Ashton Boatman

Every year there used to be the Tameside Canals Festival on the second weekend in July. I decided to leave my hair and beard uncut until then and get sheared at the festival for sponsorship. As the months passed by I started to look like an old testament prophet.

Plans for the festival weekend became complicated when one of my nephews arranged to get married in Somerset on the Saturday of the festival weekend.

I was living aboard Hazel at the time. She was becoming increasingly difficult to keep afloat. Three days before the Canals Festival she sank. This was both distressing and embarrassing. We really didn't want a sunken boat while the  festival was on.

When I  was at Ellesmere Port many years ago we had a friendly arrangement with the Fire Brigade. They would turn up with pumps, raise the boat and put it down as training.

Nevertheless, I gathered together what pumps I could and hoped for the best.

On the Friday we set up our stall ready. Early in the morning I clad myself in the poshest clothes I could find and set off in the van. I got there in good time to see Robert and Marie wed, but had to be very careful about alcohol consumption at the reception afterwards.

The cab in that old Transit had comfortable seats to sleep on and the sun was quite bright by the time I woke. I drove home, over the high moorland way, and changed into my scruffs.

When I reached Portland Basin I was pleased to see that there was a fire engine on the wharf. They usually put in an appearance at the festival to promote their charity work. 

Even better, I knew one of the firemen. I asked if they'd help us to raise the boat. They couldn't wait to get started. Immediately portable pumps were set up and hoses  rolled out from the appliance.

Ashton Packet Boat Co lent us their Coventry Godiva pump but it was reluctant to work at first,

We were nearly there when a problem cropped up. It was the end of the firemen's shift. They had to return to the station and hand over to another group of firefighters. Most of the water was out but she was still not sitting high enough to stop some serious leaks. The fire brigade were the only ones with equipment that would pump down to the last few inches. If they left immediately there was a real danger that she would go down again, I persuaded them to hang on for another ten minutes. By then we were able to handle the remaining water with a 12 volt submersible pump.

The fire brigade left. I stood on the wharf, soggy and dripping, wondering about my next move.

I was secured to a chair in front of our stall. Spider's wife ( sorry, her name was recorded in a cluster of brain cells that are now deceased) had volunteered for the mammoth task of shearing me.

The sharp eyed may have noticed a boat in the background called Squeers. Why anyone would name their boat after the unscrupulous  proprietor of Dotheboys Hall School escapes me. Anyway the owner of that boat watched our boat raising. He also observed some inebriated spectators drinking strong lager from cans and, for some reason, thought they were part of our crew. That evening he went on to a waterways forum and railed against the Wooden Canal Boat Society, saying that we were a load of drunken layabouts and if we ever got that boat restored he'd show his whatsit on the town hall steps.

We're still waiting, and will wait in vain as I've been told that the gentleman concerned has since given an account of his wrongdoings to St Peter. It demonstrates the folly of jumping to conclusions, then going online and sharing them. Of course, it may have done our charity some reputational damage. I know it did when somebody spread a rumour that we were funding the boats by drug dealing. However silly the rumour, some people will believe it and pass it on.

I don't know if anyone has noticed but I've been rather quiet so  far this year. The Happy New Year greetings had barely faded into the void when I was struck down by nasty flu virus. Emuna was determined not to catch it so I was banished to the spare bedroom. She  gingerly pushed food and drink through the door and carefully disinfected anything that I'd touched.

By 7th January I was beginning to feel better. I was declared no longer a biohazard on the 8th and allowed to get up and do the washing up. I thought I'd return to work on the boats on the following day.

At about 1pm I suddenly decided to leave the washing up and go through into the living room. I forget why. As I walked through the dining room my right leg suddenly gave way. I grabbed a dining chair with my left arm to avoid falling on the floor. I soon realised that my right arm was limp and useless. It began to dawn on me that I was having a stroke.

Emuna was upstairs so I called her. The sound that came out of my mouth was unfamiliar to me. She came downstairs and I explained in my distorted voice that my arm and leg weren't working. I realised, to my horror, that I was dribbling.

Em said "I think you might be having a stroke". "Corse I'm avin a bloody sthroke" I blurted, "Geranambulance". Emuna dialed 999. The operator said she'd make me top priority but we may have to wait 50 minutes.

I was still clinging to a dining chair so Em fetched her wheelchair. Between us we managed to manoeuvre me into it.

The ambulance arrived in 15 minutes, along with 2 cheerful and efficient ambulancemen. They carried out the necessary checks to ensure  that I would survive the journey, then wheeled me up the ramp into the ambulance, still on Em's wheelchair. She followed on with her stick and we were all strapped in.

I'd never thought much about strokes. I'd imagined that my risk was pretty low. Here are two things I didn't know about them. For an older person like me the risk of one quadruples after a bout of flu. When you've had one your emotions become amplified and sometimes uncontrollable.

