carrieblackbird

Keeping a blog

2008-04-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

It's a funny ol thing, blogging. I love writing anyway and as Ken says, keeping a blog is quite addictive. If you choose, as I've done, to not have Sitemeter or any other means of checking who reads your blog or to find out how many read it (or don't!) , you feel free to post your thoughts quite openly, without fretting about turning people off. I hate being monitored so wouldn't inflict that on others.
If you also choose, as I have, not to censure comments, you accept that others can criticise you openly. So, I suppose that's the difference with keeping a personal written diary - there's knowing someone may read your stuff and knowing that they may comment on it. I like that not-knowing that anyone else is even bothering to read what I write and it's always a bit of a surprise when they do comment!
So why does it feel suddenly intrusive when your blogging gets posted on a forum? Perhaps because it does away with the last pretence at a blog being personal. You may have had a good, cheerful day, or a fed-up rant but when taken out of the context of the diary it stands alone, naked and chilled.
So, I wonder - should that stop someone from writing a blog - fear of being left exposed? I don't think it should. After all, I do a lot of copyright-free illustrations for people and risk having my work ripped off left, right and centre. I guess I must just accept that opening your opinions and thoughts to others, like falling in love, is a risky venture. If I try to live by the principles I believe in, I needn't be afraid of others.

What a morning!

2008-04-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

I looked out the window this morning at 6.30am and had to leap straight out of bed, it was so beautiful. Lots of snow, sunshine through the trees, blue sky - lovely! My dog loves the snow, though it does make him look a bit scruffy cos he'll never be as white as that. He snuffles madly in it, getting his snout all covered and rolls over and over like a puppy.
(My computer won't let me post a photo right now so I'll try and add one later.)
A nice family on their hire boat made snowmen of each of them on the roof before setting off. It's very peaceful here with the sound of woodpeckers up in the branches overhead.

Stocking up

2008-04-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

I travelled on a fair bit today, stopping at Rugeley to stock up with food. The dog had started eyeing me up - always a reminder to buy him some food quickly. I'd run out of bread a couple of days ago so I made some and it was sooo heavy! I made a nettle and goosegrass and lentil soup (all comes under the generic term 'hippy-slop') which was ok and put some sprouting potatoes out of their misery, but it really was time to rejoin society and splurge on fresh-ish veg and Frys chocolate creams and bourbon biscuits and a couple of bottles of Weston's cider , for a few days at least.

At Kings Bromley marina, that massive house on the waterfront is still empty. There's room for 3 families in there. That and another estimated 700,000 empty houses in the UK, not to mention unused factory buildings and offices. It's madness to talk about building 3 million new homes and pretend they can all be carbon-neutral. The government clearly doesn't have a clue what carbon-neutral actually means. Talking of houses..
I took a photo of a brand new housing estate full of diddy doll's houses made to look like olde worlde cottages, with plastic window frames and 2/3 cars to every house, all framed within the giant backdrop of Rugeley power station. The horror, the horror. I'd better not put up the picture as it's too depressing and is bound to be someone's dream-home. Shit, I'd rather live in a tent.

I'm in a beautiful wooded place now, which calms me immediately. I spent half an hour watching a little mouse grooming and skittering about on a tree stump on the opposite side of the canal. Then watched tree-creepers flitting spirally up the trunks of alders for insects, dropping back to the bottom and starting up again. I have a pair of binoculars but only one eye of them works so I have to squint at things. After half an hour, you come away with blurred vision and a squint - most attractive.

Later, I checked out lots of trees and came across a duck nesting right inside the bole of another tree stump. I distracted my dog so he couldn't disturb her. There was a felled beech and I counted the rings - it was 150 years old. Some parts have been roughly carved to make a couple of lovely unpretentious seats, which made me very happy. Someone altruistic out there. There was a bank full of tiny holes that I saw were home to a sort of bee but my insect book offers me too many looky-likies for a positive ID.
Tomorrow I must go down the weed hatch. I picked up something dodgy today and kind-of ignored it as I was able to keep going and steer ok, and because it's a nightmare getting to the hatch with no head room to lever the plate off. But tomorrow will do.

Recycled wallet

2008-03-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

A friend made me a wallet from a tetra-pak which as you probably know is not usually recycleable - though I hear that scum-bag Tescos has recently started offering recycling of tetra-pak in some areas. Oh the irony!

http://www.tescopoly.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Anyway, here's how he made my wallet:

Waterproof, strong and just the right size for bank cards. I don't tend to buy anything in cartons but it's almost worth it get a fruity wallet. You just have to be careful you don't chuck it in the reycling by mistake!

Hopwas wood

2008-03-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

What a glorious wood is the Hopwas wood. Mentioned in the Domesday Book (did you know you can check out the Domesday Book online?!) so some of it is ancient woodland. At the moment there's a starry firmament of wood anemones throughout and you can see there will soon be a vast carpet of bluebells.

I met a lovely old man who walked my legs off for miles along towpath, through the woods, around the village and back. He told me how a large part of the woods had been bought by Nash Rocks and was currently under threat from quarrying. That figures. Show me a stunningly beautiful place and home to miriad wildlife and I'll show you the corporate bastard waiting to fuck things up.

Then I met a guy on a boat who carves mushrooms and benches and planters from trees. His boat is covered in giant mushrooms! I don't know whether he cuts em down just for that purpose. I couldn't bear to know the answer to that particular question, but I did go back and help myself to the large amounts of sawdust for my compost loo and discarded bark as firelighters.

