Lines

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:36:55 +0100

Here are some great things that are happening this week, which are loosely based around the theme of LINES:

TODAY: A new chair (pictured above). The person I bought it from said it had very nice lines. I agreed. To offset the money I spent on its threadbare upholstery I am selling all my DVDs. These can be purchased for £2.50 each. Even ones containing a youthful John Travolta, which I actually value much higher. Especially The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, where he mainly parades in underpants.

TOMORROW: A Line of Thought. This is the name of an exhibition of line drawings by local artist Daisy Campbell. It’s happening on the boat from 10am to 5pm and is completely free, except if you want to buy a piece.

MONDAY TO WEDNESDAY: The shop is closed while I pursue another line of work.

THURSDAY: Book club is at 7.30pm and we’re discussing The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. This book also contains lines of coke. Book club, however, is largely drug free. Unless you count great literature and stimulating conversation as one, in which case snort away.

FRIDAY: A great line-up for we have A BAND ON THE BARGE. They’re called The Housekeeping Society and are playing *free* from 5.30pm. Check them out in all their Yorkshire folk-pop finery here.

You’ve now reached the end of the line.

New opening hours

Thu, 3 May 2012 14:26:47 +0100

Admittedly, these have always been pretty sketchy. This is mainly because waking up is so hard to do and also, once, because I went to look at a Shetland pony for sale instead.

Henceforth, however, I think I can say quite authoritatively that things will be very different. For example, we will DEFINITELY be closed every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This decision was taken because these days are generally the quietest. I say “quiet”.. a book-buying VACUUM might be more concordant with facts. So I’ll be using the time instead to try other gainful employment and to Enjoy Potatoes in Eighty-One Ways - a cook book-cum-challenge I was gifted yesterday.

Not wishing to confuse matters, but we will STILL be open on Bank Holiday Mondays, and even the odd Wednesday too I fancy. Thursday to Sunday we’ll be open between 10ish and 5ish. When we’re not here you can still email or text us with your book-buying dilemmas/demands - or just make us feel bad for slacking. What we lack in Protestant work ethic we more than compensate for in Catholic guilt.

So, all clear? Open most days, most of the time. Closed some days, some of the time. That just about covers it.

Olympiacos BC

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:46:54 +0100

We have a slew of exciting things to announce over the next week or so but we’ll start with our tidings of great joy for sports fans. In a nod to some P.E. event going on down south this summer, we’ll be launching a new four-week book club special at the end of July to celebrate the best of sports writing. Sadly for some the line-up, just finalised, will NOT include Beach Volleyball: A Pictorial History from the Locker Room. It also omits, against my better judgement, Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, the horsey story of (Wikipedia synopsis) “a high-strung, nervous child with a delicate stomach. Her mother is a wise, taciturn woman who was once famous for swimming the English Channel; her father is a butcher.” It continues in a flurry of raffled ponies and jump racing until, disguised cunningly as a Russian jockey, 12-year-old Velvet wins the Grand National. Unfortunately, to quote big W again, “her sex is discovered in the first-aid station”. Some gender drama ensues but all ends splendidly.

Anyway, we won’t be reading it. We’ll be reading these:
July 25th - Dynamo by Andy Dougan
August 1st - The Fight by Norman Mailer
August 8th - A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng
August 15th - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

You can be signed to Olympiacos BC (yes, a name of some considerable genius) immediately by emailing info@thebookbarge.co.uk. It’s completely free to play, a 7.30pm kick-off each week, and we’re offering a discount on the books if you buy them through the barge.

Weird things

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:44:10 +0100

Folks, here is a picture I think neatly sums up The Book Barge’s experience of London-and-back. It was taken at a boatyard en route and is not, as you may be forgiven for thinking, a still from a towpath re-telling of The Hills have Eyes. The first thing to immediately strike you is that it’s a very busy picture. For simplicity’s sake, I have cropped out the doll bust in a bird cage, the skeleton hanging from tree and a small stable of rocking horses with alopecia. We shall concentrate instead on analogising just four key features: i) the girl shoved in a barrel; ii) the pig; iii) the keg, and iv) the mannequin in cloche hat and marigolds (a most unusual sartorial choice, although I fear my own barging wardrobe informed by elasticity, multi-layering and water repellence does not qualify me to judge).

i) Embarrassingly, the prosthetics of those legs were initially lost on me. Good god, I mentally shrieked coming around the corner, that poor lady has hand-standed fatally into a firkin! A week later I’m in a bar in Rickmansworth that smells of damp dog. The boat is 106 locks and eight days into the trip southwards - with no sales and a worrying lack of funds to replenish diesel, or eat. Four men at the bar compare the size of their bilge pumps loudly. I look in vain for handy beer vat to dunk my head while whining that ALL CANALS SHOULD BE BANNED. AND BOOKSHOPS TOO before discovering an odd hard lump in the sachet of horseradish sauce I’m twisting agitatedly in my fingers. A quieter 20 minutes then ensues, during which I try to discover more lumps in other sachets and the friend I’m with makes swift excuses to catch the train home. This is the low point of the trip. This is what mannequin number one stands for. Everything is upside down and things don’t look very good at all.

i) I discover I am a pig! And not just any pig - a WATER pig. And Joseph the boat is an Earth Ox. I am in another pub, same friend, but conversation has shifted from condiments and concreting up the inland waterways of Great Britain to Chinese horoscopes and the future. I am an OPTIMIST. And Joseph is a PERSEVERING TYPE. Wikipedia via smartphone says it is so. Everything will be just fine. We glide into London a day and a half before schedule.

i) Everything is wonderful. The till is ringing, the sun is shining, customers are interesting and interested. We store all the goodwill up in a big imaginary keg to take home, but sadly most of the monetary takings leak out before getting there.

i) Nevertheless, The Book Barge has a new spring in its chug. We move stridently back to the Midlands and point to the future with a steady arm (and a sensible rain mac for the weather has turned). When we re-visit the photo scene above it is Easter weekend and the last bit of Chekhov’s short story The Student* seems to sum it all up perfectly:

Joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour -- he was only twenty-two -- and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life appeared to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.”

