Wednesday 28 July 2010

Horseradish Source


As Carrie mentioned last week, I stumbled across a rather plentiful source of horseradish on the way to Long Buckby recently. This has always been one of my favourite plants ever since I found some growing on an abandoned and seriously overgrown allotment I rather rashly took on with a friend some 15 years ago.

I discovered this pretty simple recipe for horseradish sauce around that time and I’ve used it ever since. Unfortunately, it’s not vegan but I’ve included it anyway in the hope that there’s a decent substitute for the double cream.

Ingredients:

1oz horseradish root
1 tsp English mustard
½ tsp ground black pepper
about 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
¼ pint double cream

Grate, or finely chop, the horseradish root and whizz it in a blender with the mustard, pepper and vinegar. Once it’s mixed more or less evenly, add the cream and whizz it again. It should go pretty solid pretty much immediately but keep going until the horseradish is well mixed in.

I’m told that it keeps quite well, although I’ve never been able to leave it long enough to find out.

If you’ve got more than you need (or if some well-meaning person has given you too much…) you can plant the top part of a root and it should start to grow. It seems to propagate quite easily, in fact it can be difficult to get rid of once it’s established, so make sure it isn’t going to become a weed in the future.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

The Great Unknown

On Friday afternoon I finally decided to venture out into the G.U. Distinctly grotty weather meant painting was out, so no longer had any excuse and I duly set off across Braunston to tackle the flight of locks up to the tunnel, my first attempt at doing broad locks.

The weather seemed to have deterred most of the remaining boaters so I had to do the whole flight pretty much on my own, the only exception being a young lad of about ten or twelve hanging around the bottom lock. Everything seemed to go smoothly enough - open gate, boat into lock, shut gate etc., all without hitting anything or otherwise messing up. The young lad even said he’d close the top gate behind me. Perfect! Well, almost – the last thing I heard as I pulled out of the lock was the kid shouting after me “You’re RUBBISH!”

Eventually, the weather got so bad that I had to stop for the night before legging it (no, not literally, silly!) through the tunnel and on towards Buckby locks.


Braunston Tunnel - it'll look nice when they get the carpet fitted


On my arrival at Buckby Top Lock, I was reassured to find that some things on the Great Unknown are exactly as they are elsewhere. This boat, for example, was pointing north:


Then again, some other things appear slightly different:



There was even a BW work boat that didn’t look as if it had been built out of Lego:



It’s now Monday and I’m parked outside Whilton Marina – always a good place to nick fitout ideas. But the impression I got of Buckby Top Lock is that its primary purpose is as a practical joke for the amusement of the regulars at the nearby Sadist’s Arms. Going down was fine, but getting back up looks distinctly trickier. I think I might just have condemned myself to boating south of Long Buckby from now on, at least until I can learn not to be rubbish...

Sunday 11 July 2010

The best laid plans...

Or “Mushrooms, mushrooms”…

Did I say that Saturday was going to be a rest day in preparation for setting off today into the vast unknown that is the Grand Union? Being a veteran of almost two months’ living aboard now, I really ought to know better than to make such rash predictions.

A gentle morning saunter into the village to get rid of my rubbish seemed harmless enough but then I had to spoil it by going shopping. First I found some (but not quite all) of the electrical bits I wanted. Then I found parts (but not the whole) of the mushroom vents I need. The rest of the day turned into a trek around, punctuated by innumerable breaks for drinks, in search of the bits I couldn’t get in the morning. I finally managed to get the electrical bits but now I have to wait until Thursday for the mushroom vent man to turn up. By the time I got home, it was just starting to get cool enough to start work on painting the roof. I’ve just had a look at it this morning, and it’s not very good, even by my standards. To be honest, I’ve had so little sleep since I got here I’m surprised I can do anything much.

So, no rest on Saturday, and I’m not moving until Thursday at the earliest. Still, as they say, the best laid plans of mice…

Friday 9 July 2010

The Benefits of Insomnia

I’m not alone in enjoying this new location. Tigs has taken to staying out late – a sure sign that she’s comfortable with her surroundings. The only problem is that she tends to get home from work between 2:30 and 3:00 am, which doesn’t give me a lot of time to get much sleep before the sheep start their choir practice, at around 5 o’clock. As a result, I’ve been getting more and more tired and the few jobs I need to do (my first engine service, mostly) seem to have taken much longer than they ought to. Tigs will be confined to quarters tonight, and tomorrow will be a rare rest day for me before I set off for pastures new.

One advantage of this disrupted sleep pattern was that I was awake and able to enjoy the tranquility at around 3:30 this morning. I did my best to capture the scene but again the pictures (even with assistance from Photoshop) failed to rise to the occasion.


Braunston

Having spent nearly a fortnight in what is, even by canal standards, the urban hustle and bustle that is Rugby, I made a point of stopping just short of the first signs of human habitation on the outskirts of Braunston, which turned out to be one of my better decisions. Although this means I have a walk of at least a mile each way to reach any kind of civilisation at all, the reward for me is the most delightful mooring I could wish for. I have yet to take a picture that does justice to it.




For me, what makes this place so special is the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the fields and hedges, giving the impression of an almost total absence of human intervention, as if the entire landscape has been created solely for the benefit of its inhabitants. I am lucky to be able to choose this for a home as I pass through; I can imagine no greater luxury.

Saturday 3 July 2010

One for Paul

That's enough of the serious stuff for now. This post is for my friend Paul, who used to delight in the fact that there was a local firm called the Burnt Oak Timber Company. Well, Paul, you might be interested to learn that about three weeks ago I passed the Stone Boat Building Company...

Heritage (1)

At the beginning of June, I happened to be moored next to two boats, Heron and Jupiter, who were taking part in the Tom Rolt centenary cruise, retracing the route taken by Tom Rolt aboard his boat Cressy in 1939 and described in his book Narrow Boat, published in 1944. I had read this book several moons ago when some of us attempted to start a Canal World reading group. Although this group seemed to struggle and die, I found this book both interesting and challenging.

Rolt depicted the canals of his time and described the changes he saw taking place in a way that was very much of a bygone age but, strangely, still applicable to many aspects of our own times.

He saw the replacement of old skills by modern mass production and the movement of populations into the cities that this brought. He saw this as being indicative of a movement away from an "old" Britain, in which work was a product of people's way of life, towards a "new" Britain, which regarded work simply as a means of making money. The canals, he argued, belong to the old way of life and he regarded their reducing economic importance as a part of an almost inevitable decay of our entire society as we convince ourselves that material wealth is the road to happiness, even if it results in spiritual poverty.

Having taken to the water in search of spiritual rather than material wealth, I can agree with much of his sentiment but there's something that tells me that the idyllic life he imagined contained the seeds of its own downfall. The boaters of his day may have been self-employed, and their boats built using traditional skills that took a lifetime to learn, but the canals themselves, the means by which they earned their living, were run purely for profit. When the canals were no longer profitable, the loss of the spiritual wealth of the communities that relied on them simply never featured in the calculations.

Why have I felt the need to write all this? Apart from the first ten days or so, I have spent most of my time travelling along the Trent and Mersey Canal, following the path taken by Tom Rolt and passing through many towns whose history charts the rise of the industrial revolution and the subsequent decline of manufacturing. Like Tom Rolt, I can appreciate the spiritual value of the skilled work involved in those industries. Unlike him, though, I think this was of little consequence to the relatively small number of people who profited from it.

As a result, I found myself surrounded by what most people would regard as a fantastically rich industrial heritage, but wanting nothing to do with it and yet somehow thinking that I must be missing out on something. I imagine that this will be an important theme, so it will probably be something I'll be returning to from time to time.