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/

Manchester by rail...standard class!

Ahh, the romance of train travel! Clouds of steam, assignations in the dining car, genteel murder, stoking, assignations in the luggage car, gin, amusing incidents in the sleeper compartment, bribing the border guards and, of course, thanks to terrorists and strict border controls, it's still the best way to smuggle smack or shooters into the country.

Modern day train travel has much to commend it. There's the quiet carriage, where mobile phones and, apparently, loudly rustling your crisp packet is frowned upon to the point of Paddington hard stares or second degree tutting. There's the buffet car, with it's cornucopia of snacks meaning that some offer up to three flavours of crisps to compliment your twelve cans of Stella.

Recently, I had to travel up north for work. I love the train journey up north. You go through what is now a deprived area of the country but what was once a glorious industrial powerhouse. That's one of the reasons why there is a railway track there at all and also the reason why for so much of the journey the railway runs alongside the canal network. Railways were laid alongside the canals they would eventually replace because the navvies had already done all the hard work of levelling the area, building embankments, finding the best pubs and composing folk songs.

Previously I'd done the trip first class. Not this time though, this was austerity Britain and I was under the distinct impression that my class of travel was one above having to shovel coal into the engine for 200 miles. Or whatever.

The view, however, was still first class. England was in the grip of winter and there had been a hard frost that night, now the same clear skies that brought the frost let the sun illuminate it in dazzling style. You could see the cold, the white countryside, the breath of the cattle and, in the canals, a thin skien of almost ice on the iron dark chill waters.

Inside all was jolly and warm. First class travel means that you get fed and watered. Tea and coffee and coffee and tea and a hot breakfast. Not so in standard class. Luckily I am a man of immense resource and enviable pic nic skills and so using only the most basic of amenities; a M&S simply food, a coffee shop and an artisan bakers, had cobbled together a light three course breakfast.

Then, as we left the station, came the announcement that because the catering crew has missed the train, there would be no catering, at all, on the journey. The howls went up from first class while, sitting in a fug of smug, I debated whether to eat my BLT or auction it.

I ate it, of course, and enjoyed the view. But I wonder if future travellers will have that same opportunity. The canals today are used for holidays and colourful narrowboats putter along, a reminder of a time when the world moved at a slower pace. I can't see the holiday makers of the future getting away from it all on a motorway cruise, although journey times might be similar.

One of the more colourful sights was, in the middle of an expanse of what at first appeared to be suspiciously well groomed countryside but was, of course, a golf course, two golfers striding forth across the frozen fairways. Colourful trousers making an impression in the black and white surroundings, clouds of breath steaming over their shoulders like the puffs that would have come from my train decades ago. They must really love their game, or have really shit home lives.

It was refreshing, at journey's end, to see the northern city I was visiting in the sunshine for the first time ever. No kidding. The place looked transformed. But no wonder they shot 'life on Mars' there. It was like going back to the 1970s. Everyone was smoking (remember smoking?) and everyone was overweight, probably due to the wheezy queue that seemed to be a permanent feature outside the door of Greggs. Not that I blame them, if I hadn't of feasted on a BLT that morning, I might of joined them.

Travelling in style

I’m writing this on my laptop, sitting in a first class carriage watching the English countryside slide past. There are slower ways of seeing England, but there are few better. This is especially true is you like canals. The railways may have killed off the canals but, with the permanent way being laid so often next to the waterway, travellers today can now look at hundreds of miles of the canal network as it passes at high speed. Of course, this has it’s downside, travelling by train is fantastic (you drink while somebody else drives at insane speed, that kind of arrangement is only available elsewhere on shocking council estates when you are in the passenger seat of a stolen car), because ever now and then you look out and see a boat captained by somebody smoking a pipe, wearing a moleskin waistcoat and a beard that society would disapprove of, accompanied by a dog with a kerchief for a collar and you know, you just bloody know, that not only is he carefree but he has picked up a couple of dainty female passengers who are into free love and experimentation and are, at this moment, in the galley making him a bacon sandwich. This is in contrast to life on the road, where the only passengers in the cars of, for instance, sales reps, are murdered hitchhikers.

The better you travel, the more you are rewarded. Travel by air and what do you get – you get to breath the air that the guy in front of you, the one with lank hair and a cough, was breathing half an hour ago. You get to sit in a seat that’s too small in an airplane that’s too crowded and if you get drunk enough to actually blot out the pain, you’ll be considered too drunk to be a passenger.

Travel by car and you have the illusion of freedom but, in reality, you’re just swept along with everyone else. There’s a reason that pictures of a highway at night, with the taillights all surging in the same direction, looks like bloodflow or a river, because you’re in the current. Don’t believe me? Try swerving across four lanes of motorway and look at the reaction you’ll provoke.

Travel by tube and you are normally asked to leave cinemas whenever there’s a horror sequence set on the tube because no atrocity quite matches what you once had to go through that time when you were bursting for the loo, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lady in front of you had a PVC handbag. The resulting six month stretch in Parkhurst almost erased the embarrassment of the moment, but not quite.

Travel by boat is best of all. Slower than driving, a bit quicker than walking and all rivers, eventually, flow to the sea so the possibilities are limitless.

(Interjection – it’s suddenly got so dark outside the train that I thought somebody had closed the curtains in the sky. It is, in fact, simply the traditional laden northern sky). (Or a tunnel, I’m a bit pissed on red wine).

Which is why, I think, I’ve recently seen the VW camper van as my vehicle of choice. It’s not unlike a boat in its lines and when you put up that roof extension thingie, it’s like raising a sail. All in all, I rather like camper vans, I just love the idea of having everything you need, stove, bed, telly, to hand and, best of all, when you fall out with the neighbours, you can drive off.

A camper van is very, very different to a caravan. The caravan is used by two sorts of people, wife-swapping cannibals of Welsh descent who enjoy nothing more than confounding senior maths lecturers by causing traffic jams where there should be none; and pikies.

As for global warming and pollution – fuck it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a price worth paying for me to be able to sit on the train (product of the industrial revolution, where it all started), listening to my iPod and sipping red wine. Mind you, I’d miss the snowboarding.