This month’s book from my Travel Library is more adventure than travel. Sometimes it’s impossible to say which of those a story falls into, which is why this blog is loosely themed around travel and adventure. In this case, All At Sea (original title: In The Bath) by Tim FitzHigham is definitely an adventure.
It’s an adventure that makes me feel a little inadequate, actually. My adventure in March was an hour on an off-road Segway. Tim’s adventure is an attempt to row the English Channel. In a bathtub. An antique copper roll top bathtub that weighs “only” a third of a ton.
Now, Tim is that most English of things – an eccentric, a real one. He grew up in a very marshy part of the Fens, failed to learn to row at Durham University, worked as a pig farmer in the West Indies and could 100% perform Mozart’s tremendously difficult Horn Concerto in E Flat Major on the French horn – this in reference to his stage revival of the 1950s/60s comedy novelty music act Flanders & Swann. Not to mention his series of weird ideas, feats, obsessions and challenges. Tim is not a normal human being.
(I love him. He reached inside my brain & heart and gave it all a good stir that had me upside-down for four days.)
Rowing the Channel in a bath presents problems. Getting the bath to float is one problem. Financing it is another. Not being able to row. French bureaucracy. Logistics. Weather. The sea. Shipping traffic. This book details all of it.
And then Tim goes and adds to his challenge. Yeah, sure, he’ll row the Channel in a bath. Then he might as well row round to Tower Bridge while he’s at it.
I don’t want to tell you how it goes, where the successes and failures are – for there are both a-plenty. There’s a weird Englishman in skintight green Lycra. There’s an application of surgical spirit that makes me cringe just thinking about it. There’s the indomitable figure of a true eccentric who really does possess a great baritone and the weirdest sense of humour and no use whatsoever of what he calls “Anglo-Saxon language” – this appears to be a theme not just in this book and not just in the Flanders & Swann show but in Tim’s existence in general and while I love swearing, I also love the inventiveness and weird delightful turn of phrase that sometimes comes with deliberately avoiding it.
I read this book weirdly. I already knew how it ended so I read the last third first, the middle third second and finished the book at the beginning. Obviously. And all in one night, if you’ll take that as a recommendation. My favourite thing about the book? The totally unnecessary and partly irrelevant appendixes. I so want to put them in my own book.
Buy All At Sea by Tim FitzHigham here. (Affiliate link so Amazon will throw me a couple of pennies if you buy anything from that link. You all know how it works but I have to make sure you’re aware. GDPR or something.)