The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Word on the Water: Three Friends, A Dutch Barge, And A Whole Lot of Books
In this episode, I chat with Paddy Screech, a co-owner of Word on the Water. Paddy shares the story of London's famous floating bookshop, housed in a 1920s Dutch barge moored along Regent's Canal in King's Cross, London.
Paddy takes us from his early days as a literature-loving boy in an agricultural school to his unlikely friendship with a "trampy-looking man with a fabulous mad collie cross dog" that would change his life forever. When these two bibliophiles partnered with a French boat owner, they created something extraordinary—a floating bookshop that would navigate London's canals, facing bureaucratic battles and financial uncertainty before becoming a cultural institution.
Far from witnessing decline, Word on the Water reveals a renaissance in independent bookselling, especially among younger readers seeking authentic connections in our digital world. Paddy shares fascinating insights about curating a tiny space that often sells as many books as major chains, the profound impact of the pandemic on reading habits, and how a floating bookshop became a vital community hub in an often isolating urban landscape.
The conversation explores the legacy of co-founder Jonathan Privett, whose daughter now continues his meticulous curation philosophy, shaped by his own extraordinary life experiences. You'll hear about their transition from secondhand to new books, life aboard a narrowboat, and the unexpected political intervention that saved them from closure.
This episode offers both inspiration and practical wisdom about building a community around literature. Follow us on social media, subscribe wherever you listen, and share this episode with fellow bibliophiles who believe in the transformative power of books.
The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint Exupéry
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 297. 197.
Speaker 1:Tucked behind King's Cross at Granary Square in London, Word on the Water is a one-of-a-kind floating bookshop aboard a 1920s Dutch barge. This literary gem offers an eclectic selection of new and second-hand books across every genre, Beloved by locals and visitors alike. The bookshop hosts poetry readings and live music on its roof deck, making it a vibrant cultural hub and a must-visit destination for book lovers around the world. Hi, Paddy, and welcome to the show. It's lovely to meet you. Good to meet you too. I've not had a floating bookshop on the show before, so you are my first. I don't think we've got many floating bookshops there's a few out there, but we're proud to be the first. I think Word on the Water is probably one of the most photographed bookshops on Instagram, but we'll get into that later. And listeners, yes, you will hear a little bit of background, speaking in this episode because Paddy is working in the bookshop. Okay, let's begin with learning about you and what drew you to study English literature at Oxford.
Speaker 2:Well, I went to a little agricultural, what you'd call a public school in Devon in the southwest of England and that was kind of a school for the sons of farmers and bikers really. And I was the son of an English teacher and another English teacher, the son of an English teacher and another English teacher. So I was a slightly sort of effeminate book reading little boy in a quite kind of macho school. I was sort of reading hardy when I was like nine or something and I got very interested in disappearing into books. First book I ever read was Watership Down and I was so just totally enthralled with it. Do you know Watership Down?
Speaker 1:Over there. Yes, in fact, I read it to one of my sons when he was younger and he said Mom, why did you read that to me? I'm so depressed.
Speaker 2:It's a big story. All of human life is there, ironically. And so I read that five times in a row because I didn't really realize you could read other books at that point. And then, yes, started reading before I was 10 really quite, quite a lot. And so by the time it came to making choices about what I might want to do at the university, I was this far steeped in it already. Basically, I'd read quite a lot and I had fabulous, uh, teachers at A level which is sort of 16 through 18 really really good teacher and a really good art teacher, and between the two of them I kind of inspired them. They were the sort of people I wanted to turn out to be.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that story and that your parents encouraged you to read my twin sister is a literacy consultant, one of the campings at Britain as well.
Speaker 2:I had no choice.
