Not like it used to be...

A NUMBER of contributors to narrowboatworld rely on the old saying, 'It is not like it used to be'! It may well be true but, of course, you do need to think about which particular time in the past really was 'the good old days', writes Mike Todd.

Reading some of the accounts of working canal life bring home that boaters then had to cope with at least as many maintenance problems as we do today. Okay, they may have been different issues but, for example, lack of dredging has long been a complaint going back well before the leisure boating era.

See things differently

This is not an attempt to whitewash or exonerate CaRT and those charged with keeping the navigations open but it is perhaps worth pondering why, apart from selective memory, it may just be possible to see things differently now from how they seemed before.

One major factor is that we live in an age of instant communication. I know that the old canal gossip, exchanged during fleeting moments when passing at locks or tied up outside local pubs was often even faster than the internet, but—realistically—we get to hear about a lot more than in the past.

CaRT's daily email notifications, for example, give us all information that no so long ago we would never have heard about unless actually stuck at the lock or bridge concerned. This can easily lead to us to thinking that matters are deteriorating when, in reality, we are now hearing things once kept from us through a lack of a blindingly fast method of communication.