Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

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Having read LTC Rolt, Steve Haywood and Paul Gogarty on narrowboating - all of them with their own merits - I have to admit that Terry Darlington's offering is the only one that made me laugh out loud. It's described (as can be seen from the cover above) with words like "classic" and "comic" on the lines (I guess) of Three Men in a Boat or Bill Bryson's travel books, and some reviews are 5 star raves. On the Phyllis May you dive through six-foot waves in the Channel, are swept down the terrible Rhône, and fight for your life in a storm among the flamingos of the Camargue. There was a point 65% in that I wondered can I take more of this blather, but I had to know if they ever reached Carcassonne. So, if you are on a plane and reach into that elasticized pocket in the seatback in front of you and find a discarded copy of “Narrow Dog to Carcassonne” don’t be surprised.

This book tells how the author, his wife Monica and dog Jim took their narrow boat Phyllis May down the English canal system from Stone to the Thames, across the Channel, through the French, Belgium and then French again canal systems all the way to Carcassonne. But today I wound up the paddles in the lock gate with my new aluminium key without spraining my wrist, and when the lock was empty heaved on the beams and opened the gates without shouting for help.

We keep crashing into things and running out of fuel and falling in and people shout at us and stick notes on the door. When I woke up the next morning, and I wished I had not woken up the next morning, I realized that I had agreed to sail an inland boat across the English Channel, roped up to a madman.

But faithful Jim, the whippet, is always there and is the only one I would like to spend any time with – ever.You’ll visit the France nobody knows—the backwaters of Flanders, the canals beneath Paris, and the forbidden routes to the wine-dark Mediterranean Sea. All three stars are for Jim the whippet although even he comes across as slightly depressed at times!

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. At least 3 times in the book Terry and Monica thought they would break their boat beyond repair or die.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. The punctuation and sentence structure is actually very clever, giving a stream of consciousness style to the whole piece.

Initially because some of the stuff was so funny that l laughed out loud which is off putting to other people. This is about an older couple and their dog from England who take a narrow boat across the English Channel. It was quite a dangerous outing, but they had a boat pilot with them and another boat to guide them across the channel. Written with the author's glorious sense of humor, this is one of those journeys you never want to end.His references to places, people, poetry, art and movies and music sent me to look up things multiple times. For instance, I think the boat was required to be escorted across the English channel, and I think that there is a relatively high cost for the escort service due to licensing, but this wasn't even mentioned. We are selling our house and our possessions, giving what is left to the poor, and having a narrowboat built, on which we will live out our days. His writing remains unformed and discursive; as someone else noted in the Goodreads review and is revealed in an interview transcript, the style is a kind of "stream of consciousness" effect. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.