Speaker 1:It sounds like you had a nurtured literary life from the beginning. Now, after university, your life took a turn when you moored your narrowboat next to Jonathan Privitz. Can you share that story and how Stéphane Chadeau entered your life?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I worked for about 20 years with homeless people and women and running big treatment centres and dropping centres homeless people in London and running big treatment centres and drop-in centres and I was quite burnt out and tired and I came into a bit of money from my grandma and went for a walk by the canal and suddenly I could smell all the wood smoke coming out of the boats. And I grew up in sort of the country with an open fire and I had this sudden, this sense that it might be possible to live in London in a sort of country way. So I bought an aerobate, knowing nothing about it, and drove it to London and parked in this beautiful little park that I discovered, like only a few weeks before really, and the person next to me was this sort of trampy looking man with a fabulous mad collie cross dog and a huge cannabis cigarette who sort of ushered me over to his boat. It was a kind of unlikely friendship and yet we just absolutely clicked immediately really, and slowly I became brothers, that sort of finding a secular brother out there in the world.
Speaker 2:John loved boats and he'd been on boats to do, he'd been homeless and so voting for him had been like an impossible promotion from living in sort of the squat scene around northeast London for 10 years, he was now living under a willow tree next to sort of moorhens and wildlife of the marshland.
Speaker 2:The area of London that we were both parked in is like a hole in London. It's as London would have been if there'd been no city at all. It's the original wetland that would have covered all of the area of London if it hadn't been settled by people. And so it felt like been settled by people and so it felt like escaping London really, and living on a boat felt like escaping a city and escaping everything. Yeah, that's what's fabulous about that. So me and John became friends very quickly and began he kind of worked on me basically to that's not going to be enough to just move onto a boat. You know You're going to have to change your lifestyle and you don't want to be a boater, which is someone who lives in the boat. You want to be a bargee, you want to make your living on a boat and live on a boat.
Speaker 2:and I must say there was nothing about what he was saying seems unattractive and as we were hatching our plans, which was to do it on my own little narrowboat, which is about 40 foot long, and it would have been a rather. We'd have basically sort of rested some books on the outside and and made a little store like a market store. But we'd look out the window each day at this wonderful 1920s dutch barge that was parked on the other side of the river, and we vaguely knew the french guy who owned it and we'd heard that he just had it broken into because he'd bought it back from Holland to sell but then had fallen in love with it and been unable to sell it because every time someone came around he'd talk it down he's extremely French and he'd be like oh the engine is a little dodgy because he didn't really want to part with it.
Speaker 2:he loves beautiful old machines and so he was now kind of stuck with it. He'd spent all his money buying it. He didn't have the money to buy a license. And now it had broken into and we kind of swooped in like vultures and said to him could we maybe rent his boat for a year just to do this bookshop experiment on it that john and I have been imagining? But he kind of immediately saw the possibilities and was like no, I'll build a stage on the roof. We can do live performance as well. I will give you the boat, I will put the boat into the business. If you will, let me be a third of it, third of it.
Speaker 2:And so we all had this kind of manic, delusional it felt at the time, optimism about how definitely successful the whole thing would be. And then we started, within within about five weeks of having that conversation with him, we were off and we'd already begun to sort of fly the waterways, only to discover that we sold nothing and it was hell and we couldn't afford cigarettes and coffee anymore and it took quite a long time to sort of turn into a thing. But eventually every dream we ever had, for it has come true. And, more frankly, once we got the full page in New York Times with photos, we were like, okay, we weren't delusional it turned out.
Speaker 1:Well, you cannot beat free press, right. And you kind of got the same thing going now with social media, because every reader or book blogger wants to have their photo taken at Word on the Water when they're in London.
Speaker 2:It seems to garner attention far more than we kind of expected that it would, and it seems that people already know what it is. There's this weird thing John and I used to say, which is that because we weren't what we are now at all, we were shabby and tragic and we were both quite sad old men, we weren't in a happy point of our lives and the boat was filthy, we still had a coal fire and all the books had fingerprints on them. But people just knew what they wanted it to be, and when they, if they wrote about it somewhere, they talk about it as if it was already the thing that they were imagining, and so it was easy for us to just actually turn it into what people had already sort of sensed it. Also as a project. It's always had its own weird magic. It's like just can't stop it. It seemed to, it seemed to be a bit charmed really, and nothing seemed to get in its way. It's just sort of the doors open for it.
Speaker 1:We're very lucky old men it sounds like your vision was something that the community had already envisioned and that they just came together at the perfect time. People are happier when they have a community hub, but, thanks to social media, word on the Water has grown from a London community hub to a global community. The bookshop is on social media everywhere, but I can't help but think it's more than people just wanting to get a photo taken by the bookshop. I think it's that people want to read. Yeah, I mean what we discovered.
