08/08/19: David Thomas and Helen Krasner – Travels with Cookie: Narrowboat Cruising with a Cat (2014)

The author learns that he has terminal cancer and decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition to buy and live on a canal boat. He does this with Cookie, his large, fluffy, white cat.

During their four years afloat, David saves a woman stuck in the mud and meets a seal, while Cookie – perhaps not the brightest button in the box – falls in the water a few times. But otherwise, not a great deal happens beyond boating up and down England and Wales. This is no way prevents it being an enjoyable read.

I came to this book via its co-author, Helen Krasner, whose Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain I enjoyed recently. The story of how David meets and falls in love with Helen is touching. They end up living together (she has five cats of her own) and his health miraculously improves.

I would have liked a bit more Cookie and a little less boating, but it’s to the authors’ great credit that this doesn’t become yet another sentimental “me and my pet” memoir.

01/04/19: Helen Krasner – Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain (1998)

“I wasn’t particularly interested in fulfilling an ambition, nor did I want the great feelings of achievement people thought I must be seeking – this just wasn’t the way I looked at walking, or indeed at life.”

In 1986, Helen Krasner became the first woman to walk around the coast of Britain. This is her tale. Rather than present a day-by-day account, she simply reports back on the interesting bits – a wise decision, as this makes for a far more compelling narrative. There’s a visit to Sellafield nuclear power station, where she commits the faux-pas of carrying a camera. She passes Paul McCartney’s farm at the Mull of Kintyre. And she looks for the monster at Loch Ness.

She is unpretentious and easy to like, with a relaxed view about the “rules” of the walk. She undertook the journey for pleasure, not for the sake of setting a record. Plus, there can be no definitive route. It’s not as simple as keeping the coast on your left. How literally do you take this when paths come and go? Even if the path followed the coastline strictly, where is the “coast” anyway? It depends on dynamic factors including tides, ocean currents, times of year, weather and erosion – an infinitely complex matter. You realise that she is absolutely right to interpret the route the way she does.

She only suffers one blister on the entire trip and the book is refreshingly free of gripes about the pain of endurance. She does it for fun, and that cones across well.

Along the way she depicts an older and more innocent Britain – one without computers, GPS technology and mobile phones. On one occasion she has to call for some medical results (foot X-ray to rule out suspected fracture) and only had 10p to use in a phone box. Keen to hear about her walk, the radiographer is slow to get to the point and reveal the good news: “She had told me in the nick of time. The pips went, and we were cut off.” There must be generations now who have no idea what the pips even means.

I particularly liked the way she refuses to play the role others expect from her. By the time she completes the walk, returning to Brighton, she has become weary of retelling the same story endlessly and generally disappoints the press by not issuing the kinds of memorable statements they expect to hear.

Only one real criticism: the book would have greatly benefited from a map showing Helen’s route route. Amid the barrage of obscure place names, I found I was often looking up locations online to see how far she had travelled. That said, she does end with a day-by-day listing of each stretch she completed and a running tally of distances covered – in fact, a journey of 4,922 miles from the start of March 1986 to the end of January 1987.

22/03/19: Tony Hobbs – One Pair of Boots: Land’s End to John O’Groats (2000)

I was very keen to read about a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats (a.k.a. the LeJoG), but this wasn’t quite the account I was hoping for. The author generally fails to inspire with his descriptions of the physical feat of undertaking the walk, which he completes slowly over nearly 15 weeks. Nor does he especially engage the reader with descriptions of people and places along the way, although it’s touching when he seems to make a friend called Nicky:

“She was tall, with a mop of thick light brown hair, spoke with a soft Devon accent, and was reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea...In the dark we left the pub and walked the half mile to where Nicky was camped. She held a torch while I put up my tent, and then we looked at the stars, she pointing out the Plough and North Star.”

You wonder if he is somewhat smitten, although he misses the chance to use an obvious joke about carrying a torch.

His interlude aside, the book, like the journey itself, seems to lack passion and purpose. There’s a charity angle (£2 goes to the MS Society for every copy sold), but this is only mentioned when he’s close to finishing. It’s not presented as a motivating factor for his walk. He visits a lot of churches and takes a lot of wrong turns, but you don’t really learn how he feels about anything.

