WORDS once SPOKEN now CAPTURED
Feb. 18, 2024
Rough Crossings
Welcome aboard the NB Erica on a wet winter’s night. It is a perfect night to snuggle down and listen to JM Synge’s turn of the 20th century accounts of his travels to the Aran Islands in a small currach on stormy seas. Jour…
Dec. 3, 2023
When Mum met Dad (95th Birthday edition)
Join us on a night when the boat is wrapped in freezin fog, but the stoves are warm and the cabin is cosy, for this week's very special episode as we celebrate Dad’s 95th birthday and we go back in time to hear about how a 1…
July 30, 2023
The New Baby Arrives (The 'Kathy' Chronicles - pt 3)
What was it like to give birth on small 30 ft boat in the 1960s? Mum continues her account of her life afloat on the Kathy in this week’s instalment of ‘The Kathy Chronicles’. We hear about the some of the challenges and joy…
July 23, 2023
Crochet by Lantern Light (The 'Kathy' Chronicles - pt 2)
What was it really like to live on board a 30ft canal boat in the late 1950s before there were such things as service points and fully equipped marinas? This week we continue with ‘The Kathy Chronicles’ where Mum describes h…
June 11, 2023
'A Little Clinker-Built Boat' (The 'Kathy' Chronicles - pt 1)
Travel back in time to the scorching summer of 1959. Although the canals were still mainly used by working boats, leisure cruising was growing in popularity and so too the idea of living on a canal boat. Tonight, I take us b…
Sept. 18, 2022
The Longest Trench (Summer readings)
The second of our reading this year takes back to the working-boat families of the First World War. Geoffrey Lewis’ beautifully detailed and cleverly structured tribute to the people who worked the boats through this turbule…
Sept. 11, 2022
Canal Pushers (Summer readings)
The first of our ‘Summer’ readings this year is a litle different from those we looked at last year and features Andy Griffee’s meticulously researched, fast-paced, crime thriller Canal Pushers . Set on the West Midlands can…
June 5, 2022
Caught in a Rhyme
On the week that the cygnets of our swan pair hatched, we explore the rather contradictory nature of the canal through the eyes of poets Jo Bell, Nancy Campbell, and Ian MacMillan. We find romance amidst the unromantic and b…
Aug. 29, 2021
Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' (Summer readings #4)
This week we explore and listen to extracts of Kenneth Grahame's (1908) children's classic The Wind in the Willows . The story follows of the lives of various (anthropomorphised) animals that live by a river, principally, th…
Aug. 1, 2021
Lucy M. Boston's 'The River at Green Knowe' (Summer readings #3)
For our final summer readings session we are looking at a very different piece of writing. It is Lucy M. Boston’s The River at Green Knowe . Lucy M. Boston is probably better known for her earlier book The Children of Green …
July 25, 2021
Temple Thurston's 'The Flower of Gloster' (Summer readings #2)
In this second Summer Reading Special we discover the delights of Ernest Temple Thurston’s The Flower of Gloster . Published in 1911, Temple Thurston is writing about a very different world to the one in which last week’s au…
July 18, 2021
Hassell and Hollingshead - Early canal writings (Summer readings #1)
This is the first of our Summer Reading Specials devoted to one or two books that are in some way related to waterways or life on them. They replace the normal format while Penny, Donna and I are away, off-line, and having a…