The Canal & River Trust Ltd

Ian Hutson

…after sending me a threatening email on the 23rd of December 2020 have changed their minds, at the end of April 2021. I can pay for my boat licence without the promised ‘trouble’.

I have received a very nice letter of comprehensive apology, and an offer of fifty quid from C&RT Public funds as a token thereof (which I have declined because a., I’m not that cheap and b., the canal infrastructure needs all of the money it can get or keep, and diverting any to me – or to any other non-canal issue – would not be right). I am told that email wordings will be changed, procedures reviewed and that when I clickez-vous on the C&RT website to forkez-moi over mon moolah I will not be met with resistance.

Splendid. What a lot of wholly unnecessary fuss, nonsense and stress, but at least now, for this year, tis done with.

My sincere thanks to the gentleman who put a lid on it.

Biscay was rough, as usual, but unless we go by train there’s no other way to get the Cardinal to Venice.

Just f.y.i., for anyone else heading this way, the Elsan Point in St Mark’s Square is out of action, and the bins are full.

In other gnus we’ve just had the most splendid early-May weather here for a couple of days. Cold, coupled with blasting winds and lashing rain. There’s nothing like a good lash. Today – this morning at least – is forecast (and appears to be) much more civilised, but then we’re back to the early North-Atlantic summer weather again. Mr Stove has been back on full duty and will, later this day, be cooking up a pot of Bloke Curry (made from whatever I can find in the fridge that hasn’t yet developed its own civilisation, and a jar of Patak’s Lazy Git Finest). I’ll add a few Hutson touches to the recipe and then cook it until the spoon dissolves and it declares itself ready to mangez.

Heck, if the weather sets in again I may even eat it in front of a celebratory airing of Master & Commander this evening.

Now I must away and file all of those emails, transcripts and wotnots, j.i.c.

Then I can put the sandbags and the tin hat away until the next time I have to try to do business with a total Arsenal Villa are doing awfully well this season, are they not?

Chin-chin.

Ian H., & Cardinal W., &etc.

25 Comments

  1. Bravo, sir, bravo!!! 😀 … good to hear you turned down the bribe, for that’s exactly what it was. And you’re right fifty quid would’ve pleased Mr Stove mightily, in the coal replenishing department, but really, any true compensation would’ve been ten times that much, at least. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    1. My logic is that if you break a window and throw ten quid through it you’ve still got a broken window (one that can’t be mended, only replaced – and my time can’t be replaced, nor the stress mended). What really boils my bile is bully corporations – and most especially as here with C&RT, unelected, awarded a monopoly, and (now) with total disregard for their true customer base – being wholly aware of the imbalance of power and not only using it but enjoying using it. Forget governments, they’re old hat; human wars now are fought between (and here’s a weird term) crowds of disenfranchised individuals (a crowd of individuals?) and corporations of all sizes.

      The optimistic point is that corporations rely on physical infrastructure and ownership, crowds really need only Molotov Cocktails.

      Liked by 2 people

  2. Glad you had the apology.
    I wouldn’t have touched the money either….on the grounds that it is a drop in the ocean compared with the time wasted by paid staff of the tyre drowners in being being A – obstructive and B – obnoxious. Wouldn’t buy my learned friend a glass of wine.
    All in favour of crowd funding reform of Westminster by physical means. Put me down for a fully loaded Lancaster.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I wonder sometimes if the return of hunting with hounds might not be in order – not with foxes, of course, but with the sitting incumbents of Westminster. Release one each weekend during the season, blow the horn and let the chase begin… It’s either that or we send the beaters in one door and position the guns and loaders (and a decent lunch a la Ruth Mott) at the other…

      Liked by 2 people

  3. That is, indeed, excellent news. I hope the plans for the rest of the live aboard evictions got nixed as well. It seems like they found a brain in a drawer in the office. If they found a heart with it, maybe all will be well for everyone.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It is indeed a weight off the old donkey, but I fear that I merely stumbled into a pocket of the exceptiona rather than discovered a new leaf for the whole of C&RT Corporate – as a body they’re as daft as ever!

      Liked by 2 people

  4. I wonder how much compensation the execs would want for so many months of stress and the threat to their way of life and home?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. At a guess I’d say that the initial (“enforcement”) chap – the one with the surfeit of obduracy and the inadequacy of everything else – had swallowed directorial policy hook, line and sinker. There was no human element, no human interaction to be had, and I don’t know whether he wears spectacles or not but he obviously had no need of a window in his office, being utterly uninterested in the real world as he was. When the complaint reached a second stage and an unrelated manager the response could not have been more different.

      I’d pay good money to see the first guy barricaded in his home with a Council Demolition JCB idling outside and half a dozen R Souls from “District Enforcement Ltd” waving paper in the air. Very good money indeed. 😉

      Liked by 2 people

    1. The initil C&RT wallah, the one who stretched this nonsense out for four months, seemed to place total faith in the (wildly ill-targetted and wholly inadequate) “spotting” system – even during a year of “pandemic” with half of the staff on furlough and the other half on reduced rounds. Had there not been a mechanism to engage a “someone else” in place of this chap I’d be arguing still (and the initial chap did everything that he could to prevent my invocation of their own process).

