Travels with my Nan

Nick Imber

Lodestar Books

£14

An attractive account of three generations of family sailing.  Nick Imber’s parents bought the 1904 barge-yacht Nan in the late 1950s and spent many happy holidays exploring the East Coast and then Devon. For a while they were joined by an ex-Arthur Ransome dinghy Swallow II and much of the writing has a whiff of the faintly didactic, unpretentiously jolly, sub-Navy  flavour which other children of the 1950s may find nostalgic. Imber’s book is technically interesting as he describes the particular challenges and skills of sailing a flat-bottomed yacht. As the children grew up Nan offered ‘mates’ sailing, girlfriend sailing and began again with a new generation. I mourned the day when her maintenance became too demanding and she was sold as a ‘project’.