Speaker 2:It's a fantastic time to be selling books. This country is very interested in books indeed, and whenever anyone knew where we were, we were doing very well, and there was one we were just selling secondhand at that point. But we had to move every 14 days because it's very regulated on the canal system in Britain and that meant we kept disappearing, and so it's very regulated on the canal system in Britain and that meant we kept disappearing, and so it's very hard to build up your community when the boat, the shop, has disappeared. The next time you'd go and see it and people had to follow us on social media to sort of know where we were, which is where the whole beginning of social media knowing about us came from, because we we didn't really know much about it ourselves, but we thought we'd better sort of have a presence so that people could find us. And then, after about sort of seven or eight years, reluctantly, we were beginning to realize that we weren't making a living properly from doing this three people trying to share the profits from the southern hand bookshop that kept disappearing, even though we were sort of quite well known and people were quite affectionate. It's like finding us was a bit like you know, stumbling on one of those sort of doorways into another universe and the subtle knife. You were incredibly lucky to come upon us, and that's not ideal in retail. It shouldn't be like winning the lottery to find the shop.
Speaker 2:And so we slightly theatrically said eventually we're gonna have to close, we're so sorry we can't get a permanent mooring. And the canal authorities would never give us a permanent mooring because we had like live jazz and poetry serams and things going on on the roof and because we couldn't choose where we parked. We'd often be outside some poor person's house and they'd sort of write and complain. And so the canal authorities, who were based 200 miles away from London, had never seen the shop, kind of assumed we were like a party boat or something, just because all they really knew about us was the complaints they were getting. There's a man playing a saxophone outside my bedroom. It's been days now. Yeah, there's a man playing a saxophone outside my bedroom. It's been days now, yeah. So we, um, they wouldn't let us have a home, but we weren't making a living not having a home. And so we said on social media we're very sorry, we think we're going to have to close, but they're not really turning it over.
Speaker 2:We can't get a mooring and we went to paddington station, which is one of the few places that's got a lot of footfall in l, and we just squatted there and refused to move, on the grounds that at least that way we could be selling books. And we waited there for a year while the canal authorities read these really terrifying letters about how they could drain our boat out of the water and sell it for their own profit if we didn't move. And we posted one of their letters online because it's kind of threatening, we thought, and that inspired people to start campaigning for us. And suddenly there was a petition that one of the people our regulars told us they'd started and that had that got 7 000 people signing it and they're not. Creed, who's a very famous booker-winning author over here, started to support us. And Stuart Lee, who's a comedian, is very well-known over here started supporting us.
Speaker 2:Then we got in the newspaper and things began to kind of roll in our favour. And we couldn't believe it, because we'd been chased by the canal authorities for years and we assumed that it was only a matter of time before we'd have to give in. And then one day a very, very handsome Ghanaian, very well-spoken gentleman came in a very expensive suit and explained to us that he was a parliamentary private secretary. The house of commons uh, he shouldn't really be saying it, but we might like to know that. We had three MPs and one cabinet minister on side and there was every chance that we'd be successful in our attempt to get a mooring. And we we assumed he was just, you know, passing loud. And then we got a phone call a few weeks later from the canal authorities saying where would we like a mooring, which is very different to the sort of tone they'd be taking with us until then. So it seems that the deep state of Great Britain in some way may be lent in our favor. And so we were offered a mooring where we wanted and we said let's go to King's Cross because it's near a station. But then in the year or two that followed us coming here, this huge redevelopment called Granary Square, which is like a second Covent Garden just grew around us. So suddenly we're near to the St Martins, the world famous art college and the Guardian newspaper and the British Library and we're in a perfect place to be selling books and we're doing it at kind of a perfect time.
