Coasting: Running Around the Coast of Britain – Life, Love and (Very) Loose Plans

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The dust jacket of this book is slightly damaged/ripped, however, this does not affect the internal condition.

Running away from your problems doesn’t solve anything - but sometimes it’s more fun than dealing with them. Unemployment was rife, traditional jobs disappearing taking with them a way of life generations in the making.

A hugely enjoyable jaunt around Britain, that proves that you can find adventure right on your doorstep. You only had to look at the atlas to see that the identity of the Falklanders, like that of the British, was bound up in endless aggressive assertions of their differences from the continental giant across the water.

Salman Rushdie Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War.Where Theroux is cocksure, Raban is barnacled by hang-ups: about his unhappy boyhood (he finds Dartmouth’s naval college so evocative of his 1950s boarding school that he flees); about his rocky relationship with his father, an Anglican priest; and about his own fecklessness as he approaches middle age. Reading Coasting is like listening to a friend tell a tale down the pub that you can't quite believe. An easy, thoughtful and engaging read, using his solo sailing trip around the country to review family and British behavior and understand his own place and purpose in life.

On April Fool’s Day, 1982, Jonathan Raban set sail from Fowey in Cornwall to circumnavigate the British Isles in a two-mast sailing boat kitted out as a one-man floating home. Sailing along the coast with charts and a hand bearing-compass, and talking to the people he meets in harbour towns and failing fishing ports, Raban comes to understand England and the English, and his own sense of national belonging. There are also pleasing asides detailing other gentlemen’s sailing adventures over several centuries. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The rest is really about his voyage and ongoing learning how to handle this boat and how to be at sea.He was educated at the same minor, public school as his father – an inexplicable parental decision given what he had to endure there.