Emuna is good at humour, we share a sense of it. She tried to cheer me up. Consequently, as the ambulance rushed through traffic, sirens blaring, I was laughing fit to burst.

They took us to Stepping Hill hospital at Stockport, the main stroke facility in our area. I was rapidly wheeled through corridors. When we entered the stroke unit the staff immediately went into action. It was like a well ordered military operation. I was fitted with a canula, checked over, taken to have my head scanned, about time some would say, then, when the doctors were satisfied that they understood my condition, thrombolised. This is when they pump a cocktail of drugs into you via the canula to break up the blood clot and prevent further damage. The sooner this is done after a stroke the less damage is likely to occur. I was lucky. I later  met someone who had been lying on the floor for 2 days and 2 nights before he was found.

We were taken to a side room to await a bed allocation. The staff were clearly busy. One nurse said it was the busiest  day she could remember. We wondered if it was linked to the flu that had been going round, from which some patients were clearly still suffering. I was thirsty, but every time  I asked for a drink I was told they had to check that I could swallow first. Another thing I didn't know was that strokes often take away one's swallowing reflex. Food or drink will go straight into the lungs.

Eventually a nurse found enough time to check my swallow reflex, then make me a cup of coffee.

I was moved to a ward and started to remember how congenitally uncomfortable hospital beds are. Em had an adventurous bus journey home in a blizzard, including tentatively descending a long,dark, deserted and icy flight of stone steps when changing buses in central Stockport. Later that night I was moved to another ward and settled down for a restless night. The natural discomfort of the bed made worse by the fact that my right arm and leg were just immovable dead lumps of meat.

As I blinked into wakefulness after a fitful night's sleep I started to realise how lightly I'd been let off. Several people had tubes feeding them through their noses. Some were confused and would pull out their tubes, bleating constantly for water, which they couldn't have. On the second night a man came in who was so connfused that he thought the nurses were attacking him. The little movement I had in my leg meant that I could walk with two people supporting me. 

A big moustached South Asian man came to scrub me to within an inch of my life, He looked like he would be more at home riding a white charger across a desert wielding an immense bejewelled sword. 

The doctors on their rounds were like the United Nations. The head doctor reminded me of Henry Kissinger, partly his looks but particularly his East European accent. Other doctors included a very tall young Sikh, a beautiful Muslim woman wearing a hijab and a colourful dress and a smart young African man. Thank God for immigration.

I've heard it said by my more right wing friends that nurses spend lots of time drinking tea and chatting. I've never seen that. On the stroke wards they are rarely still. Their shifts are 12 hours and they rarely get a break from the constant demands of patients.

Hospital food is not wonderful, though, to be fair, it's improved since last time I was in. Nevertheless, there was still too much refined starch and sugar to be healthy. Em visited every other day. A friend started bringing her. She brought wholemeal sandwiches with tasty and healthy fillings, bagels, fruit and sugar free cake. I got visits from therapists, speech, occupational and physio. I was given tongue twisters to practice. I was taken for a walk the length of the ward.

I'd been promised a transfer to Tameside, nearer for Em. The problem was finding a bed, then finding an ambulance to take me. Suddenly, one night, two young ambulancewomen appeared at my bed to whisk me away. As we travelled I enjoyed intelligent conversation about life, the universe and everything with the young Northern Irish woman who sat in the back with me while her colleague drove.

At Tameside it was a similar routine. The man opposite me was pretty much totally paralysed, though he could eat if spoon fed. Others were nil by mouth and some were deeply confused. The daily doctors round was similarly diverse, though less colourful. Three of the chief nurses were little Indian women, so similar that they could have been sisters.

Each day I looked forward to physiotherapy. Very soon I was able to walk to the gym with a quad stick. I was soon moved to a room of my own. After one night I was moved back because someone came in who needed to be isolated because of an infection. After a few more nights I went back to the single room. It seems the infected patient, who was nil by mouth, had been crawling out of bed and trying to drink from the sink. I enjoyed having my own space where I could practice moving about without well meaning nurses intervening.

It was lovely having visitors, with one proviso. Having a stroke makes you tire easily. Having visitors is tiring. One day I had thee visitors. I enjoyed seeing them all, but I was shattered by the end of the day. I felt sorry for some people who had hordes of family visiting all day. I know that sounds ungrateful, but that's. how it is. 6 weeks after the stroke, I still have to conserve my energy.

At last, after about a month, I was released. I'm waiting for some rails to be fitted by the stairs but my walking has got good enough that I can carefully move around the house. My arm is making less progress but I'm confident that I'll get it back eventually.

I wonder how much this would have cost in America!

People keep asking me when Hazel will be back in service. I had hoped by the end of the month, but, with only a week to go that's looking a bit unlikely. People wonder why it's taking so long. Here's my excuses.

