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

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The tension between this moral martinet and his louche and feckless son seems to have fuelled Raban’s knowing and savagely funny critique of his own British culture, and to have enabled him to escape his homeland with such relish. Probably it was not possible to do it the way I was expecting but nonetheless that was the impression I got from the title details.

In the same way that countless strangers felt compelled to join her around the UK, Coasting carries the reader along and inspires us all to ask 'why not? Raban is far from the first to have decided time at sea would offer a welcome escape from a life stifled by the practical demands of finance and family. A journey round the coast of Britain with a back drop of the start of the Falklands war give the author both the opportunity to think through his earlier life and his observations of his country, and promptings to think about reactions to the war, both his own and those of the individuals he meets. This is about her quitting her job to run around the country when she has debt and can’t read a map. There is little description of the places she visits, outside of the challenges of the running itself.Her book about the trip is out now; Coasting (publishers Summersdale) “Coasting is about putting one foot in front of the other, even when it feels impossible, and trying to enjoy it too. Each trip back to shore gives him little updates on what is happening, he tends to be disgusted with what he reads in the papers, especially The Sun and it blood hungry racist slurs, these all make him desperate to get back out to sea. In 1982, Jonathan Raban bought a wooden two-masted sailing boat and circumnavigated England in a slow, wandering, unhurried way. Another time she moans because a guy offers his spare room last minute and she has a moan because the spare bed doesn't have freshly laundered sheets. A freelance assignment for the BBC, recording Freya Stark barging down the Euphrates, inspired his first travel book, Arabia: Through the Looking Glass (1979).

I grew up with a sentimentalised version of the English past, of the enshrined holiness of the squire in the grand house and the tenant farmer and the exact place you occupied. His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War. Well written but now perhaps a bit dated so it’s an historical record of Britain in the early 1980s with the Falklands War,the miners’ strike etc.Raban hangs out with bored tax exiles in an Isle of Man casino, goes fishing with crabbers in Lyme Regis and plays at being a tourist in his home city, London.

A hugel Coasting shares the literal highs and lows as she finds her rite of passage to the world of ultra-running, with an endearing vulnerability and hilarious flair that brings places to life.He plots his naval trajectory, getting it wrong more often than not, while he ponders the perilous state of Thatcher’s Britain (at the time of the Falkland war), the insular arrogance and condescension of the people living there, the rigid social hierarchies in place, the creaky state of the Church of England, and so much more. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I read Raban's Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings years ago and really enjoyed it, and so with this book years later, I absolutely loved it. But it is the way Raban mixes the personal past with his present journey that stayed with me after I turned the last page. Oh, and he meets up with noted glass-half-full types Theroux (who was trudging around working on Kingdom by the Sea at the same time) and Philip Larkin, both of whom are positive about positive things all the time forever.

My father-in-law, Tom, recommended it to me after our conversations about Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island and my love of Tim Parks ( A Season with Verona; Italian Neighbours; An Italian Education; Italian Ways). Registered address: Unit 5, Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, LE5 3EF, United kingdom. It wasn't a debate, it was a verbal bloodletting, with words standing for the guns and bayonets that would come later when the fleet reached the islands. I was therefore a bit disappointed that she actually relied very heavily on staying at people’s houses night after night and didn’t actually pitch her first tent up until well over 6months in.For me it was an escape from Trumpism into Thatcherism, because Raban was a keen observer of England at the tipping point from Industrial Revolution to tourism and a global economy.