A BIT AGROUND

A satisfying feature of looking after this column for the last 16 years has been the latitude granted me by editors for selecting material. This has delivered enough slack to celebrate the less spectacular among the yarns of derring-do and sheer survival. ‘Travels with my Nan’, published by the ever-inventive Lodestar Books and written by Nick Imber, tells of three generations of a family growing up with a small barge yacht in the Thames estuary.

The opening lines set the scene perfectly: ‘I first met her in Tollesbury and immediately fell for her. She was Essex Girl through and through, but not like the others, although she was shallow. There were only two problems. The age difference – she was born in 1904 and I was ten back then in 1959. None of this mattered to me but the second problem would be trickier; my Dad loved her too.’

We join Nick on his inaugural passage as a teenage skipper with a crew of fellow students. Like many a first trip, it doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d have liked, but the account smacks of an earlier, more innocent age than ours. The buoys may have changed, but the sands have