The Book Barge

Gentleman & Player loves bookshops, and second hand bookshops in particular.  G&P also loves canal boats.  So, you can imagine the suffusion of joy that inhabited every fibre of G&P’s being when on the BBC web-site there was a wee four minute documentary about ‘The Book Barge’, a second hand bookshop…on a canal boat.

That’s right, for those of you who find the environment of a traditional second hand bookshop just too stressful, there is a place where you can browse for literary bargains in the relaxing environment of the riverbank or canal.
The documentary reveals that the people who visit the Book Barge often end up paying for their book by offering the owner a bed for the night or a meal or both.  I think the hosts get the better of that deal, as they not only get a slightly-foxed copy of ‘Rural Rides’ but get to tell all their friends for the next three years about the night they gave a ‘stranger’ hospitality. 
Owning a second-hand bookshop is, as has been remarked upon before here, an indication of eccentricity, as it tends to lead to carpet slippers being considered business attire and opening hours being from ‘when I feel like it’ to ‘when I feel hungry/thirsty/sleepy’.  However, putting eccentricity on a barge makes it adorable, and so socially acceptable.
The only way in which the story of a second-hand bookshop being based on a barge could possibly be improved is if the owner also solved literary-themed crimes.  Maybe Sunday evenings?  I smell format!  Somebody get me ITV3 and tell them I have their first original afternoon drama series ready.  They can get that river-cruise company to sponsor it.
It also makes one wonder what other business models can be adapted to the barge model.  Pub is the obvious one, and how wonderful if it could be the riverbank that was tethered to the pub on the boat, rather than the more traditional arrangement.  It could be like one of those dreadful ‘party boats’, but with a fine selection of real ales and, best of all, no room for morris dancers.
The proprietor (can we say ‘skipper’, I think we can) of the Book Barge acknowledges that she does not shelve her books by subject.  This is an approach to stocking the shelves of a second hand bookshop that G&P heartily endorses.  G&P holds the view that a good bookshop is not stocked, it is curated, and taking this further would like to propose that while stocking by subject in a sort of half-arse Dewey-decimal system may be appropriate for a behemoth like The Book Barn (indicating a corporate warehouse-sized discount bookshop that occupies three postcodes, rather than a bookshop in a barn, possibly also occupied by horses, pigs, and other animals with a literary connection, which is an excellent idea), true second hand bookshops adopt the serendipity method. 
The curation method is to place books in proximity that, although not of the same subject, complement one another so that in choosing one book and looking the regulation six inches to the left and right of the now empty space on the shelf to see if there is anything else of interest, the browser will see a book on an entirely different subject that will be of interest.  For instance, any ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Doctor Who’ novel would be shelved in proximity to ‘Cooking for One’, and any book about Hitler would be shelved next to, well, frankly, more books about Hitler – one thing you soon realise about people who read books about Hitler, they rarely have just one book about Hitler.
The serendipity method is curation by instinct rather than design.  People need to know about the hidden meanings in pub signs, and they also need to know about the Opium Wars, they just don’t know they need to know it.  But one visit to a serendipitously stocked bookshop, and they leave on the path to enlightenment, and probably also with a novel by Jilly Cooper.
One question though.  The proprietor has written a book about her experiences; ‘The Bookshop that Floated Away’, but it’s a new book.  So can she sell it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27065292
http://thebookbarge.co.uk/

Postcard from Norfolk - Drink up

'Boat on Cley beach'  The right light, the right angle, a right old pain in the arse getting this shot.

My tip - support the local economy and buy one of the many postcards available with this shot...

but better.

Every year you read about some poor chap who is drowned trying to save his dog after the dog decides to go swimming.  As one of the dogs ran into the surf and suddenly found itself out of its depth, the headline ‘Heroic dog rescuer mourned’, together with a picture of the canine in question sitting on my gave looking properly mournful, flashed through my mind as I started to take off my jacket.  I needn’t have worried as the next wave deposited the dog safely on the shingle, while I wondered if anyone else could hear my heart beating as loudly as I could.

Once my hands had stopped shaking, I set about trying to take the perfect photograph of an upturned boat.  This is apparently easy, as there are many galleries showing variations on this image in just about every visual medium available up to and including modern dance.  My conclusion is that getting a decent photograph is a lot harder than it looks.  You have to wait for the right light, not easy when you have to keep one eye on a dog apparently intent on doing a Reggie Perrin, and you have to find just the right angle, which is, let me tell you, hell on the knees.

After such exertion the place to relax is the marvellous ‘Lobster’ in Sheringham.  Sheringham had just finished celebrating some sort of festival related to World War II, and many of the buildings had bullet holes painted onto them, it was as if the Arab Spring had happened in Norfolk, but with more booze.

