Indie View: Word on the Water

We set up our tiny bookshop on a 1920s barge 12 years ago. Though we took turns to describe our grandiose plans for world domination in the early days, we never truly expected anything more than that we would maybe scrape enough - with the help of other work - to keep the thing open and give us days sitting on the towpath talking about books and literature with like-minded people. Initially we planned to use my tiny narrowboat with a makeshift display of books on the outside, but we eventually managed to persuade a friend - an outsider artist Frenchman called Noy (French for Noah) to join us, and to allow us to use his beautiful Dutch barge on the understanding that he would build a stage on the roof so that we could have music and theatre and poetry events in addition to just selling the books.