With the rain, came the ducks. One duck was very brave and tame and came to beg at the window. Then she leapt up onto the roof and I took this picture by sticking my camera out the window. A second later and she pecked it but I didn't manage to capture that!

Fork handles

2008-03-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

..or that's what they could be!

Here are four of the fifteen candles I made from all the saved drippings and stubs of my candles and a right mess I made of them too! It all seemed so simple in my 'How to live without electricity - and like it' book (Anita Evangelista), which explains how to melt the bits together, pour onto a greased surface, lay down lengths of string and roll up. Voila! Some dodgy sausages.

But they do burn fine and as I mostly use candles rather than the yukky little flourescent strips in my boat, I suppose it's a saving of sorts. If you melt the wax using the gas stove instead of the wood stove, you're probably wasting more energy than you save!

After a stay out by Alvecote Pools - a pleasant wooded and wetland area that used to have collieries nearby, I've had to move on to collect water and find some food. Olive oil and marmite on stale bread is becoming monotonous - need to find me some nettles! I got into a boating convoy, which I hate and now I'm lying low, waiting for the flood of hire-boaters to subside. But they're a hardy lot those hirers - rain, snow, wind doesn't put em off enjoying their holiday. I know they're on a schedule but you have to admit they're up for it!

Cool!

2008-03-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

Moving a narrowboat through snow is wonderful.

My dog, looking confused.

Good company

2008-03-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Ah - alone again after a very sociable time seeing OTHER PEOPLE! I met a friend on a boat and we had great fun catching up on news and cider and getting snootily turned out of a pub garden at Grendon cos I had my mutt with me - but you had the impression it was because we looked a bit um.. scruffy. Hurray!
Then the two dearest people in the world came to visit: my darling, clever, wonderful daughter and my dear, talented and amazing son. I'm much braver when there are helpers around, so we went boating in the blasting wind and went aground and went on long walks and hauled firewood together and it was lovely. Now they've left, I'm missing them, but that's ok.
The canals are suddenly full of holiday-makers and other boaters, including a scarily large number of Christian boaters. Perhaps they're having an easter shindig? I also spotted Khayamanzi (a boaty blogger) at Polesworth.
I've been doing little work recently as I've been engrossed in 2 books - 'Wildwood, a journey through trees' by Roger Deakin and 'How non-violence protects the State' by Peter gelderloos. 'Wildwood' is really beautiful and I didn't want to finish it and just wish I'd met the man before he died in 2006, but at £20, better beg, steal or borrow the book! The 'How Non-violence..' is well worth reading and makes you question your attitudes (always good), even if you don't embrace all his arguments.

Lost post

2008-03-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

I have learnt, the hard way, to always put a sender's address on the back of my letters. :-(
I sent a pack of seven illustrations in the post, end of January but as I wasn't near a post office, I weighed it, put on more stamps than I needed and stuck it in a post-box. Unfortunately, Royal mail stopped recognising that address for 3 weeks for some strange reason, (having delivered letters there for the last 8 years), which means everything got re-directed to Belfast sorting office! They pretend to look for it, but meanwhile, you get a curt letter saying you can't claim any money off them without proof of postage. I don't want money, I want my artwork! I'm reluctantly facing up to having to re-do them and luckily they were ink and wash drawings and not full paint jobs.
I'd become complacent after years of problem-free posting but it reminds me of a letter I once received, 6 months late. It was a blackened, smudged offering in a plastic bag with an accompanying letter from the Royal Mail saying 'we apologise for the condition of this letter. The mail collection van caught fire...'.

Atherstone

2008-03-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

Been off gallivanting and come back to some hefty gales below Atherstone! It looks like I missed seeing a couple of boats, including nb No Problem who's blog was the first I read on narrowboating and which made me think "ooh - I'd like to live like that". I also missed nb Hadar which Jo had kindly shown me over when Hadar was still in the boatyard shed. I was looking forward to seeing her afloat but there are lots of great photos on Jo's blog.

The Atherstone locks, as anyone who goes up and down them knows, are beautifully looked after. The lock-keeper's cottage is also well maintained and there are tended flower beds and rose bushes but who is this enigmatic lock-keeper? I can only go on impressions. Was he for example, one of the knot of three portly gentlemen who stood at the cottage, arms folded, staring while I locked down the first two locks, getting redder-faced and more and more clumsy under their gaze? Surely they were there on the other two occasions I've been up and down these locks?! Is the stuffed figure dressed up in camouflage clothes, leaning at the lock cottage wall, with 'Keep Hunting' painted on its lapel, his work? And the long letter in the BW noticeboard addressed to 'Mr Boater' (3 times) asking us to be patient and polite, telling us that he has an MBE, well I guess that's his handwriting. As a Ms Boater, I'm assuming I'm exempt!

I've noticed that there are signs limiting a boaty stay of only 48hours in the fairly long stretch in the middle of the flight and that this stretch was completely empty. I've been noticing this elsewhere this winter - completely empty stretches of useful canalside mooring where boaters would presumably have been spending cash in the nearby shops and pubs if the staying limits were relaxed over winter. Where are all the boats? The worst was Cropredy. You'd be hard put to fit another sign along that stretch above the lock, with the 'No running of engines...', 'No more than 24hrs...', 'Overstay fines..', 'Take rubbish elsewhere..' signs every few feet. It really makes you feel unwelcome. We're boaters - we should bloody well be able to use the canal without being made to feel like we're scum. Grrrr...
Anyway, enough grumpiness for today. It's great to be back on board and now I'm going to cut up some of the forest I've got piled on the roof.