Another book ticked off my 20 Books of Summer list! I didn’t have an awful lot of work on this week, plus it was really hot, so I spent quite a lot of time reading in the shade in the garden or in the cool sitting room, and have made better progress with my list.  This one was from the back shelf, as it was one of the more recent acquisitions (of course, I’ve acquired even more books since I made my list, so they’re coming out of the section about 3/4 of the way along, argh!). I’m reading the next one now, although also reading another Shiny review book.

Steve Haywood – “Narrowboat Dreams”

(BookCrossing, from Gill, 20 May 2019)

Subtitled “A Journey North by England’s Waterways”, he takes advantage of the re-opened canals around Huddersfield and other bits of the North (although they have some teething troubles, he carefully states at the end that he’s been through a few times since and they’re fine now). He’s written a few other books about boating and does seem to hanker after the old days before there was so much red tape and pleasure cruising, bemoaning all the heritage signs now springing up, and I felt this was a shame as the canals are now, for example, a lovely resource in Birmingham for runners, walkers and cyclists, giving relatively well-maintained and safe green corridors to explore. He likes a manky city canal and I can’t fault him there, and there are good descriptions of other boaters and people around the canals, told with humanity and respect.

He says early on that the journey will push him to his limits and change his life – I actually discussed this with Gill, who read it before me, today and we were a little nonplussed by this. He does hurt his ankle badly and has to rely on the kindness of strangers, and is also moved when the canal community finds out about his mother being unwell and checks he’s OK, but there’s no real statement of how that’s changed his life (nor does there need to be, of course; the canal stuff was fine on its own, but if you say your life was changed …).

I was pleased to learn that winding holes are wind as in the thing that blows, not as in what you do to wool or a bobbin, as boaters let the wind help their boats turn (but is this true??) and I also enjoyed his defence of writing about a smaller journey and how that kind of adventure is just as important as the big, worldwide ones.

This book was number 6 in my 20 Books of Summer project.

I’m currently reading Harriet Harman’s excellent autobiography, “A Woman’s Work”, and am just starting “The Seafarers” by Stephen Rutt, a beautiful book for review for Shiny about seabirds. Good times!