The pub itself is an interesting place.  You walk in and there’s a spaniel sitting looking at its owner eating and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time things will end differently and chips will be involved.  It’s also rather vast, and on different levels, but at the same time cosy.  Best of all, despite the latte and the food, it’s a proper boozer, where men can go in the middle of a long day for a sustaining pint.

I bet it bloody rocks in the evening.

Postcard from Portsmouth - sunshine on the sea

Blue sky! Blue sky! The Solent is at least 60% boat. As well as the ferries there is a constant steam of sailing boats leaving the marina, turning left and heading towards Cowes and presumably racing like buggery to get there first, snag the best anchorage and get a seat at the bar. That is what sailing is all about I understand.

Getting from where we are staying to Gunwharf Quay is a fifteen minute walk or a two minute swim, such is the strange geography of coastal towns. I think if I were a permanent resident, I would invest n a small dingy, or at least some wellies and a tide table.

Just time to grab a coffee at the excellent Brasserie Blanc, where yesterday because we had to wait five minutes for our coffee, we were given it for free! Tempted to repay their kindness by shooting cake bolt, but was still metabolising breakfast - the fried tinned tomato has its place, and that place is on toast next to bacon and fried egg doing something at the molecular level to the alcohol in my bloodstream while doing something at the macro level to make the world a better place.

Odd place Portsmouth. Maybe it's the proximity to the Isle of Wight. I came here expecting an industrial port crossed with a busy naval base and found a small and charming town. The Old Town has loads of character, mainly to be found in its cobbles and laughably optimistic sea defences, the ferry traffic makes the place feel busy and the sailboats add glamour.

But I still can't fathom the attraction of the Isle of Wight!

Postcard from Portsmouth - towers and Victory is ours!

The seafront at Portsmouth is dominated by the Spinnaker Tower, a pointy structure that you can go up, and up, and up, and look out over Portsmouth. This is great fun, as the's nothing like an observation deck to get people arguing about where exactly Cowes is on the Isle of Wight.

But the big attraction is the glass floor. One section of the floor is what one hopes is very thick, very strong plate glass. A popular pastime seems to be plonking your toddler on the glass floor and getting a photograph of them 100m above the ground before they look down and either get distressed or convey complete disinterest.

Slipping my shoes off (presumably they are worried about high heel damage) I take my turn and stand there, looking down. It is fairly impressive and does produce a little flip flop in the stomach. The glass is remarkably clear and the size of the floor means that you could be fooled into thinking you were standing on nothing atop a sheer drop, held suspended for a moment like Wile. E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Of course this is sheer fancy but when the darker parts of your imagination start conjuring up questions like 'would it just be a sudden CRACK! and plunge, or would there be a splintering and a desperate scramble for the edge before you lost a very quick tussle with gravity, meeting an undignified shoeless end as a very wide, but very thin, corpse.

A glass floor is no place to take on nausea unless you know you are going to win but it really is hypnotic to stand there, in your socks, dreaming of flight.

The Tower is part of the redevelopment of the seafront. It's great to visit and perhaps coolest of all is that they stamp your hand and your entry fee is good for access all day, so if it's cloudy in the morning you can come back later, or at sunset. Unfortunately the stamp on the back of the hand does not entitle you to free squash and biscuits, as it did in the school discos of youth.

But the highlight is the Historic Dockyards and, of course, H.M.S. Victory. It's amazing to think that something so small could have had such a pivotal role in shaping the fate of a nation. The organisers really do a good job of conveying the crowded conditions aboard ship by letting on hoards of tourists at once - when we were there there was a rugby team doing a tour. It's amazing to think that this is the actual ship, not a replica or mock up, that fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, truly an age of wooden ships and iron men, at least I presumed their heads were iron, judging from the number of times I nearly concussed myself on the low ceilings.

I can confirm that the is a plaque marking the place were Nelson fell and that next to it is a museum official presumably stationed there to frown with disapproval if anyone stretches themselves out on the deck for a photo opportunity. Disappointingly, the brass plaque is flush with the deck, meaning that one cannot do the 'I'm not surprised, I nearly fell over the damn thing myself' joke legitimately. It does not stop anyone though.

Prior to visiting Victory we toured H.M.S. Warrior, a Victorian sailing and steam warship that never fired a shot in anger. It was intended as a deterrent and it certainly scared the hell out of me. Huge and black, if one opened one's curtains in the morning to see that thing moored up in the bay, the was nothing to do but accept that you were now part of the British Empire and try and flog the sailors fruit at vastly inflated prices.

The Warrior had a crew complement of over 600 and was armed to the teeth with cannons and marines with guns and cutlasses. Today one can hold weddings on board and I am pleased to report that every firearm and blade, even the belaying pins, are securely locked down and cannot be used in a brawl, leaving only the traditional weapons of fists, bottles and cake.

