Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

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I like the genre of travel writing because it really takes me away from the diurnal details of my life and make me dream of being in other places without the annoyances and irritations of actual travel so this was quite fun and even got me thinking about narrow boats in the future, though I might find negotiating and navigating the locks a bit difficult in practice. I feel I am travelling with them all, the humorous comments are so clever, yet so simple, just a couple of words sometimes. Jim looked out of his kennel, his eyes wide-He begged me Your Honour, Steal my bone; he went down on his hands and knees. The story of a man, his wife and his whippet who sail their narrowboat from the Midlands to the South of France including a Channel crossing would be interesting however written but the main selling point is the author's sense of humour.

I think this would be hard to follow if the book was intended as anything serious, but it's appropriate for the material - it is an entertainment, nothing more. However, R L Stephenson in his "Inland Voyage" or Jerome K Jerome in his "Three men in a Boat" didn't supply maps either, and both are classics. I know nothing about Terry Darlington, so I approached this book unaware of his life and the role in the advertising world that seemed to affect other readers. He eats pork scratchings (whatever they are) by the bagful, lopes effortlessly at 30 miles an hour and is terrified of boats.

As soon as I began reading it, I realised my aunt would give up - since the complete absence of quotation marks makes the reading of it confusing. You visit the France nobody knows – the backwaters of Flanders, the canals beneath Paris, the heavenly Yonne, the lost Burgundy Canal, the islands of the Saone, and the forbidden ways to the Mediterranean.

The publisher also needs a review on how they choose books if this is the best they can come up with. There was so much information on each page that I felt my head spinning, as it was a lot to process! Terry and Monica Darlington are intrepid pensioners who made the surprising decision to sail their canal narrowboat Phillis May, sixteen hundred miles across France and down to the Mediterranean, accompanied only by their whippet Jim. Jim sees Clive and Beryl as part of our pack, who sometimes make their escape owing to my lack of leadership and poor attention to detail.There is not much plot to the book, it is a tale of their journey, with anecdotes, a bit of history and a good helping of fantasy and day dreaming. I have visited Carcassonne, Aigue Mort and Sete, and have been bitten by mosquitos by the petit Rhone, where we shared a swimming pool with frogs. The lady on the barge tied up to his boat kills herself one night, quite a distressing episode, you'd think, yet it just becomes a small and equal part with the rest of his account, the interesting and the mundane. Terry Darlington was brought up in Pembroke Dock during the war, between a Sunderland flying boat base and an oil terminal.