Ditch crawling!

Ditch crawling - a phrase I have heard on numerous occasions to describe canal boating. I know it is used as a phrase of endearment but somehow it grates on me! It seems to epitamise the dis-respect for the history and heritage of the past and the hard lives of the old working boat men. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't correct anyone who uses it and at the end of the day, I guess I'm just as guilty in using 'derrogitary' phrases to describe cabin cruises and other such boating related areas but I just don't like being referred to as a 'ditch crawler'!!

On a more serious note, the death of Mike Stevens is still permeating through the boating community. His arrival at my school when we held the Save Our Waterways campaign meetings was always an enthusiastically anticipated event and guaranteed to liven up the assembled group. I am grateful for the picture in my previous post which was taken by Keith Langston of Towpath Talk. Towpath Talk seems to now be an excellent source of on-line news and rivals many other waterway news sites. Well worth a visit and a look to keep in touch - the only negative is that it doesn't appear to host an RSS feed and so has to be manually visited every time you want to catch up rather than simply landing on your plate!

OK, enough of this - I'm off to explore Facebook. I've heard so much talk about it and some of my staff at school used it today to transfer pictures and files between home and school as well as to chat socially so I was promptedto go and investigate just to satisfy my own curiosity!