What the Warrior had that the Victory did not was engines, meaning that it had stokers. Down here one seemed to find the only place on a warship more horrible than the gun deck. Iron men on an iron ship in this case I think. Another advantage on the Warrior was the guide, a tremendously enthusiastic bloke who could describe every knot and rivet and had a salty story and yarn for every yardarm. Always a pleasure to see an expert enthusing, what started off with a question ended up as a fascinating twenty minute impromptu tour of the aft of the ship to a crowd of about a dozen.

Finished off with a harbour tour. The Russians were in port, their battleship a rather more cold war shade of grey than the jaunty grey of the Royal Navy. The Russian ship bristled with weapons and was moored up next to the new Frigates commissioned by the RN. Sleek, stealth and with only one small gun showing, the RN ships somehow exuded a quiet menace, like a bloke so tough he doesn't have to prove it. Again, if you open your curtains and one of those is in the bay, it's time to dust off your best trousers and treaty signing pen and negotiate the sale of your mineral rights and fruit.

As evening fell, the car park for the Isle of Wight ferry was jammed! Just what is the attraction of the Isle of Wight? Is it the weather? Is it the people? Surely everyone queuing to make the crossing wasn't doing so to visit a loved one in clink? Maybe some sort of obscure law means that you can do something on the IoW that you can't do on the mainland, like eat unpasteurised cheese or stick turbot up your arse or something. Obviously now I am going to have to make the crossing one day, although early, as I have seen too many movies where the tourists miss the last ferry back to the mainland and end up on the wrong end of a Christopher Lee.

Postcard from Portsmouth - new roads, old town

Portsmouth. On the map, our hotel, in the Old Town and close to the Solent, looks easy to get to. Just get on the road, keep driving in a straight line and turn left before you ditch in the sea. In practice it's a little more difficult. This is because Portsmouth is the Town Of Many Roundabouts. This is, I presume, the result of Portsmouth's strategic importance and is a cunning plan in the event of invasion to get any enemy troops so hopelessly lost that they end up conquering the Isle of Wight.

We do successfully find the hotel and in truth the journey itself is quite charming, from motorway to city centre to, suddenly, driving over cobbles and feeling the pleasing burrrrrrrr in the pit of ones stomach that comes from driving in a heritage part of a town, and indeed from driving over cobbles.

The 'boutique hotel' is fantastic. It's located over a tea shop and seems to combine attention to detail with, let's face it, ready access to bacon rolls! Best of all is the view from the windows, only betted by the view from the bottom of the street, which is one step away from the water (and sometimes not even that, if the impressive flood gates dotted around the place are any guide). By the time we are unpacked, I am officially over-excited.

The street itself, though cobbled, features history in the shape of rails, down which no doubt cargo used to be transported after being unloaded. The nearby pub is called the 'Spice Island' and so one rather hopes that in days gone by sacks of exotic and wonderful smelling prices from the far corners of the world were unloaded here, the stevedores breathing deep of foreign fragrance and then sneezing heavily. Of course, it could be that this was the port for domestic traffic and the landlord decided that the 'Pig Iron Inn' was never going to capture the Gastropub crowd, but one likes to think the best.

My over excitement is due in part to the ferry traffic. The Isle of Wight ferry leaves from, apparently, the bottom of the street every two minutes or so. Ships the size of multi story car parks glide with balletic grace in and out of their port, performing the equivalent of a handbreak turn to do so. This is impressive enough, but I can see from the water that there is a tidal flow, and from the gulls and the chop that there is a fair old wind, so no mean feat to turn on a sixpence and steam home in style. I can also see from the shower of rain that it is time to watch all of this from inside the 'Spice Island' pub.

There is always joy to be found in spending an afternoon in the boozer, discussing lofty subjects, but there is a special joy when one has a view. In this case, the view over the Solent towards the Isle of Wight. One will be arguing the finer points of the role of beans in any pasty filling and suddenly the light will dim as another ferry glides by. As disconcerting as the IOW ferries are, this is as nothing compared to watching the Sea Cats that make the trip to and from France coming into port. These things are like skyscrapers set on end, on stilts.

And they do it all with such grace, as choppy as the sea is, it's incredibly soothing to watch the boats come and go, and the tide come and go, and the beers come and go.

And they glide past level with the balconies of the posh waterfront apartments. People sitting out in their robes trying to enjoy their coffee and Daily Mail find themselves being waved at by enthusiastic children and drunken stag parties. I think that if you had a flat here, you'd have to establish your policy on waving pretty early on, whether to wave back, or pretend that the group of drunken women twenty yards away from you at eye level all wearing plastic tiaras and flashing their tits are not there.