Things aren't what they used to be.....

I hope I've beaten foxy here....

Is the canal scene less friendly ? Remember cwdf not so log ago , the biggest canal forum on the net , was not excactly a love fest was it , I began to meet to many people along the canals that seemed to have the mindset of many people on that site , sold the boat before I ended up throwing some moaning twat in the cut , not paying their way , their boat is very untidy and the most outrageous was a suggestion that people who lived aboard with a couple of children should be reported to social services , why I don't know , I talked to both parents said hello to the children who loved the canal and boating but it seems that seeing others happy really gets the miserable bastards down.

Things are what they used to be in that the canals reflect a microcosm of life in general. When general attitudes change, so does canal culture. Yes there seems to be more selfishness and ignorance around, but there are still some lovely people on the cut. Me, for instance.

I think that what has changed is that for a brief period under BW, linear housing estates were allowed to proliferate, but that was a new phenomena in the 80s and 90s. (1980s and 1990s, in case you were wondering). It wasn’t prevalent before that. Now it is getting harder to live on a linear housing estate  / hippy colony/ aquatic squat due to CRT’s enforcement of “the rules”. So those moaning about their losses have very short memories and/or no knowledge of what happened before their freeloading lives.

I believe there has been the odd altercation in recent  times at places like Fradley. Canals and boating have always had miserable sods on them and boatmen who didn’t give way to anyone. One boatman with a bolinder engine used to stop above a lock or below a lock and leave the gates open and the paddle gear up any noise and in the engine hole where the blow lamp was left ticking over and away they went. We used to try and creep up and get ahead of him but it only made for bad feeling so didn’t bother. Most were very helpfull to us amateurs but the odd one would have loved a fight. I went over to the continent in 2000 because to me things were just to busy and the shining boat brigade had no concept of  why we had an old commercial boat and no idea of what we had all done to try and keep the waterways open and  worked to reopen closed waterways. Now the same thing is happening there with an influx of mega buck Pipers pretend barges brought by people as their first boat but who have read the book and know everything. They don’t talk to us uns with genuine old barges but only to each other.
thats enough but really it’s good to be a grumpy old sod anyway.