On Good Friday I get up at 4am and snap frost from the mooring lines. Mist costumes the canal in a chiffon grace I’ve never seen and, when the engine starts, it’s difficult to stop looking back at the long white train tucking in behind us uncreased. Inside, all the paged people on those dusty shelves are quiet and, for that first moon-shot hour, I’m happy to my cold-squeezed fingers with no other story but this one, unfolding in quiet chapters of shadow and the ebony lapping of water around the sleeping boats we pass. To the left, the magnificent frontispiece of a wide sky waking up.

It has now been a week since The Book Barge returned to its permanent mooring in Staffordshire. On Thursday we welcomed Dan James and Leah Fleming aboard to discuss two new novels inspired by another Night to Remember, the 15th April 1912. Then yesterday we were buoyed by fellow bookseller Jen Campbell’s appearance, signing copies of her disturbingly true compilation of Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops. Thanks to the writers and customers alike who attended both events, and for the very welcome reminder that, for all the weird and worrying things we’ve seen, heard and felt recently, there has been a disproportionately large helping of the downright wonderful.

* We’ve mentioned this story in a previous Easter blog. it’s worth repeating. For that matter, we’ve mentioned other Chekhov short stories too in this blog before. We will probably keep doing so.

The Rhymz of the Ancient Mariner

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:14:51 +0000

This is us through a rose-tinted lens in Camden. Yes! London! It took ten loooong days of canalling during which we witnessed pensioner nudity, conversed with a champion bagpiper, performed some reckless overtaking manouevres (even at 4mph) and got mighty cold. It was, however, mainly an anti-odyssey of unbearable boredom and increasing moneylessness. I must add that a whole day, which we shall never get back, was spent navigating Milton Keynes.

So it was some relief to reach Camden where yesterday people were LITERALLY THROWING CASH AT US. Sure, it only actually amounted to one penny, and it wasn’t aimed at us directly, more the corpse of a bird lying on our bow to ascertain if it really was dead/no more/ceased to be/bereft of life and resting in peace. But this doesn’t really matter. It was cash and it was on our boat. Hurrah! A good omen! And one to cancel out our albatross of a pigeon bedecking the front of the good ship. This was, incidentally, the fourth pigeon The Book Barge has come to know intimately in the last 18 or so months. Some of you may remember Nelson the one-armed racing bird that was staring down cars mid-road on the way back from book club one night. He was successfully nursed back to health in a guinea pig hutch, only to be massacred by a cat weeks later upon day release. In Bath last summer the boat was squatted by another unfortunate avian with thalidomide claws. We fed him on Alpen for a week, then moved on. In Bristol we fished one from the Avon, installed him (boxed and soggy) in our kids’ corner, and were cruelly repaid the following morning when he escaped and shat over Iris Murdoch. The most recent addition to the sorry tales was dumped outside the entrance to the boat on Wednesday afternoon. Several people seemed quite keen to stamp on his head. Or just scream shrilly at him. Another, clearly a Daily Mail reader, warned he might give me cancer. I flirted with carcinoma and carried him to the front of the boat with a pair of blue marigolds, where he was arranged atop the miniature topiary like a sweaty-feathered pterosaur and willed to live. He didn’t, but I grew rather fond of him there and had misplaced my rubber gloves in the interim. He stayed until midday today, some modern Mariner metaphor. I’m not quite sure how Coleridge’s lesson translates to 21st century bookselling but I’m fairly confident I passed the ghost vessel he mentions (the one with Death (a skeleton) and the “Night-mare Life-in-Death” (a pale woman) playing dice for souls) around Hemel Hempstead on Monday.

Speaking of chilling verse, facebook and twitter followers may already know we hosted an impromptu gangsta rap performance on the boat’s roof on Wednesday. I wasn’t aware so many words could be made to end in ‘z’. Possibly only ‘pince-nez’ was omitted from the Scrabble bonus lexicon. It seemed a good idea at the time but perhaps, with hindsight, eight grown men having a musical discussion about urinating “like the rain” on certain sections of polite society, general mother-effing and jeffing and a very un-Christmassy use of “ho” does not always translate to bumper sales of Wendy Cope’s Family Values. In return, I suspect cavorting on an astroturf and faux-decking gardenscape on the roof of a narrowboat, while a cardiganned proprietress peeps worriedly from the hatch window, will not make the HF Crew’s youtube video the street success it was potentially destined to be. What was that about albatrosses around necks?

This weekend we’re at King’s Place, Kings Cross for the Guardian’s Open Weekend. It’d be splendid if you could pay a visit. Failing that, pop down on Monday lunchtime (midday-1pm) to meet Sam Mills, author of magnificently bonkers The Quiddity of Will Self, for a signing. You can whet your appetite here, as we did more literally on pink french fancies and gin at the launch party last night. It’s nice to be back.