December 2025 – Pete's Blog

This week I received.a package in the post. It contained not a Christmas present, but four books with maps and routes of the canal network in the UK.

Narrowboaters have many options for navigating these days. We use a website called CanalPlan AC and an app called OpenCanalMap. But most boaters also like to read the guides. Some use the ones from Pearsons, but we prefer the originals – the Nicholsons. They have good maps of the routes, helpful lists of pubs and places to visit, and honest descriptions of the towns and villages on the route.

I also have a personal connection to the Nicholsons because one of my friends is the main author, Jonathan Mosse. I met him about ten years ago at a barbecue for narrowboaters in Scotland. He lent us a long chain for an anchor when we travelled the tidal river Clyde. And since we have been in England we have used our Nicholsons to navigate the huge network of rivers ad canals across the country.

Once a year I let Jonathan know all the changes and edits we have found in the books. Perhaps a pub has closed. Perhaps a bridge is incorrectly numbered. Perhaps we have discovered a wonderful new cafê. In return he sometimes sends me new editions, and that was what I received this week. In fact, guides 2 and 3 have not even been published yet. They come out in February but Jonathan has got me early copies.

We have been living in bricks and mortar houses since October, albeit with six weeks in the Outer Hebrides. I am itching to be back on Narrowboat Thuis. We won’t get properly going till March but perhaps we can get a week or two on the boat while it is moored in the Marina. Maybe New Year in our Narrowboat, with me, Mandy, the dogs and reading my new books. Sounds good to me.

Most of us take thousands of photos each year with our phones. It is a long way from when I was growing up and I had a very old camera that only took black and white film. Each photograph was carefully chosen and then I had to wait till the film was used up before taking it to a chemist and waiting a couple of weeks to find out if any of the pictures had come out, or if they were out of focus or had my finger in front of the lens.

I have mentioned before that I like to study family history, and one of the challenges I have found is old photographs. My cousin Pat and I have lots of old pictures of family but most of them have no names and we struggle to work out who they are. The best we can do is to try to look for matches. For instance, I think that this photograph is my great great aunt Elizabeth Capener.

But Pat has this photo about 30 years later. Is it the same person?

For a long time I have worried that the massive photo collections we now have will be even harder to collate once we are gone. Photos are no longer special to us so although they have many meta tags on things like place and time, they don’t know who the people are.

I downloaded IOS 26 on my iPhone this week, and it is full of the latest AI tools. It can turn any photograph into a 3D image. It can create panoramas by merging photos. And it has the security of really good facial recognition. So the technology for matching faces is out there. But without being a professional developer I have not found an app that does it for me. Is there one?

Either way, such tools are coming, and I think that family historians will have an easier time in future. Or maybe we will simply be redundant when a bot just does all the work for us.

Anyway, are these photos Elizabeth? What do you think?

EDIT I have just used ChatGPT and it has done an incredible job matching the photos, pointing out things like the left eyelids being slightly droopy and the deep set eyes with identical spacing. They are likely to be the same person. Hello great great aunt Elizabeth!

I don’t like clutter. Never have. That is why when we moved house a year ago I was so quick to unpack boxes and find the right place for everything. Within a week the house was basically sorted although an awful lot of stuff went to charity shops or the tip. The one area where I failed to tidy was the garage. For quite a while it was jammed full of boxes.

In the spring I finally went through every box and threw a lot more stuff out. But as I emptied the boxes, my garage itself became a bit of a tip and I have become increasingly frustrated through the year as I couldn’t find anything. Well this week I finally got around to putting up some shelves and tidying.

There is a good and a bad in this. The good is that I can now find whatever I need. The bad is that I have become obsessive about maintaining the tidy garage. I found myself telling Mandy that she can only put things in there after consulting me. I mean – it’s a garage!

I think my ridiculous behaviour is a mental thing. When things are well organised I feel under control. When things are messy it just feels wrong. I can cope with a disorganised garage by closing the door but eventually it has to be sorted. That is just the way it should be.

I see that Wes Streeting is saying this week that the NHS is over-diagnosing Autism and ADHD. I am not sure that over-diagnosing is the problem. The thing that costs money is over-treating. People like me with unusual ways of thinking are OK with no treatment. Because even though sometimes I have ridiculous ways of thinking, I quite like them.

And garages should be tidy.

Month: December 2025

Why am I so excited about new canal books?

How do I find pictures of ancestors?

Tidy Garage, Tidy Mind