1)   I keep being diverted on to other tasks. It would be nice if there were more volunteers to do the other tasks. It would be even nicer if they were self organising volunteers. A lot of the time I end up spending more time explaining how to do a job, finding tools and materials and checking its being done properly than it would take me to do it myself. I'm also still spending a day every week running the shop so that Christine can have a much needed day off.

2) I'm doing the job properly and carefully. The electrical cupboard was rather thrown together when it was first made as we were under pressure to get the boat into service. Whilst getting the boat back into service is important now, I intend the work that I'm doing to outlast me. I reckon that Hazel will need a comprehensive renovation sometime around 2045. It should last until then. It's conceivable that I'll still be around then, aged 92, but I won't be doing much boatbuilding.

3) I'm insisting on having a day off every week. Well, sort of. I've chosen Wednesday, so that I can attend Latihan, but most Wednesdays I seem to spend catching up with office work and writing.

4)  I put a brave face on it but I'm still not very well. I get tired easily. I put it down to Long Covid. Whatever it is, it's a blasted nuisance.

Anyway, having got my excuses in first, what have we been doing? Nessie has largely repainted the interior. Currently he's putting trims round the windows where we've bulked up the insulation (because of hot summers rather than cold winters). The trim is made of strips of copper cut from an old hot water tank that was donated as scrap. The extended central heating is nearly ready to be tested. The LiFePo batteries are now charging off the sun and running all the electrics. I'm just finishing off the woodwork around the electricity cupboard, which will now include shelf space for tools etc, and more accessible fuses, switches etc. 

The windows.

The electrical cupboard.

On Friday I collected some redundant advertising panels donated by Tameside Council. These had been round the market area while it was being revamped, a process that was delayed by the collapse of Carillion and then by the pandemic. They're made of tough plastic sandwiched between thin layers of aluminium. They'll be very useful for re-roofing "Southam" and are an environmental positive by being re-used rather than sent to landfill and then new materials having to be ripped from the Earth.

I tried to unload them and get them stacked on "Southam"s roof on my own, but discomfort from my catheter suggested I'd better stop. I later discovered that I'd taped it a bit too tightly to my leg, so certain movements were pulling it.

On Saturday morning Nessie and Aaron helped me to stack the panels. Aaron then helped to shift some bags of engineered wood flooring that have been donated. I'm not sure what we'll do with these but I'm fairly sure they'll come in useful.

Well! That was a strange morning!

Yesterday as I tried to tidy up  the boatyard every movement was a major effort. I struggled to lift things that I normally find easy and I ached in every muscle like I'd been trampolined by elephants. The day before I'd had a bit of a cough, and M had been coughing too.

I began to wonder if we had the virus.

This morning I woke up and reluctantly started to get ready for the day. I was supposed to be meeting a couple of young lads who have volunteered for online selling.

I really didn't feel well and normal simple tasks seemed a huge effort. I found climbing the stairs a little daunting, and it left me puffing slightly. That's not me!

M woke up, coughing. "It's the cold air" she said "Close the window". I closed the window but she was feeling rough and already thinking of postponing her day's tasks.

"Perhaps we should have a test" I suggested. I wasn't really that keen about it, and M was quite fearful. We started to discuss the pros and cons as we sat in bed drinking coffee.

Back in March we had felt much the same. We considered going for a test then but it seemed pointless. We were locked down and not seeing anyone so there wasn't much chance of spreading it.

M has M E (or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and I am coming off hormone treatment for prostate cancer. These things could explain how we felt. Another possibility is that we did have it back in March (or earlier, we felt ill around Christmas and they're finding evidence of cases back to December now). Many people suffer post Covid fatigue, perhaps it was that.

We discussed the implications of a positive test. Troublesome to say the least. However, though ignorance may be blissful, it doesn't stop you infecting other people, some of whom may be even more vulnerable than us. The clincher was the fact that yesterday I had been with someone who told me he was going to visit his mother next week for her 90th birthday. I really don't want the responsibility of causing an old lady's death. Some may say 'well, she's had a good innings', but it's only 23 years until I'm 90 and I'm pretty sure that if I get there I'll be hoping for another 23+ years. Let's look after our older folk, none of us is getting any younger.

M went online to find testing centres. The nearest one was Oldham. It had a 'phone number, but it didn't work! The other ones said you had to book, but had no contact details. I fired up my laptop and went a different route via Tameside Council. This led me to a long long online form, which I filled in for myself, then had to do it all again for M. They sent us a QR code to our phones and email addresses. My 'phone is a brick and doesn't do this clever stuff but I got a long series of numbers from the email and wrote them in a notebook.

