There are lots of fascinating things to see, smell and trawl for, on the Birmingham Canal Navigations. This booklet will show you some of the more amazing sights of the BCN. Score as many points as you can, and don’t forget to send your completed book to Big Chief I-Spy (aka the Duke of Edinburgh) and you will receive either the coveted Gold Award, or a manky old tachograph disc, whichever comes to hand first.

An Accommodation

You need one of these in order to get completely trolleyed (see: trolleys) on Friday and Saturday nights and not have to drive home. Here’s a typical one: a 1950s/60s/70s school in Tipton, in which youngsters are expected to grow into upright citizens, having spent their youth in a brutalist concrete box being reminded of courtesy, respect, and always wearing a condom. This accommodation is warm and has strange showers which are surprisingly satisfying.

How utterly incomprehensible were the directions to your accommodation? Score 25pts

Base Camp

This is where you meet up with all your chums and sign on to the work site. Here you will find a leader (see: leaders) and an assortment of British Waterways staff with cool Brummie and Black Country accents. There might also be boats belching odd smoke, some big hoppers full of scrap (see: trolleys) and possibly, a Wolf.

How many unsuspecting locals signed on at your base camp, and how many brought their own kebs? Score 25pts

How many actually came back on Sunday? Score 750pts

Leaders

You need these in order to know what you are doing, when you are doing it, and when you are allowed to go and have some tea. Here are some examples:

Aileen: This is the site leader who gets everybody to the right place at the right time and then gets them all to sign on to site and to sign for borrowed BW tools (see: tools). Aileen is the link between the BW folks and the volunteers, and warns you not to get shot when you go out to site.

Score 50pts for spotting Aileen’s make-up on site

DrEd (mouse slayer) and Moose (Mr Moose to you): These are the zone leaders, and their job is look after a specific part of the site and ensure that you don’t actually get shot, or even injured in a normal kind of way, like having a grappling hook (see: tools) swing straight into your shins during your first half hour on site.

Which zone leader were you working with? Score 50pts for DrEd and 250pts for Moose (or else he’ll rip your nuts off)

Tools

The main tool used on the BCN (other than BW blokes and boats) is of course the ubiquitous grappling hook. The reason for this ubiquitousness is that whenever you turn around or try to hook something with your grappling hook, someone else’s will somehow get in the way.

How many hooks and ropes did your group get hopelessly entangled, and was any of the original colour of the rope still visible by lunchtime on Saturday?

Score 25pts per hopelessly entangled rope and hook

Crap

This is the whole point of the exercise. You get more points for the more outlandish/filthy/heavy thing or things that you drag out of the canal. Don’t forget that if you are in Moose’s zone, the quality of the crap always seems to be higher (the rotter). Here are some of the things you might just catch on your grappling hook:

Car Parts: Particular to the West Midlands is the BCN approach to building a kit-car. You fish various parts of several cars out of the oily water and attempt (a) to identify the car of origin and (b) build a whole one before the bits get chucked into the BW working boat.

What sort of car originally contained the parts you dredged up?

Score 75pts if Mk2 immediately identified the exact make, model and year of the car, and 250pts if Mk2 wasn’t on your zone, but you managed to at least work out that it was maybe a Japanese 4x4.

Trolleys: These devices fulfil two main purposes: (a) to convey shopping from a supermarket to a parked car (see: car parts) and (b) to be chucked into the canal in order to make navigation hazardous. Trolleys, of course, breed ferociously in canal, especially if the alpha male bread-crate trolley is also present. One lock can contain as many as five trolleys, but surprisingly, none ever seem to still contain the £1 coin.

Which supermarket (not mentioning ASDA by name) did your trolleys come from?

Score 25pts per ASDA trolley, 50pts per any other trolley, an extra 20pts per pound coin remaining. Deduct 20pts per missing wheel.

Old Tools: A popular thing to fish out is a tool from a previous Clean-Up, or something which once cleaned up a bit, can be re-used. Grappling hooks will re-appear, and Martin will no doubt add another bicycle to Fulbourne’s inventory.

How useful was your tool?

Score 25pts for fishing out a grappling hook or a keb. Score 50pts for still using the bicycle you fished out last year.

Miscellaneous bits of crap and nicked stuff: This category will include bicycles, motorbikes, tyres (of all sizes and types) and the usual selection of roadworks and sunken vegetation.

How much black, slimy sludgy stuff seeped out of your pieces of miscellaneous crap?

Score 20pts for just all over your site boots and 100pts for so much it formed its own little support network and starting having a black, slimy, sludgy stuff coffee morning right there on the towpath.

Specialist and/or unique bits of dumped stuff: This category will include anything that doesn’t come out of the canal in large numbers.

What kinds of weird things did you drag out besides the usual items?

