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Lock, Stock and Barrel
192 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 1985
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March 2, 2026
We probably went past this shop multiple times on the waterways, and may even have bought this book there, though I doubt it - I have no conscious memory of the building at all. Certainly Blisworth Tunnel was operational at the time, so reading about the author's struggles with a lack of boat traffic due to a longterm tunnel closure came as a jolt!
This appears to be a self-published book from the era when that generally meant a family memoir rather than amateur genre fiction, and it is well written and entertaining; one can see why the original book went into this second edition from a new publisher (and apparently a subsequent 2021 edition...) She comments on the changes that were evident since the days of Tom Rolt's pioneering Narrow Boat, and the inevitable result is that you end up wondering what has become of Long Buckby and the landscape around it nowadays - even by the time when I was last there, twenty years ago, the station had lost its booking clerk. I don't know what became of the old-fashioned shop she describes, and have avoided looking on the Internet to find out :-(
It's unusual in terms of canal memoirs, and hence of interest, because, contrary to the suggestion in the blurb, it is *not* a book about boating ("the family's voyages round the waterways" - I think they manage two trips of a week each in the course of the whole book). It's a book about running a business in the canalside economy and trying to make ends meet by working out what services you can and can't provide, while creating a home and garden in a rural community where eggs and manure come from the farm across the road... and wooden spoons for painting and selling to tourists come from Taiwan! But while that description makes it sound rather dull, Shirley Ginger (their real surname, much to local confusion) turns out to be a lively memoirist in the James Herriot/Gerald Durrell tradition, and there is never a dull moment in the book, while there are a few very lyrical and evocative passages.
She is also a talented artist, and the book is illustrated throughout with her black and white sketches (presumably for reasons of cost, as she is a painter), with one of her images being used on the cover of this edition.
This appears to be a self-published book from the era when that generally meant a family memoir rather than amateur genre fiction, and it is well written and entertaining; one can see why the original book went into this second edition from a new publisher (and apparently a subsequent 2021 edition...) She comments on the changes that were evident since the days of Tom Rolt's pioneering Narrow Boat, and the inevitable result is that you end up wondering what has become of Long Buckby and the landscape around it nowadays - even by the time when I was last there, twenty years ago, the station had lost its booking clerk. I don't know what became of the old-fashioned shop she describes, and have avoided looking on the Internet to find out :-(
It's unusual in terms of canal memoirs, and hence of interest, because, contrary to the suggestion in the blurb, it is *not* a book about boating ("the family's voyages round the waterways" - I think they manage two trips of a week each in the course of the whole book). It's a book about running a business in the canalside economy and trying to make ends meet by working out what services you can and can't provide, while creating a home and garden in a rural community where eggs and manure come from the farm across the road... and wooden spoons for painting and selling to tourists come from Taiwan! But while that description makes it sound rather dull, Shirley Ginger (their real surname, much to local confusion) turns out to be a lively memoirist in the James Herriot/Gerald Durrell tradition, and there is never a dull moment in the book, while there are a few very lyrical and evocative passages.
She is also a talented artist, and the book is illustrated throughout with her black and white sketches (presumably for reasons of cost, as she is a painter), with one of her images being used on the cover of this edition.
Displaying 1 of 1 review