Speaker 2:In the British book market it's absolutely exploding at the moment. Over here New little independent bookshops are opening all the time and staying open. It's like it's a growth spurt. We had our dark times sort of 10 years ago, when borders pulled out of Britain altogether and bookshops were saying, if you wanted to buy your digital version, at a sort of sad little stand in the shop and all the books have stickers on them saying three for the price of one, and it seemed like it was all over. But that's the exact opposite of what's happened in the last few years in this country, partly locked down. A lot of young women readers are kind of saving bookshops, reading furiously, making book groups, online book groups, bookstagram, all that stuff and advertising. So they'll come to a bookshop like ours, a little independent bookshop, but then they'll advertise it all over social media afterwards as a sort of thank you and tell lots of other people about it. So it's kind of an exciting time to be selling books. It's the exact opposite. We thought we were getting into a dying medium.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree. At in-person events people have said to me oh no one's reading as much anymore. And I say to them you know where are you getting this information? And they'll just say you know, well, it's everywhere, it's on the news. And I'll say you know what? Every week or every two weeks for the last five years I've spoken with booksellers and independent bookshop owners from around the world and they have all said that, yeah, they have a slow day every now and again, but overall, since the pandemic, their businesses have grown and that tells me that more people are buying books and more people had time to read.
Speaker 2:Capitalism doesn't give you much time, does it, and as soon as everyone had to stop that for 20 minutes. They all remembered how to concentrate again for a moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, but their argument is that they'll come back and they say, oh, but young people aren't reading. And then they'll start putting down social media. And I just want to say to them you know what? Why don't you go on social media and understand that this is where this community lives? There is a huge community of readers on Instagram with hashtag bookstagrammer. On TikTok with hashtag booktalk. But then I think to myself hmm, maybe it's the person moaning about the fact that people aren't reading who aren't actually reading.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think there's moaning about the fact that people aren't reading who aren't actually reading. I mean, I think there's real truth in the fact that these damn machines have stolen and sort of twisted our attention spans. But there's been this absolute wave that's come up, particularly among young people suspicion of the technology, suspicion of the internet you know all the things that my generation thought was so exciting and interesting. There's this whole younger generation which are like you know, once they tried to make real friendships on Zoom and realised that that really wasn't the same at all.
Speaker 2:I know quite a few young people who started book groups because it was a way to try and reconnect with humans after lockdown and a safe way and a positive way. And, um, I really because it's I know from working in a bookshop. It's just, it brings out the absolute best in people. I can't imagine any other sort of retail bookshops make put people into their best selves and I think young people kind of sniff that out after lockdown when it was very important to try and find a way back to each other and back to sort of authentic connections with each other. And I think I think it's really nice to not have a sort of 14 second sliver of someone, but instead to spend a week with someone talking to you. You know and I think a lot of young readers get that too that it's a deeper sort of contact to read a book than it is to, no matter how much you watch someone's YouTube channel.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've realized is that reading and reading communities, book clubs etc. Are a way to combat loneliness, and the COVID pandemic has had a lot to do with this, and I can only speak for the US because that's where I live. But there is so much divide in this country. It is so sad. And yet when I speak with booksellers, you know they tell me that conversation is still alive and well in independent bookshops. Independent bookshops have, throughout history, drawn conversationalists. We build relationships through stories, whether we're telling stories to one another or sharing our thoughts about a book that we've mutually read.
Speaker 2:That's totally true and these little community-based things, things that the internet just doesn't generate, naturally tries to replace, are so precious, I think, especially in cities, um, which can also be quite isolating in their nature. The way that our shop was saved, we had really showed that thing about. You know, it takes a village to build a church that sort of. We were kind of carried on people's shoulders because the people in London wanted a thing like this and things like this so much. They wanted a little village environment where you could connect with people exactly and you didn't have to talk to people. But that made it much easier to talk to people and we're so small, we're a bit like, you know, when Alice eats the cake and gets too big. You kind of feel like that in the shop. It's such a tiny environment and so many spaces and retail spaces and cities are so intimidating and big and the buildings are intimidating.
Speaker 2:I think there's something about just being tiny in a city. That's already kind of takes a bit of the pressure off people and people. We're small enough that people overhear each other, and people we're small enough that people overhear each other. So when people are talking about books, when you've read a book and you hear someone else talking about that book, it's impossible to keep your gob shut. You've just got to go. It's great, isn't it? And that's it's a lovely way to connect people. And we run up.
