Jo Bell, "Boater: A Life on England's Waterways"

Jo Bell, photo by Lee Allen

Jo Bell is an award-winning poet, writer, and archaeologist whose collections include Kith and Navigation. She was the UK's inaugural Canal Laureate and is a former director of National Poetry Day. Originally from Sheffield and raised on the edges of the Derbyshire Peak District, she has spent the past twenty years living a life afloat on the waterways of England. She can usually be found on a mooring somewhere in Cheshire. Boater is her first memoir.

About Boater, by Jo Bell
After decades of calm aboard England’s historic canals, a turbulent relationship finds Jo Bell embark on a year-long odyssey navigating the country’s canals. Exploring the past and present, Boater is both her story and the story of the living waterways – told with wit, wisdom, and deep insight into a culture found on the other side of the map.

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Jo uses her experience as an archaeologist to guide readers through this floating world. Along the way, there is heartbreak, disaster, a particularly grisly episode involving a Canada goose, biscuits, and an array of unforgettable and curious

characters.

She also highlights the importance of key historical figures who shaped the system we know today – James Brindley, Thomas Telford, L. T. C. Rolt – whose groundbreaking work revolutionised and revitalised transportation in England.

You can read more about Boater on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the memoir. 

From Boater
This is an adventure story. The adventure is a small one, and the country in which it happens is not on the usual map, because the place where I live is not on your map. It sits inside a parallel geography, on a map-within-a-map of England and Wales. It requires you to look differently at the land you live in. Its history, too, is a history-within-a-history; a rival to the chronicles of great men whose monuments are columns, and whose homes were themselves monuments. This watery nation is an idiosyncratic country, which inspires a love of place without nationalism.

Its people include ordinary workers, clowns, freaks, and charlatans. All share a sense of self, time, and purpose, which makes their world different to the one that lies ten feet away, beyond the water’s edge. I have not crossed the Atlantic in a dinghy with nothing but a jar of peanut butter and a waterproof hat. I have not scaled Everest, or rescued a friend from a crevasse by cutting off my own leg. But then, adventure is not a question of scale. What I have done is travel the waterways of England (and sometimes Wales) for twenty years, meeting with extraordinary people in an extraordinary environment. I have learned a lot about human nature, including my own; about rope, and Brasso, and bravery; and above all, about the necessity for a constant supply of biscuits.