For a narrative like this to succeed, it cannot simply be a list of places trudged through, meals eaten and places camped at. It needs to do something with that information to give you a reason to invest your time in the story and experience it for yourself. He could have taken one aspect – such as the fact that he “consumed 285 pints of beer of 83 different varieties” – and framed the entire narrative around that. It could have worked so much better as Land’s End to John O’Groats in 285 Pints.

But despite all this, I grew to like the author and found myself wanting to get to the end to see him finish his journey – even if the huge achievement of his reaching that point fails to even warrant a new paragraph in the text. There’s something about the sheer ordinariness – the complete lack of pretension – that makes this book difficult to dislike.

13/03/19: Phoebe Smith – Extreme Sleeps: Adventures of a Wild Camper (2013)

This was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “Leave one, take one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

Believing that you don’t need to travel far to find real wilderness, Phoebe Smith hikes to obscure and remote UK locations and then camps in them. Each chapter covers one such location and details what happened when she travelled and slept there. Sometimes it’s fascinating (camping beside the wreckage at the crash site of a World War II bomber) and sometimes it’s a little mundane and repetitious.

There are quite a few typos and sometimes the grammar doesn’t work. See, for example, this awkwardly dangling sentence: “Looking at the map, the River Liza which feeds the reservoir, should have been nearer to where I was standing.” This implies that the river is looking at the map. The commas are in the wrong places, too.

That said, Smith’s cheery and energetic writing bounces along. It's friendly and upbeat – an amiable read.

19/02/19: Karl Pilkington – An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington (2010)

The tie-in book of the first Sky TV series of the same name. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send their friend Karl to witness the Wonders of the World, and Karl – a man who dislikes travel and is well out of his “comfort zone” – responds to these alien experiences in his usual deadpan manner.

Written down, it’s considerably less funny. You can still enjoy Karl’s unique slant on things, but it seems one-dimensional without hearing his voice (so familiar from podcasts and radio shows) and seeing his face. Another disappointment is that the little drawings are not by Karl, but by an illustrator and made to look as if they are Pilkington doodles. Despite some funny sentences, the whole book has a child-like quality that makes it oddly unsatisfying.

It’s undoubtedly lightweight, but there’s still a certain pleasure to be had in reading about these adventures – however flimsy. Despite his many prejudices, Karl mostly emerges as a kind and likeable character. You wouldn’t necessarily want to travel with him, though.

13/02/19: Stuart Stevens – Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure (1989)

“You would have to be out of your mind to go anywhere with Stuart Stevens, but when the travel is only mental, he is the perfect companion: brave, funny and ever-watchful” – Martin Amis

Amusing account of the author’s attempt to cross Africa by car, from Bangui in the Central African Republic to Algiers. His does this with his glamorous, remarkably laid-back companion Anne. Intriguingly, the exact nature of the pair’s relationship – not romantic – is never explained.

Their efforts are continually thwarted by local corruption, a lack of roads, failing equipment and poor living conditions. It’s to his great credit that Stevens finds so much humour in a situation that continually veers between maddening, desperate and scary.

According to the book blurb, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Mali, all of which he drives through, are “bizarre places where the vestiges of colonial folly, idiosyncratic enterprise, bribery and endless, pointless bureaucracy are the stuff of life”. Indeed, the frustrations of bureaucracy are such that the actual road journey only begins halfway through the book – and even then not in his friend’s Land Rover, as planned, but in a completely different vehicle. The section detailing the Toyota Land Cruiser breaking down during their attempt to cross the Sahara is genuinely hair-raising. It had to be locked into third gear and then driven in a continuous session without stopping, whatever the terrain.

It’s a miracle that they survived to tell the tale.

01/02/19: Cheryl Strayed – Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found (2012)

“Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

When her mother dies and her personal life unravels (one-night stands, divorce, heroin), Cheryl Strayed decides to walk the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) from Mohave, California, to the Bridge of the Gods on the border of Oregon and Washington. Even with sections of the route being missed, it ends up being a journey of 1,100 miles.