Speaker 2:We've got a lot of book groups in the evenings in the shop where people come and kind of sit around, sit around the fire, and we can never get more than 10 people in. So it keeps it kind of intimate. And, uh, the way it's kind of grown the sort of skirts of culture around it, because people just needed to make that space, it's really harnessed something. One more thing I just say when I hear american people talking about it makes me sad because it reminds me of 10 years ago. Here there's still a bit of that culture of, oh, do buy a book from them. They really need your support, and I get a sense of how it's still quite challenging over there. And that's before people start knocking on the door and intimidating you because you don't have Jordan Peterson on the shelf or whatever. I've got a lot of respect for American booksellers, particularly now.
Speaker 1:Well, let me ask you something with that in mind. Here in the States, books are labeled with their price. So if your bookshop is in a place where the rent is low, wages are low, the cost of living is low, you're going to make a bit more of a profit on that book, right? But if you're in New York City, san Francisco, los Angeles, any other major cities where rent is exorbitantly high, your profit margin isn't going to be as much because of higher wages, rent unless you're lucky enough to own the building, in which case you're going to be paying high taxes. So the margin of profit is so different all over the country. Is it the same in the UK?
Speaker 2:It was never that people didn't like bookshops, it was always rent, and it was rents here 10 years ago. But Amazon a bit. On the one hand you've got this monopolistic, undercutting transnational corporation that's kind of spoiling the pricing system of books for literally everyone else in the retail sector. But predominantly that was exactly the problem. Shops would end up closing because the book sales didn't go up but the rents did. And there comes a point where you had to find a balance and that's kind of still true here, being on a boat. Everything's better on a boat and that's one of the reasons why everything's better on the boat, because we are paying probably about a quarter of the sort of overheads you need to do to be able to run a bookshop.
Speaker 2:And we've also learned another lesson which I think bookshops should learn, who are facing that problem, which is you can have a bookshop four times the size of ours, but you won't sell any more books. So if you have a bookshop the size of a cupboard but it's really tightly curated and you keep on putting new books on the shelf and filling it all the time, you can still sell as many books. We probably sell about the same as a Waterstones, which is our big British sort of chain store, but we sell it out of the space a quarter the size. And so opening a bookshop at a tiny, weird little corner of a city, under an arch somewhere or the sort of places that don't have premium rents, can still work, because so long as the people are coming and they're buying the books, it really doesn't matter how big your space is, because that's just your. People don't really need to see more than about 100 titles pointing at them to be able to shop well.
Speaker 1:And with this in mind, I'd like to talk about the curation of Word on the Water. I read an article in Towpath Talk. That's a fabulous little newspaper. Yes, it's a fun read. In this article you said of John quote John was a world-class curator and the book Baj would not have been possible or happened without him. End quote. Can you guide us through John's curation style and how his legacy continues, because he has family members now working at Word on the Water, right John's?
Speaker 2:daughter, meg, is now one of the three directors of the company. She's basically replaced John and is just as safe a pair of hands to do that. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the book barge when she was six and now she's 23 and a highly intelligent, just finished her university course. She already curates about a quarter of our books every week and is fabulous at it, to be honest.
Speaker 2:So John had been selling books all his life. He sold books when he was at school. He sold books on blankets and, uh, embankment station, uh on the street and illegal trestle tables in angel islington, getting chased around by the councils. Um, he was a kind of a homeless producer for a number of years and books kept him going. He started selling books.
Speaker 2:He met a man with a terrible hoarding who was living in a warehouse and the guy hoarded books and John made a deal with him that if John would sell some of the books, split the money with him. Then John could live on his half of the money and the guy could buy more books to add to his hoard with the money that came in. Could buy more books to add to his hoard with the money that he, um that came in from the ones that were sold. And so, um, from the first moment, john sort of learnt that you could be free and independent if you could find a source of books, and he taught me that. He taught me I could go to a charity shop, I could buy a book for a pound and I could walk to a bookshop and I could sell it to them for two2. And if you know that you're free, you don't have to work for anyone ever again. As long as you don't work in poor, you can have a living. John's curation was about.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons that people loved John's choices was because he lived a very extreme life and he was very interested in reading books by people who lived extreme lives and learned the things you learn from extremity and challenge that kind of hits the zeitgeist because I think in the last 20 years people have felt there's a real hunger for people who have led quite comfortable lives you know what I mean and existential challenge, extremity and intense poverty and intense injury and illness things that John was interested to read stories about that were true, because in those sort of stories there's a level of knowledge you can only really get from either having those experiences or reading books by people who've had those experiences, and so one of his superpowers was that he had an instinctive ability to teach with his curation.
