You
She can see the landscape and more. It's all painted in her grief, all of her history.
It's just out of the field. Now all of the landscape. It's just an empty world.
I wanted to be a detective, but I wanted to live on the boat. I got introduced to boats at various stages quite early in my life.
That seed got planted and I also wanted to live in the country and I knew that and I don't, but I almost do.
There's seeds of what I do know.
We weren't sure it was going to work and then we met someone who owns this boat and we said to him,
can we maybe use it for six months just to try all doing this?
And he said, no, I want to be a full partner in your business and he built the stage on top of the boat and we have events on the roof now,
because of him and he did a lot of the putting bookshelves into the boat for us.
And so we opened in July last year and we did really, really well on our first day.
And that was a sort of inspiration and we realised this was probably going to work.
And then since then we've just been building it. Every time we make a bit of money, we spend a bit more money on the boat.
We get our books from two sources. One of them is donations, which is about a third of the books.
I wake up in the morning often and there's a big bag of books just sitting on the boat with a little note from someone saying,
I thought you should have these. And the remaining two thirds are coming from charity shops and they get these huge piles,
mountains of books in there in back rooms in the shop and we go and sort of pick through them and take some of them out for them.
And we're going to start selling new books in the next month or two.
I've found another one, I'm sorry.
There's a real community of people on the river. It's a very friendly place to live.
Bookshops seem to bring out the best in people as well. People are very friendly and lovely when they come to bookshops.
I don't know why that is.
And living on the river is just like living in the country. There's little arteries of countryside that run through the river.
So it's a chance to slow down and escape London.
If you don't mind waking up in a sort of Edwardian lounge surrounded by books in the morning,
which I don't sleep on the floor of the shop, but I've got mattresses, it's very comfortable.
And I have my two cats to keep me warm. So it's entirely comfortable, yeah.
I don't feel like I live in London now, I feel like I go and visit London.
You earn a very small amount of money, but you spend a very small amount of money,
unless you're just as rich as I've found.
I had a drink with my friend who's on, who drinks about £3,500, £4,000 a month.
And we discover that we both have the same money to spend each week on our lives and ourselves.
Because she has to pay a mortgage and childcare and a car thing and parking and all the things that she has to pay for.
I don't have to pay for, so we've actually got the same amount of money.
It's close and tight, but it's exactly meeting the terms of the business plan that we predicted for it for the first year.
It's keeping us fed and clothed and housed.
And I think that the less money you have, the less interesting you are to governments and corporations.
Because you can't provide them with what they need, which is your money.
Because we're perhaps all nowadays batteries for corporations.
And so the simpler and the less expenditure there is in your life and the less consuming there is in your life,
the more you maybe get a bit left alone.
And in that tiny niche, there's a little bit of freedom.
It's about the fact that we're supposed to live in free societies.
He's a really cool man. I had to really run a good car on my own.
I love the running water.
So they can do what the fuck he wants for most of the time.
Yeah, right.
All the wood you see, all the furniture you see on the boat, the inside of the piano on the roof,
the roof itself at the back, the beautiful driftwood.
It's all skips. It's all detritus that the market throws away.
And all we do is pick it up and put it on the boat and have all comes and photographs it all day.
They are things that other people regarded as rubbish to be thrown away and that we found and decided
that we weren't quite ready to be thrown away yet.
I've got no memory of any youth cult since the 50s and the dawning of the sort of teen cult phenomenon.
I've no memory of any youth cult that was so fascinated by the past.
Kids think that's where the goodies that have been found now.
And they're always used to think they're in the future.
And they were forcing the future.
And now I think kids are scared of the future, as everyone is.
A whole generation of young people now are like, we can do this with technology.
They're like, yeah, we know you can do that with technology.
But I think people are really hungry for something that's authentic and something that's non-urban.
Something about this odd phenomenon seems to be a sort of expression of that.
Only time and work and love can make this happen.
The other thing I think that's very relevant nowadays is curating.
There's an awful lot of information around.
Everyone's got everything at their fingertips.
That means that everyone doesn't know which things to go and look at now.
And so we think there's a real role for curating humans, creating things for other humans nowadays.
And that's modern, but that's not a throwback to something.
That's a vital necessity in an age where all the information is available to everyone all the time,
but no one can choose what information to expose themselves to.
And so the music and the books and the lifestyle are all sorts of curating in a way.
There are ways of saying that here's a way that we found.
Here's some books that we like, here's some music that we like listening to.
And people seem to be drawn to it like mosquitoes,
possibly because they need some sort of human guidance,
rather than corporate or technological guidance in their lives,
because machines don't give a fuck about us.
And I think deep down people are beginning to suspect the big forces that are shaping their lives
have a lizard-like indifference to their well-being.
And for the Olympics we're going to be on the Hartford Union Canal, just next to Victoria Park,
because there's 40,000 people in the park every day for six weeks during the Olympics.
So there's going to be a big floating market along the canal
to see what the centrepiece of that market is.
My favourite part of the day is the end of it.
It's the evening when I put on Foray's PA Yeziu,
and quietly pile up books and carry them into the boat.
Because that's a whole day of talking to people that's finished, and it's usually nice the day.
And that's a really quiet, little meditative sort of routine that's always the same
at the end of each day, and it closes it.
And it's the one piece of music I turn up, the loud.
And so everyone can hear the PA Yeziu by Foray for four minutes,
and that's not enough to cause anyone upset.
I had a homeless guy come running over the bridge when I did it the other night.
I had to come, it was like the Shawshank Redemption.
He was really moved by it.
The last half an hour of my working day is my favourite.
Thank you.
