. 

... My interest in being there was to try and learn better ways of keeping Jannock's paintwork looking good whereas a lot of my fellow students were really into the idea of giving their boats complete DIY paint jobs.

... All in all a great weekend during which I have gathered lots of interesting tips to achieve my goal of preserving the paint finish on my boat.

Neil of NB Herbie attended one of these courses in August last year.  He wrote up the experience in his post How to paint your boat, complete with photographs. 

The impression I'm left with, from both Graham and Neil, is that Phil Speight makes it look far easier than it is!

But it also sounds irresistible.  They way they both describe it, I'd imagine that you could sell tickets to rich retired Texan men for tens of thousands of pounds to come over and try their hand at painting canal boats and for their eager wives to do the 'roses & castles' courses.

Yet, I can't find out how to book online.  Phil Speight's website is here, but where do you sign up for his weekend roses & castles painting courses?   Or the full-blown 5-day in-depth boat painting courses?

UPDATE:  Wait, here it is!  It's not on his own website, but on the Craftsmaster Paints site.  And I got it the wrong way round - the 'Paint Your Boat' course is over the two-day weekend, whereas it'll take you the full five days to master 'Roses & Castles' to Phil's own standard.  Hopefully.

So, for example, an item of Waterways World news might appear one moment, and the next update might be Mortimer Bones' blog  The only thing they'll have in common is that they posted at about the same time.

I mention these two because sometimes coincidences occur - as on 18th September, when Waterways World mentioned a story about beehives and Bones mentioned honey.  I did a double-take, momentarily thinking they were talking about the same subject.

This sort of thing will be unique to me and my reading list.  However, if you read blogs in the same manner you'll have your own reading list, and your own sweet coincidences.  It's amusing to share them.

(Well, almost; the blog uses a crescent moon in the banner, which is a bit of a tease.)

Robert's been writing for nearly a year about his obsession with exploring Britain by the light of the silvery full moon.  (The first post, from last December is here). 

Each month he's done a long walk overnight in the full moon, outlining the result on the blog and presumably reserving a full essay for a future book.  The first moonlit walk was on January 11th 2009, and it was 17 miles from the Royal Observatory Greenwich to Waltham Abbey. 

Yesterday, in his post My Agent, he announced that he now has a literary agent.  Now he needs a book deal.

I'm not sure how wise it is to announce all this in advance.  It could work both ways:  On the one hand he might get people taking his idea and stealing his thunder (and moonlight).  On the other hand - the sunnier side, so to speak - the blog can give him valuable feedback, support on his walks, or useful advance publicity.

However good has his essays might be, in raw sales terms I suspect the success of a book like this will hinge on the photographs that accompany them. 

Moonlight photography is still - for some reason - an unexplored phenomenon.  It's very hard to convey the atmosphere of a moonlight walk;  I know, I've done dozens of them, and on Granny Buttons I've done my best to propagandise it. 

There's no better light to portray landscape.  I've written quite a few posts where I was given the moonlight and the rest was left to me.

Just for starters: 

• My boyfriend's the man in the moon - Cropredy Lock, Feb 2008
• John Jackson's memorial seat at Bosley Locks, Macclesfield Canal, October 2007
• 'Watercolour' of canal near Winkwell, 1am in the moonlight - Feb 2009
• A little more frozen canal at night, near Berko, Feb 2009 (the same 7-mile midnight walk as above)

In my case, I spent each blog post talking about the trick of photographing the landscape and the strange 'other-worldly atmosphere that resulted, not about the countryside itself or my impressions of it. 

If there's one GREAT time to photograph canalscapes in the full moon, it's when the snow falls.  That's a rare occasion during climate change, of course.  How about the photograph above, taken during last February's midnight walk from Berkhamsted to Apsley.

Below is a photo of the railway bridge near Winkwell.  The snow's not so visible, but it was on the same early-hours full-moon walk.

(Daylight photo of this location here.)

Robert, on this Halloween weekend of all weekends, good night and good luck!

See also: Full moon vs. Granny Buttons

And now please excuse me; I need to nip out and photograph Mercia Marina in the full moon.