Along the way she evades rattlesnakes and bears, struggling through parched deserts and deep snow. She has excruciating foot pain and loses toenails, but meets kindly strangers, makes some hiking friends and starts to come to terms with her past.

It’s hugely readable. The film made in 2014 is a fairly faithful adaptation of this text, but suffers from condensing such a detailed narrative into a couple of hours and somehow seemed a more disturbing tale overall. It’s also harder for a film to show an emotional transformation, which is perhaps the real subject of Wild.

The book is far more varied in tone, with plenty of gentle humour amid the soul-searching and recollection. You end up admiring her spirit and determination. And if you like walking, as I do, it leaves you yearning to undertake your own epic journey.

03/01/19: Raynor Winn – The Salt Path (2018)

Raynor Winn and her husband “Moth” have financial and legal problems that cause them to lose their home. Moth then receives a diagnosis for terminal brain disease. With no money, nowhere to live and seemingly no future, the couple decide to walk England’s South West Coastal Path. They do this in two sections, with a few months in between, and cover all but 40 of the 630 miles.

The story of that walk works as an amiable travel book, but there’s so much more to it. Living on the outsides of society, they encounter prejudice and fear whenever anyone hears about their situation. Often perfectly friendly members of the public recoil from them when they discover that the hiking couple are homeless, with the “h” word itself seeming to carry a lot of stigma.

There’s some pretty writing about nature and wildlife and there are quite a few laughs (or smiles, at least) – such as a running joke about Moth being mistaken for Simon Armitage, who was walking the same route.

There’s obviously a tragic element, too. Moth’s wellbeing and longer-term options are always in doubt. Paradoxically, the extremes of the walk seem to improve his health, but the days beyond the walk remain a big unknown.

A few passages of worldly wisdom and philosophising occasionally seem overbaked until you consider what the couple have been through.

It’s an entertaining, moving and oddly gripping read.

20/10/18: Mark Mason – Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground (2011)

Mark Mason sets out to walk every tube line overground, passing all 269 stations from Acton Town to Woodside Park. It’s a good idea for a book and one that works some of the time. I read this while commuting on the tube and several times found myself at or near the station he was passing. He varies things a little by walking one line at night (Jubilee) and one in heavy snow (Metropolitan). He walks part of the Northern Line with Geoff Nicholson (author of The Lost Art of Walking) and part of the Metropolitan Line with Bill Drummond. Like Will Self, he also walks to Heathrow Airport – but unlike Self, he doesn’t then catch a plane and walk into New York.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that Mason writes too little about the physical and psychological experiences of walking. I want to hear about the conceptualisation, the effort, the feats of endurance, the blisters, the mental fatigue, the moments of joy and despair and what it means to him to walk so far. Instead, while he touches on these things briefly, it often reads like a collection of facts and trivia stitched together around the ‘tube walking’ device – not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but not quite the book it could have been. Even when he walks the Circle Line as a pub crawl with a friend, stopping for a drink at a pub corresponding to every station, he doesn't address the questions you might expect to have been answered. How drunk was he? How did he feel the next day? Did he really fall out with his companion on the walk (as is hinted)? And how much did all those drinks cost? 

Ultimately, it’s great for facts. I learned that the longest line is the Central (46 miles), which includes the longest journey with no change (West Ruislip to Epping) and the least-used station on the network (Roding Valley). The District Line has most stations, with 60. The most vowels used in a station name (five) is shared by Mansion House and South Ealing. The longest tunnel is on the Northern Line: Morden to East Finchley, Bank branch), at 17.3 miles. The deepest station is Hampstead (192 feet) and the highest point above ground is the Dollis Brook viaduct near Mill Hill East (58 feet).  The only line that connects with all the others is the Jubilee, which also is the line that crosses the Thames the most times (four).

07/05/18: Martin Amis – The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1986–2016 (2017)

I’m a big fan of Martin Amis and his collections of essays have always been as entertaining as his novels.

This book is organised around loose themes such as literature, politics, sport and more personal preoccupations. Most of these pieces are compelling even when you don’t care much for the subject – Princess Diana, the porn film industry and losing at poker in Las Vegas.

