I am an ex-actor, fringe theatre director and script writer, married and living in the Welsh Marches, the borderland between England and Wales, and the backdrop to a series I'm writing, the Batch Magna novels, set in a village cut off from whatever the rest of the world gets up to beyond the hills of its valley. All the books in the series feature houseboats, converted paddle steamers on Batch Magna's river the Cluny, and I lived on a houseboat in the mid-1970s (the time frame for the novels) on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the Medway, deep in rural Kent.