      Never really fully understood monetary arrangments, I am much happier to have just been able to highlight the (initial) numptiness and to argue long and hard enough to not fall victim to its mindless machinations. I wonder how many folk (of necessity) just accept the silliness and work around it instead of through it. With (now) (one exception, to my knowledge) C&RT Corporate really does need a Size Parliamentary Boot up the fundament, and swiftly.

      Liked by 2 people

  6. Excellent result your eminence.
    Did you miss out on the massive hail storm which had last evening and again this morning. Bathing in glorious sunshine now but still only 9c. The stove is on tickover and ready for full throttle again this evening. T T F N

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Hailstones here too but only an ordinary-level smattering of them. This freezing-warm-freezing-warm weather is a roght royal pain in the stove! I slept too well to keep the stove in properly last night and this morning as I type this my nose is complaining of frostbite.

      Like

    1. I thought long and hard about that but it would still stain my fingers on the way through my pocket. I have donated a matching amount to the fund-raiser. C&RT, kind offer though it was, as a corporation do already spend far too much public money on non-canal related things, I can’t with a clean conscience (well – clean-ish!) encourage that. I have to take them at their word on the changes to the emails and review of procedures and hope that fewer people may now be treated to similar abuse.

      Mind you, tbh, I never could hold my breath for long! 😉

      Liked by 1 person

  8. Well, well, that is a bit of satisfying news. It does seem Letters and Complaints do eventually result in Action Taken. Pity your Weather isn’t so willing to implement a volte-face towards agreeability. Fickle world we live in.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. It is indeed a strange world – one of randomness and chaos, in which we Hoomans appear to have evolved with some desperate need to seek order and meaning, neither of which really exist. I do wonder if we really did evolve in this environment (seems more likely to me to have been a Petri dish in some laboratory)!

      Tis one thing off my back and that is reet gradely. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

  9. I’m pleased you’ve got your license and sorted the Wellmess Trust. But this May weather is just stupid. This is the first time ever I remember that I’ve not even considered getting out my summer clothes. And the heating is still on in the house. Temperatures not above 12 of the Celcius variety. Summer had better be brilliant or someone must pay! I blame the Government.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. It isn’t the warmest May on record, that’s for sure. Blasting winds and rain and hailstones. I suspect that we are in for a year of cheap, second-hand weather… but just in case I have stocks of logs and coal, AND a new mosquito net… 😉

      Liked by 2 people

  10. Good news on the threat front! I had the same experience, after threats of debt collectors for the £30 (inflated to £80+ after charging me for every threatening letter and text) because I cancelled the direct debit for my car insurance (due to no longer having a car I was unable to use for three years). It took them six months to send me the final statement (with £0 balance). When you consider just how many communications we get from scam people pretending to be utility companies etc. it gets harder to see the difference between them and the realones. I admire your integrity re the offer (read bribe not to sue) – do we really need such prolonged stress given what we have to cope with in general?

    Liked by 3 people

    1. In my lifetime all of this supposed focus on “customer” “service” has served only to alienate the customers and decrease the level of service – giant corporations were first with the non-human nonsense, and now even the riff-raff like The Watery Wellness Trust Ltd are in on the act. I wasn’t kidding a while ago when I theorised that the change from ‘Personnel Department’ to ‘Human Resources’ brought about the despicable way that employees are treated these days – and that it’ll be ‘Customer Resources’ soon enough. The individual is being erased from the machinery of human society.

      While fifty quidlings would be a welcome addition to the budget it would have been money that was far too expensive… I’ll keep my integrity instead thanks. 😉

      Liked by 2 people

  11. I no longer try to follow English football or Rugger. The buggers lost me when they went for the money and allowed themselves to become slaves to “owners.”
    But back in the day…I followed Spurs. At home, I am a Waikato girl. Internationally? Terribly torn between Wales and All Blacks. Probably accounts for my wine consumption!
    Oh, well done on sorting the CRT boffins. Westminster next?

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I wish Ian would take on the clowns at Westminster. He might get somewhere.
      How they got in, I wondered, but then I heard a woman say she’d voted for dear old Boris because he’s ‘fun’! Should funness be a requisite for running the country? So that explains everything.
      I’ve been saying people are getting more stupid by the day.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Human society becomes more and more akin to Raspberryade with each passing day – sickly sweet, full of saccharine and fit for nothing more than a belching contest.

        Liked by 2 people

    2. I used to enjoy spectretating the rugby and – oddly – Australian Rules football (not that I knew the rules), but haven’t seen a match in years. It’s all amatewer dramatics these days. That said, I’ve only ever seen one football match where everything clicked and I could see what was going on – usually it’s just blokes running hither and thither. No idea why that one match clicked, and it hasn’t happened since.

      Westminster? That can only be solved with an all-night sitting and about a hundred barrels of the old black powder… and I have my fingers crossed that it will soon be so. I suspect that if there were to be one of those on-line fund-raisers then we’d be able to afford to use nukes within five minutes of the appeal going out.

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