Score 50pts for a TV set

Score 500pts for a Pentium 4 PC, which is more up to date than the machine this report is being written on

Score 100pts for a cooker of any kind and 200pts for a fridge

Score 100pts for a keyboard weighing so much it might be made of concrete

Score 100pts for a working pogo stick

Score 200pts for a ceramic toilet

Score 50pts for a bikini top or bra and score 500pts for finding the other half of the outfit (this being Topless Tipton, of course). Score an additional 500pts for knowing the cup size

Score 750pts for dragging up the entire bottom of an old speedboat (“just look at what you could have won”)

But be careful…

Deduct 50pts if you turned around to see a local kid chucking whatever you just dragged out back into the canal

Deduct 25pts if you went and thoroughly washed your hands and then decided to take your site jacket off

Deduct 25pts if you wanted the minibus driver to pick you up but waited under the bridge ‘ole where he can’t see you

Big Dinner

This is what happens when you return to the accommodation (see: accommodation), weary after a day’s hard grappling. A nice surprise is the big dinner coinciding with someone’s 50th birthday (congratulations, Lesley!) and there being not just sausages, mash, onion gravy, swede, carrots and peas all served up by Jude and Ellie, but also a choice of three partyesque puddings (rice pud, choccy something and trifle with real strawberries!) and candles, one of which is in Lesley’s dollop of mash.

How long did you spend touring Wolverhampton in the minibus looking for an open offie, to return only for the last line of ‘Happy Birthday’?

Score 50pts for each time your beer stash clinked on the speed bumps

Score 200pts if you actually remembered to buy some beer/wine BEFORE the event and bring it with you

Evening Entertainment

This is what happens after the big dinner and is generally done on a DIY basis. Opportunities to score abound.

Score 25pts for having seconds of at least one of the puddings.

Score 75pts for having cheese and biscuits sometime after 1am.

Score 20pts for spotting Mike Palmer asleep with his head on the table just after dinner.

Score 20pts for WhichChris looking up an internet clubbing guide on his whizzy mobile telephone just to prove that there is indeed a club in Sheffield called Bed, only to find that it has closed.

Score 100pts for Frank, acquiring a page of the BW blokes’ Stihl Products Girlie Calendar (featuring a lightly-oiled and scantily-clad female holding a Stihl chainsaw) and getting as many people as possible to sign the back of the poster to Tenko, who is recovering from serious illness. Score an extra 100pts if you looked at the picture and actually noticed the chainsaw…

Eventually, everyone finally tires out and goes to bed only to find that (a) they are going to slow-roast overnight because the heating system has been left on and (b) the lighting circuits are so convoluted that it is impossible to turn the lights on in the loo without fully illuminating at least one of the dorms.

How did you find your way to the toilet? Score 50pts for avoiding wet feet.

And finally…

To complete your booklet, you will need to spot those who made it happen.

Score 1000pts for Aileen putting it all together

Score a zillion points for Jude and Ellie cooking up a storm in a compact and bijou facility.

Score 750pts for BW blokes, Claire the BW PR (who makes good tea), several senior BW visitors and model BW vans which made nice (and collectable?) souvenirs.

Score 500pts for a Vaughan-quality risk assessment including the need to “recognise rodents” (score an additional 50pts per rat and 250 pts for being a mouse slayer).

Score 250pts for drivers doing ferry runs between sites in increasingly smelly minibuses, Just Jen bringing the cooker from Lichfield (and Alice from Sheffield) and James (newly-qualified minibus licence holder) and DrEd (newly-qualified mouse slayer) for other van and trailer shenanigans. Score an additional 25pts per time that DIG-SAD’s tachograph tried to eat your disc.

Score 100pts for Phoenix, Bittell, Wolf and crews and scrap-hauling lorries operated by someone called Brian.

“See you next year on the BCN”, says Mk2.

And from the leader...

Many thanks to all those hardy folk who braved the chilly weather to go fishing on the Walsall Canal of the Birmingham Canal Navigations. Great were the hauls and black were the WRGies, but it was a very productive weekend, and British Waterways and future boaters of the length of canal are grateful. BW will let us know the final total of tonnage retrieved from the depths after collecting the rest of the rubbish you pulled out the next morning, assuming the locals hadn’t tipped it back in by then. So great was the amount of rubbish that not a lot of distance was covered. Another time?

BW officials joined us each day to help and see how it all worked (and it did). It was good to see so many locals of all ages join us, maybe some future WRGies there, including perhaps Peter Smedley who came to collect his parents Sunday lunchtime.

Special thanks go to  the great catering team of Jude and Ellie, with some assistance from Tess. Not only was the food good but they also made a gooey chocolate cake for Lesley’s birthday. Also to drivers Mark II, Sleepy Dave and Daddy Cool, Martin for paperwork, runarounds Ed and James Butler for collecting and returning van, kit and cooker, Ed (again) and Moose for being able Zone leaders and, of course, to your good selves for all your hard work.

Aileen Butler

PS have just heard from BW that it was 7 skips = 27 tonnes of rubbish.