The worst part of all this is that he has written a further book about his adventures in the US along the inland waterways from South Carolina to Florida and I regret to say that I'm intrigued with the idea. So certain is he that we need to know about his trip to every pub and the number of steps up to every canal lock opening that we learn virtually nothing about the scenery of the trip.

To be fair, the English have a different viewpoint than regular people, and this book was intended to be halfway about their dog, a whippet, which was taken on the journey - I had no interest in the dog after about the first 2 pages. Aliens, trolls, gongoozlers, killer fish, and the walking dead all stand between our two-person, one-whippet crew and their goal: the ancient, many-towered city of Carcassonne. The punctuation and sentence structure is actually very clever, giving a stream of consciousness style to the whole piece. 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.They have tootled along the gentle canals of the UK, and come up with the idea of crossing the channel and going down the French canals and the Rhone to Carcassonne in the South. The humour is there in bucket loads, but I think you have to be English to understand it and even then there is no certainty that you will. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

He asked what I was reading and I told him of the pain I was experiencing trying to get through Terry Darlington’s awful book about his insufferable trip on his insipid narrowboat the Phyllis May. Terry Darlington was brought up in Pembroke Dock, Wales, during the war, between a flying-boat base and an oil terminal. Written with the author's glorious sense of humor, this is one of those journeys you never want to end.

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. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. I find Terry's descriptions of the scenes he encounters, the dry humour he sees in the world around him, including the dog, fantastic reading. Mildly entertaining and somewhat informative (if you are planning a trip to France in a narrowboat) it never really grabbed my attention.

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. 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 Phyllis May was an airship passing through the clouds, forbidden to land, though her captain longed for the streams and woods below. Clive, I said, you come from Dudley, you have been to sea once and you nearly didn't come back, and now you want to put at hazard the December years I could spend in the Star or watching Kylie Minogue on the box.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. 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.

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.Breakdowns, floods, accidents, hangovers, vandals, dicks, trolls, aliens, gongoozlers, killer fish and the walking dead stand between our intrepid crew and their goal – many-towered Carcassonne. 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. Terry Darlington has a unique style, a wide-ranging intelligence, and an incredible dry sense of humor. There were many frightening moments, when they donned life jackets, clutched passports and the CD of Terry’s book and said goodbye to Jim. Anyone with boating knowledge would pale at the idea, but they were either oblivious or dismissive of the dangers and problems.