Deep in the English countryside is an inland marina, home to a group of unlikely characters living on their narrowboats.Life at Watergrove is carefree until a local land-owner decides he wants to build three luxury houses on the residents vegetable plot.In an unaccustomed act of decisiveness the boaters decide to form a committee to fight this scourge.Step forward Judy, a lady of physical substance, fierce determination and jocular disposition, who selflessly elects herself chairwoman.H.Q. is the local pub and it's here that our ageing boaters raise a creaking battalion.Judy leads our disparate band into battle, implementing a plan code-named Operation Vegetable - a harebrained scheme of doubtful focus. The boaters find help from an ageing rock star and a TV Gardening programme. Skirmish follows skirmish until one of the boaters is severely injured and the stakes are raised. Has the despotic land-owner, a man of few morals, driven by power and greed, finally met his match?Will the boaters look like toothless turnips or can they cajole wobbly bodies, more suited to tea-drinking than physical endeavour, to mount the barricades?Or....have the boaters simply lost the plot?
About the Author: Jo describes himself as being at the 'barely competent middle-age stage'. Just prior to the 'totally incompetent late-middle-age stage' he decided to do some writing. The result is five books. Three on their boating adventures and two novels. It's taken till well into my sixth decade to have something worth writing about. In some respects, writing about our own adventures is more difficult than making something up from scratch. When you create characters and situations you are unrestrained, limited only by your imagination (which in my case is a bit of a problem). Writing about me and my wife I have to work within testing parameters, such as telling the truth! We spent twelve years living on boats. On two narrowboats we trundled round the waterways in the UK and on our 110-year-old Dutch barge we have been destroying the infrastructure in Holland, France and Belgium. We have seen some extraordinary places and met many wonderful people, some of whom were prepared to speak to us. At school, frankly, studies didn't go too well. Stupidly I preferred to propel different shaped balls around with various implements, like hands and feet. An educational own goal if ever there was one. I was a baker for ten years, then worked for a company organising sports events, mainly golf and cricket. Jan and I both lived in Littleborough, Lancashire for thirty years but we'd never met till I ruined her chances at a quiz night when I joined her team - and the rest is history (or science and nature, or sport...) We moved to Shropshire, to a hamlet just north of Shrewsbury, in 1995. It was a dark period in our lives when Jan was dangerously ill and we needed a positive change to make us look forward. We renovated a house, sold it and moved onto our first narrowboat in 2003 having bought the shell and fitted all the inside out ourselves. I wrote monthly articles for Canal Boat Magazine while we travelled around the UK. After I was sacked for an 'editorial misunderstanding' I had to find another outlet for my itchy fingers - the result is my five books. The three boat-related ones are great reminders of the times we've had - maybe they'll inspire you to try something different.