British Waterways/CRT begging bowls delayed

Still here - just been busy with lot of personal stuff over the last month but as BW will be delighted to hear I am still watching you! Like many of you who read this I keep a weather eye on the press and my personal highlights have been:

• BW's apparent discomfort over Parliament following due process leading to the postponement of the CRT launch.
• The complete mess that BW have made over Olympic moorings management, resulting in them having to offer to refunds boaters who had been led to believe they had no alternative but to buy extortionately priced towpath visitor moorings.
• The confirmation that BW did not do 'lessons learned' from past mistakes like the K+A bollards fiasco as has been clealrly demonstarted when it comes to the new fiasco with the Staffs and Worcester lock tail bridges. (This is a two part cock up - part 1, part 2.). Of course the lesson to be learnt from the 'waht a load of Bollards' case was remember to ask Boaters about plans you have that might effect them. This it seems remains an alien concept to too many people in BW!

Alan Richards continues to receive my admiration over his relentless dissection of BW spin over maintenance funding. When resorts to saying "misinformation", in my book that's  a good sign! It is in turn somewhat ironic that simultaneously we are being told that CRT's first priority and  one that is billed to be a central part of the official launch will be to start asking the public for donation money.

Don't forget Tony Hales thinks we are nasty people because we don't praise BW's achievements. With list of failures oops, sorry Tony, achievements like these what do you expect?