Book description
'WE COULD BORE OURSELVES TO DEATH, DRINK OURSELVES TO DEATH, OR HAVE
A BIT OF AN ADVENTURE...'
When they retired Terry and Monica Darlington decided to sail their
canal narrowboat across the Channel and down to the Mediterranean,
together with their whippet Jim. They took advice from experts, who
said they would die, together with their whippet Jim.
On the Phyllis May you dive through six-foot waves in the
Channel, are swept down the terrible Rhône, and fight for your life
in a storm among the flamingos of the Camargue.
You meet the French nobody meets - poets, captains, historians,
drunks, bargees, men with guns, scholars, madmen - they all want to
know the people on the painted boat and their narrow dog.
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.
Aliens, dicks, trolls, vandals, gongoozlers, killer fish and the
walking dead all stand between our three innocents and their goal -
many-towered Carcassonne.
Terry Darlington was brought up in Pembroke Dock during the war,
between a Sunderland flying boat base and an oil terminal.
He survived and moved to Staffordshire, where he founded Research
Associates, the international market research firm, and Stone Master
Marathoners, the running club.
Like many Welshmen he is talkative and confiding, but ill at ease
with practical matters and liable to linger in public houses.
He likes boating but knows nothing about it.
Monica Darlington comes from Radnorshire. Her father was a gardener
and her mother a housemaid, or perhaps it was the other way round.
She has a first class degree in French, has run thirty marathons,
and can leap tall buildings with a single bound.
Her three children have all reproduced themselves, removing doubts
about whether she and Terry are the same species.
She quite likes boating but knows nothing about it.
Brynula Great Expectations (Jim) is sprung from a long line of dogs
with ridiculous names.
Jim can run at forty miles an hour. He is cowardly, thieving, and
disrespectful and hates boating.
Visit their website at www. narrowdog. com
