The Herbies in the news

According to the Leicester Mercury, Kath and I are the owners of a certain historic large Woolwich narrowboat! Well if it’s in the paper, it must be true, so I have written to Sarah asking when she intends to hand over Chertsey to us.  So far she is making excuses.  Ah well, the paper did a good photo of me and Kath and Grace even if they did get their facts a bit askew.  You can see the article and the photo here. If all you see are some boats, then click on the arrow at the side of the photo and you’ll see the one of us.

Chertsey might be a big butch boat, but Sarah lends it a woman’s touch as you can see from a photo I took.

More news – I am in the final throes of preparing my book for publication on Kindle.  Why Kindle?  Because I don’t suppose I would sell enough paper copies to pay for the printing! Kath is having a last read through, picking up the final syntax errors (full stops and commas out of place etc.).  I think we have settled on a title, which will be Jobs for the Boys. When I do publish it, I’ll try to set it up so it is free on Kindle for a while (or any device that can download and read Kindle – PC, Tablet etc.)  Just to whet your appetite, here is the blurb.

Eric is not your average Careers Officer. Not for him the discussions on the relative merits of a life in architecture versus civil engineering or ophthalmology versus physiotherapy . Quite a few of his clients have already made a start on their careers – in crime.  As to the others, they range from boys who failed the selection test to be milkmen, to a girl who wants to embalm corpses. Eric loves it.

If only he could manage his own life better. The only career that Eric would swap for would be that of an old blues guitarist, but not being old or black or blind or from the Mississippi delta he is unqualified. Nevertheless he plays his guitar when and where he can in the hope of attracting women. He is marginally more adept at guitar than he is at women, which is to say, not very.

Dealing with women is his weakest point. While he struggles to avoid the advances of Doreen, a predatory older woman, the girl he really wants keeps catching him in embarrassing situations. Worse still, Eric does nothing to encourage her when he stumbles upon a criminal conspiracy and foolishly decides to do the police’s job for them. Lurching from one disaster to another in his battered old motor, he digs himself deeper and deeper in trouble with the police, the criminals, and most of all his would be girlfriend.

When he finally does dig himself out of trouble, help comes from the most unlikely quarters.

As you may have gathered from the above, it is not a work of great gravity, although I like to think there is a strong social conscience  running through it.

Sorry, not a single mention of canals or boats in the whole work.  I suppose I could have called the policeman Inspector Caldon and the headmaster Mr Bridgewater and the prison governor Mr Trent and so on. Next time maybe. How about a villain called Mr Buckby?

Another thing. In order firstly that I might remain semi anonymous and more importantly to make it less likely that anyone suspects, wrongly, that they recognise themselves in the book, I have have decided to adopt a nom de plume – or should I call it a nom de keyboard?  So the author’s name will be Herbie Neil. Easy enough for you lot to recognise but hard for anyone from the 1970s which is when the book is set.

I’m hoping I might publish later this week.  Stay tuned.