With her flat roof, fairground lettering, brasses and flowers, a traditional narrowboat has a louche charm, though sixty feet by seven is a preposterous shape. Narrow Dog to Carcassonne” is a 397 page version of Aunt Edna’s slide show of her trip to the Corn Palace.

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. 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. Initially because some of the stuff was so funny that l laughed out loud which is off putting to other people. My recommendation is if you're interested, maybe a canal boat owner, then try out the first couple of paragraphs or maybe even chapters and see how much you enjoy the viewpoint and writing style. The story of a man, his wife and his whippet who sail their narrowboat from the Midlands to the South of France including a Channel crossing would be interesting however written but the main selling point is the author's sense of humour.

If you are interested in canal/boating life as well as a bit of a voyage - and/or you are interested in th culture of France - I think this book is for you. You go rabbiting in Oxfordshire, tie up among the bankers in the City of London, live among history in Flanders, drift through Champagne, throw a rope around the Eiffel Tower, struggle with hostile life forms in Burgundy, float down the Saone from vineyard to vineyard, get swept along by the terrible Rhone from Lyon to Avignon, dip your toes in the Mediterranean, and sail across inland seas among the flamingos of the Camargue.

wasted pages trying to colorize a not very interesting trip - one in which the authors didn't seem to enjoy. Try reading Joyce if you want to complain about style - and he made it into the pantheon of scribblers! This sounds like bar-room tall story, exaggeration, but then a second time round it changes to them and their boat being attacked by fighter-bombers - are the tall stories getting taller? That is how the English narrow lock was born, and the English narrowboat-the cigarette, the pencil, the eel, the strangest craft ever to slither down a waterway. 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.

Having had quite a few narrow boat holidays on canals and enough inland sailing to be suitably terrified by the description of taking their narrow boat across the Chanel, I was able to enjoy the fears from an armchair. There's some lovely writing in here, and entertaining stories but I really did struggle with the lack of quotation marks. 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. The style takes a little getting used to but once you're over that, it's a fantastic read and very funny.

Then when I realized that Terry Darlington and his wife Monica were planning on taking their narrowboat over the channel, I was completely intrigued and all-in. To really appreciate the book, I think you have to be familiar with either boating, are the places mentioned.

the Phyllis May was an airship passing through the clouds, forbidden to land, though her captain longed for the streams and woods below. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. When they retired, Terry Darlington and his somewhat saner wife Monica--together with their dog, a whippet named Jim--chucked their earthbound life and set out in an utterly unseaworthy sixty-foot canal narrowboat across the notoriously treacherous English Channel and down to the South of France. Like Estuary ( reviewed earlier) I sort of enjoyed this book, but there were significant qualifications.

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. It's full of glorious passages and genuinely really funny jokes which only work because of the way it's written, and how much of the author's personality comes across through that. 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. There are supermarkets the size of a city that seem to be open from time to time, but they are not - they are going round behind you making faces.He eats pork scratchings (whatever they are) by the bagful, lopes effortlessly at 30 miles an hour and is terrified of boats. 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. 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.