He can be very funny in places: “I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain)”.

He absolutely savages Jeremy Corbyn, calling him “undereducated” and “humourless”, with “no grasp of the national character”. And he’s extremely astute about Donald Trump in a piece written in May 2016: “Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is? Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, Trump is telling us that he, like every other honest Republican, is a xenophobe, and proud of it. That is worth knowing. And what he is additionally telling us is that roughly 50 per cent of Americans hanker for a political contender who a) knows nothing at all about politics, and b) won’t need to learn – because the old ‘politics’ will be rendered defunct on his first day in office.”

Some of the other political essays were less riveting, and occasionally certain pieces don’t quite deliver. A review of a Philip Roth biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont, for example, simply consists of Martin’s own thoughts on Philip Roth’s career. Almost nothing is said about the book he’s meant to be reviewing.

I was disappointed to find some errors, too. The inside jacket states that “Martin Amis is the author of 10 novels”, then the list of his fiction offers 16 titles – of which 14 are novels. Similarly, it’s a shame to see Don DeLillo’s name spelt as “De Lillo” on page 234 when it was written correctly on pages 177–185. Given how much Martin values and writes about precision in language, he should at least have had a decent proof-reader go through this.

One of the most enjoyable offerings is an affectionate portrait of his friend Christopher Hitchens from 2010, written after he became ill but before his death (December 2011). “The Hitch”, Amis claims, thinks “like a child”, writes “like a distinguished author” and speaks “like a genius”.

Best of all are his illuminating articles on literature. Amis really gets to grips with J.G. Ballard, Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and brings sparkling insight to their work.

27/02/17: Alan Partridge with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons and Steve Coogan – Alan Partridge: Nomad (2016)

"When I stroll, my heart swells, my mind races, my soul soars. For that is the power of walking. It doesn't just transport us, it transports us – which I know is the same word twice, but the second time should be said louder and slower."

Borrowed from Hendon Library. In Alan's follow-up to his 2011 "autobiography" I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, he details his "Footsteps of My Father" walk from Norwich to Dungeness. The joke is sustained well – a brilliantly extended digression. Over time (and across radio, TV and now the written word), Steve Coogan has deepened his character. We see him growing older, if not wiser, and refining his many prejudices. As his personal and professional history builds up he has become ever more compelling. As always the humour and tragedy come from the vast gulf between the way Alan sees the world and the way the world sees Alan. It's linguistically inspired, too, with Partridge mangling his words, sentences and metaphors throughout. Rather than a lazy TV tie-in/cash-in, it's a highly sophisticated character study for which the authors deserve great credit. It takes a special talent to write this "badly" while simultaneously constructing something so clever, amusing, sad and convincingly human.

16/07/16: Juliana Buhring – This Road I Ride: My Incredible Journey from Novice to Fastest Woman to Cycle the Globe (2016)

"If you really want to experience the world, get on a bicycle."

I'm wary of any book described as "inspirational", but this one genuinely is. Juliana Buhring survived a childhood in a religious cult and then the death of the man she loved. She decided to cycle around the globe, and set a world record in the process. This narrative details that trip. Her writing is wise, dry and funny. But there's also a perfect economy to the style: no filler, no trying to be clever-clever, no travel-writing cliché – just the bare bones of each diary entry describing the scenes she experienced.

Along the way there are moments of total despair – high winds, freezing cold and steep mountains that go up forever. There's awful discomfort – from severe food poisoning to being splattered in roadside human excrement during the Indian typhoon. And there's danger – being attacked by magpies in Australia, being mobbed by "hordes of silent, staring men" in India and being chased by a pack of wild dogs in Turkey ("terror-inspiring lions"). This is all in addition to the tiresome punctures and daily exhaustion that she has to deal with. There are also moments of freedom and joy, when she's totally at one with the world and herself. There's a lot of life wisdom and common-sense philosophy, but she never becomes preachy. The complete lack of ego is admirable and refreshing.

This is a highly readable, life-enriching memoir. I hope she writes another book about her ongoing adventures in cycling and beyond.