We had elected to get tested at the Etihad. For foreigners who do not follow football this is the Manchester City stadium. Our choice of venue does not imply any allegiance to this particular team. Our appointment was at 10AM, so we had nearly an hour to get up, get dressed and drive 4 miles.

We arrived at the appropriate car park spot on 10. I had anticipated a queue of vehicles, but we were the only one. Signs told us to keep our windows closed. At the first checkpoint a man held up a notice asking for a QR code. I showed him the numbers in my notebook. He laughed and waved us on.

We followed a lane marked out with masses of traffic cones to another checkpoint. Not sure what the point of that one was as they just stopped us then waved us through. The lane of cones continued. Every now and then we passed someone in a yellow vest who waved us by and gave us a thumbs up. The lane curved into the main car park. A line of big tents was set up across the middle of it with lots of people in hi viz clothing standing about. I saw one other car driving into one of the tents. M remarked on the post apocalyptic nature of the scene.

The cones snaked around the edge of the car park and led to another tented checkpoint. Here our identities were checked, though we didn't need the passports we'd been told to bring, and we were asked if we'd like to take the swabs ourselves or have them taken for us. I wasn't bothered but M wanted them to do the swabbing. Her rationale was that if they did it it was more likely to be done properly.

Driving on, we came to another tent, on its own and separate from the line of tents in the middle of the car park. Here we were asked to wind down our windows. A cheerful nurse called Chris stuck a swab into the back of my throat, twice, then another to the back of my nose, which made me sneeze. His colleague then did the same for M. She didn't mind the nose swab but struggled with the throat one.

That was it. We each had a card bearing a barcode as a souvenir. We drove home to await the results.

I'm quite amazed that the testing facility is seeing so little use. It's not like the virus has gone away. Liberal though I am most of the time, if I ruled the world I'd have compusory testing for as many people as possible. The only way to tackle this virus is to stamp it out. If a single person remains infected then it can flare up again, like a single match lodged in a haystack.

The test wasn't traumatic (and our presence relieved the boredom a little for all those yellow jacketed attendants. If you're not sure, go and get a test.

September 30th was the 10th birthday of Tameside Radio and they chose to celebrate it by having a ride on our boats. On Friday 29th we got the boats ready and took "Forget me Not", "Hazel" and "Lilith" down to Fairfield. Some people from the radio station joined us in the morning and we set off. This went a bit embarrassingly. I put "Forget me Not" into gear and turned the speedwheel, but it stayed on tickover. A nut had dropped off the linkage and disappeared into the bilge. I rigged up a length of string to control the engine. The boats were now all over the place but I tried to start off again. Immediately she picked up something big on the blade. After a lot of struggling I got it off, it was a big thick onesy. We got going at last with the 3 boats in a train. "Forget me Not" pulled well. I connected the bit of string to the cabin slide so if you pull the slide back t speeded up and push  it forward to slow down. It worked well.

I was aware that arriving at Portland Basin with 3 boats would be tricky and there would be a lot of eyes on us. It turned out to be busier than I anticipated as it was also the official launch of "Community Spirit 2" so there were lots of civic dignitaries about. As we came into the basin I signalled to Tom, steering "Hazel" to throw off "Lilith"s towline. Aaron shafted "Lilith" across the basin to breast up to "Southam" while we breasted "Forget me Not" and "Hazel" and tied on the towpath side. As soon as we were stopped "Community Spirit 2" came through, loaded with dignitaries.

Terry the Lion appeared to present us with a cheque for Marple and Romiley Lions Club's annual sponsorship. along with a plaque celebrating their long term support. We were interviewed on radio, photographed, then spent a bit of time meeting different people and showing them round the boat, before setting off with just "Hazel" in tow to work up the 3 locks to Stayley Wharf.

It's rare to work up these locks with adequate water. This time all the weirs were running hard and we didn't even stem up in Whitelands Tunnel. At Stayley Wharf we winded the pair and tied up. Our guests left and we stopped for a brew before setting off back down to Portland Basin. The trip went very smoothly with everyone working co-operatively with little need for advice.

We had had some problems getting "Lilith" out of the arm ready for this trip. The water level had dropped, leaving her sitting on something solid. I didn't want to put her back in the arm so we dropped "Hazel" alongside "Lilith" and I put "Forget me Not in the arm alongside "Still Waters", the trip boat.

Sunday 1st October was recycling day. I was concerned that we might not get enough people as the weather forecast was bad. In fact the weather was mostly OK and we had a good team, including several new people. Everything went smoothly and we got quite a good haul. A couple of good days.

I didn't take many photos but these are they.

The 3 boats waiting at Portland Basin to set of for Droylsden.

The 3 boats at Fairfield.

Too

We did a trip with "Hazel" from Portland Basin to Lumb Lane and Back for People First Tameside on May 31st. Here are some pictures. Everybody enjoyed it.