Coasting: Running Around the Coast of Britain – Life, Love and (Very) Loose Plans

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At the start he decribes being galvanised by earlier sailing books written by authors with "philistine certainties . her cross, nanny's voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea. Applicability of cancellation rights: Legal rights of cancellation under the Distance Selling Regulations available for UK or EU consumers do not apply to certain products and services. In the same way that countless strangers felt compelled to join her around the UK, Coasting carries the reader along and inspires us all to ask 'why not?

He has a slightly tense meeting with Paul Theroux in Brighton who is heading around the UK in the opposite direction and also in the process of writing his book, The Kingdom by the Sea.I read Raban's Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings years ago and really enjoyed it, and so with this book years later, I absolutely loved it. When it comes to sex, they are furtive and hypocritical - and their erotic tastes are known to be extremely peculiar. Dave Cornthwaite'Reading Coasting is like listening to a friend tell a tale down the pub that you can't quite believe.

But it is the way Raban mixes the personal past with his present journey that stayed with me after I turned the last page. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. I recently walked in the Brecon Beacons, finding 50 people eating lunch at the highest point, others having loud conversations that echoed around the hills and others playing loud music on their phones.They are aggressively practical and philistine, with a loud contempt for anything that smells abstract or theoretical. Chapter Two is a description of the dogged insularity of the Manx, who he compares to the Falkland Islanders, whilst the Isle of Man becomes a metaphor for the insularity of the larger island on which he himself had been brought up and lived up till this point.

Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. Among many other themes, the Falkland war and the economic recession, which are important themes in the 80ies, seem to worry the author. Below, it felt as if one was squatting in the sound box of an out-of-tune harp, with every shroud vibrating on a slightly different note and the wooden frame answering the shrouds with a long, low sympathetic groan. Running away from your problems doesn’t solve anything – but sometimes it’s more fun than dealing with them. For me it was an escape from Trumpism into Thatcherism, because Raban was a keen observer of England at the tipping point from Industrial Revolution to tourism and a global economy.

I am not English/British and clueless about the sea so lots of references are lost on me, but that in no way detracts from the pleasure of the wordcraft.