Speaker 2:He loved American literature and he loved American philosophy particularly, and in England. That's an interesting sort of curation to be put in front of people, because not everyone's seeing this. But America for John was freedom. He was brought up in a terrible, abusive English public school where he had to sleep there at night as well. He wasn't allowed to leave the building. His experiences were very awful.
Speaker 2:He had a little transistor radio and access to books, and those were the two things that saw him through, and America for him was like the symbol of everything that he wasn't experiencing, experienced as the sort of freedom, the road. And then he sold books for so many years in so many environments, so many people. He just had an invisible instinct to. You could ask him to choose a thousand books and every one of them was a fabulous fan. He also couldn't listen to. He had a superpower in this day and age, which is he couldn't watch video. He was totally disinterested. He didn't want to watch YouTube. He didn't watch movies. If you tried to watch a television show with him, he'd compete with it for attention. Talk over it. He had no time for video. So the only thing he did was read or listen to the radio, and so he was reading 10 times what anyone else was reading, because it was his only form of entertainment, and so he was massively prolific.
Speaker 1:He sounds like quite a character. Do you still sell new and used books?
Speaker 2:We're almost predominantly new books. Now we're an independent bookshop with a section of secondhand books. Because if we were to try and sell secondhand the rate we're selling books nowadays, because if we were to try and sell secondhand the rate we're selling books nowadays, we'd empty the charity shops of thrift shops of northeast london every week and we wouldn't be very popular there's a lot of people that need to access those books.
Speaker 2:So, and it's such a treat we we curated secondhand for about nine years and at the point at which we were doing enough business to be able to start actually choosing new books, curating new books, it was such a treat because there's like a million books that you know and you hope you're going to find in the back of the thrift shop, but you're not going to usually. And so the moment that the two of us could be like if we could have any book in the shop, what would it be and we could reach out for them, um, it was just like a magical sort of rival for us. And each week now I'll sit in front of a computer for five hours, uh, and I'll we kind of hand curate. That's the point, because if we're so small we can't have the same books every week, or you'll have done us and you won't come back, and so that is just the absolute best part of the job, just sort of sifting for the most chewy books and the most interesting books and seeing what's come out recently.
Speaker 1:And it is so much fun hand-selling a book to a reader who walks into the bookshop and you're having this discussion and then you think I know what book that love. It's like a warm, fuzzy feeling I know it's a.
Speaker 2:It's a fresh. It's the freshest thing to be able to evade the people, and it's kind of precious to to sort of sit on the chair and and um, it's a special sort of kinship, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, it is because you've spent.
Speaker 2:You've spent a week, two weeks, both of you sort of having this person tell you about their lives, and so the two of you now have a really quite special bond. And if you love a book, it's because it's touched you. It's something quite personal as well, and so if two of you love a book, there's quite a lot that you have in common, if you see what I mean. My friend sells vegetables at an honour market store and she works here too and she says it's far more interesting to talk about.
Speaker 1:Books than a carrot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the provenance of the carrot is not the most sort of gripping subject.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, that's funny. Now, Paddy, do you still live on an aeroboat?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've lived on an aero boat for 20 years. I drove mine out of London for lockdown up into the countryside in Hertfordshire and quickly realised I had no interest in driving back to London. I love London and it's lovely to come here every two or three days, four days a week and sort of be among humans. But it's also nice to wake up in a forest or next to a lake and so I kind of live in the country. Now it was a schism between me and john. I came up for lockdown. John stayed resolutely living in the book barge for lockdown, uh, and he got terrible, terrible covid down here and it was difficult between us because I was constantly trying to say escape, come up here, you can just walk around in the country and be free, and he was like no one's staying here. He was enraged that bookshops weren't considered to be vital businesses and allowed to stay open in lockdown, because in Germany they were, but in in London they closed the bookshops and he never forgave the government yeah, it was like that here too.
