Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

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But faithful Jim, the whippet, is always there and is the only one I would like to spend any time with – ever. While the thesis for this book was an English narrowboat (canal boat) taken down England, across the channel, into Belgium, and then to the south of France, the actual amount of material devoted to boating or canal details could have been summed up in less than 15 pages. It was a good trip, but I left it feeling that Darlington is a pub bore, that nobody knows better than him and that he itches and burns with a desire to let you know just how bloody smart he is.

Alas, my reader’s guilt won out and I decided to finish the book and hope beyond reason that it might have a spectacular ending. Terry Darlington has a unique style, a wide-ranging intelligence, and an incredible dry sense of humor.

Following the publication of Narrow Dog to Carcassonne , Terry, his wife Monica, and their whippet Jim planned to sail the Phyllis May down the Intracoastal Waterway from Virginia to Florida--an adventure which, should they survive it, will be the subject of their next book, Narrow Dog to Indian River , coming from Delta in 2009. She has a first class degree in French, has run thirty marathons, and can leap tall buildings with a single bound. 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 Saône, and the forbidden ways to the Mediterranean. On the floor of the Star Inn Jim was fighting to push his entire body inside a bag of pork scratchings. I don't really know any of the places in France so a bot more background information would have made it more enjoyable.

Despite developing a kind of mild dislike for the author who, I seem to think, used to be in advertising or PR or something similar, this was an interesting story. The author is clearly extrovert, and maybe a bit of a drinker, eager to jump into someone elses boat and go on til the early hours. The writing is as muscular and lean as its canine hero, conjuring up dawn mist or giant catfish in prose haiku before moving on to the next killer one-liner. I knew there were forests of weed beneath the glassy cool translucent wave, and green herds that swim through rainbows from the skies .From the blurb I'd expected a more straightforward sort of comedy memoir in the style of Bill Bryson, but Terry Darlington's prose is almost Joycean - full of brief sentences, poetic allusions, stream-of-consciousness, foreign phrases and bawdy jokes. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.

The author is a Welshman with a very good turn of phrase, and the marital effects of living in a small space while fighting the recalcitrant properties of water bring welcome chuckles. It was a little difficult to keep up with the narrative at times because there was so much information and a labyrinth of digressions but what I did follow was enjoyable and at times quite amusing.It has also reached the heart of a daughter-in-law who has lurchers - the big version of the dog in the story. The publisher also needs a review on how they choose books if this is the best they can come up with. They took advise from nautical experts, who told them they would lose their boat and their lives (and, indeed, their whippet Jim). 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.