Speaker 1:How long have you had word on the water in the narrowboat that you have now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 15 years.
Speaker 1:Do you ever have to bring the narrowboat up to scrape down the bottom of it? What does the upkeep of a narrowboat entail?
Speaker 2:So in principle you do that with a boat every four years. We didn't do it for 12 years and we dragged it around the London Canal system without doing that and then we finally took it out about two years ago and we just got away with it. We had three millimetres hull, which is as thin as you can be, so if you hit a shopping trolley with three millimetres of steel, you'll probably get away with it in the boat woods. We had a surveyor come and he looked at the boat and he said you're good. You're good for 20 years if you don't keep it moving around. So we got some very expensive epoxy paint and we painted the whole hull in about six layers of that and so we hope we don't have to take it out for another 20 years. So long as we keep it parked on the soft silt where we are, in principle it doesn't have to go anywhere. We took the engine out, so they can't tell us to move now because we haven't got an engine.
Speaker 1:Well, that's interesting. Okay, Paddy, what are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I'm just finishing the wonderful Wind, Sand and Stars.
Speaker 1:Ah, here's the same author that wrote the Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Expéry.
Speaker 2:Yes, de Saint-Expéry, that's right. The Little Prince is a beautiful, beautiful children's book, that story, the Little Prince which is about the little prince appearing after a plane crash in the desert. So what Antoine did was he? In the 1920s and 30s he flew the mail planes the very first mail deliveries by plane all the way down to South Africa and all over South America and all over the Sahara Desert, and he had an actual plane crash which inspired the Little Prince. And this is the book that he wrote in 1939 which describes the actual plane crash which inspired the little prince. And this is the book that he wrote in 1939 which describes the actual plane crash in the sahara.
Speaker 2:And it's wonderful because no one was really flying things in those days. It was the very beginning of commercial flight, uh, before the second world war. And uh, he's an incredible describer of what things look like and feel like. He looks down at the sea in the middle of the night and talks about the silver tiles of the sea surface moving against each other. He's got this way of. Even though it's in translation, it's a fabulous translation as well. And he goes to the Spanish Civil War and you get to sort of fly a plane to Madrid in the Spanish Civil War and walk around and talk to people and get a feeling for the madness of the streets and what it was like. So, yes, wind, sand and Stars, which I'm loving.
Speaker 1:Well, I adore the Little Prince, like millions of other people, so I look forward to reading Wind, sand and Stars. Thank you, ok, I got another question. Are you originally from Ireland?
Speaker 2:No, I was meant to be born on St Patrick's but I was late for that and everything ever since. But that was where the name came from. I was born on the day after, but I'm firmly from Devon in the South West. My surname is Screech, like screeching tires, and that name. You can map where the name comes from in the world. There's a great spike that does it and it's literally that the county is the only place where you see that name.
Speaker 1:So I'm devonshire, born in blake oh, I'll have to look up that website. Patty, thank you so much for chatting with me and sharing your stories. I will make sure to come by word on the water the next time I'm in London.
Speaker 2:Oh, you'll be welcome. I shall press three books into your hand.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'd love that. The story of how Word on the Water came to be. With your love of reading books and the water. It's just beautiful. I'm so glad you shared that, thank you.
Speaker 2:I mean what it really came from and what glued it together that, thank you.
Speaker 1:I mean what it really came from and put it together was the love of friends, and that's a pretty tight tie. Patty, thanks again for being on the bookshop podcast it's a fabulous.
Speaker 2:I listen. I've sneakily listened to a couple of podcasts. They're fabulous. Not all podcasts in this world are and similarly, as you can imagine, they get quite a lot of attention. But your questions have been the most wonderfully researched, so much better than we normally have to do. So thank you for doing your job for me.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you, Paddy Pleasure, nice to talk to you. Bye, you've been listening to my conversation with Paddy Screech from Word on the Water in London. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, and my executive assistant and graphic designer is Adrian Otterhan. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Thank you.