I was excited about this. I checked my emails multiple times a day in the hopes of hearing something about this and here it is! Anna McNuff‘s new book, Bedtime Adventure Stories For Grown Ups is out mid May and I’ve already read it!
Full disclosure, I signed up to Anna’s Trail Team mailing list which means I get advance access to her latest books in exchange for a review on Amazon or Goodreads (“The review can be a line or a few sentences (or you can write War and Peace)“). I signed up eagerly because Anna’s an adventurer, author of four books so far, a Girlguiding ambassador and she has bright pink hair and in short, I want to be her when I grow up (except I’d put money on me being older than her). So I was excited to get The Email a month ago and the day the book arrived, I charged my Kindle specially for the event.
Bedtime Adventure Stories For Grown Ups is a book of eight short stories which have been translated from her lockdown live storytelling sessions into written form. They’re every bit as readable as I expected – I love the theory of short stories, that you don’t have to devote brainpower to keeping track of what’s going on but in practice, something about them often makes me sleepy. I was really hoping to say that these eight didn’t – and they didn’t!
What is an adventure? I googled it and I got “an unusual and exciting or daring experience”. What I didn’t get is the requirement for a near-death experience, or a high chance of serious injury or even an experience as unpleasant as a human being can endure. It’s all very well reading stories about massive expeditions and huge accomplishments but “it was so difficult and miserable and look how amazing I am for doing it!” can get tedious very quickly. That’s not inspiring. That doesn’t make me want to go and do the adventure at all.
Anna’s adventure stories set a very different tone right from the beginning, right from this nice colourful cover:
Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups has a story about running marathons at night to avoid desert heat, a story about rollerblading around Amsterdam, a story about travelling Europe by foot & bike at the will of social media votes, a story about a microadventure overnight camp in Wales, a story about lots of microadventure overnight camps around the perimeter of London, a story about roadtripping across Canada in winter, a story about cycling the South Downs and finally, a story about a coast-to-coast running, cycling & kayaking race across New Zealand.
So it’s eight quite different adventures – different places, different mindsets, different scales. There are plenty of other adventurers who could have written eight short stories that were all basically the same adventure over and over again, and I daresay Anna could if she wanted to. But she’s chosen eight very different stories which means reading about them doesn’t get boring and you get eight different sets of inspiration to suit your own taste in adventures.
A coast-to-coast triathlon isn’t something I’m ever going to do and nor is a social media-directed epic bike ride across Europe but I might take two days to do a walk with a camp in between. I might wild camp after work if I had someone with me. I travel and adventure solo but I draw the line at wild camping on my own in a country where it’s technically illegal. I certainly might do a roadtrip in bad weather. So many adventure stories are just unattainable and so many adventurers don’t understand that the average person can’t just take three years out of their life to train for and do a massive expedition, let alone fund it. I really like that so many of Anna’s adventures are doable and yet they’re not boring and mundane, unless you’re a “it only counts if enduuuurance!” type. They make me want to go out and have a go at one of them. I’m already mentally packing a backpack and trying to figure out how much I don’t need to carry for two days plus a camp.
I think my favourite story is Little Adventures Around the Big Smoke, the one with the Home Counties wild camping. It gathers together such a community, with so many people joining in by the end that they have to split it into lots of smaller groups. I wish I’d been around at that time. Getting to somewhere-around-London for an overnight camp would probably entail taking two days off work for me and I’d probably have chickened out anyway but it would have been nice to have been able to join in, if I’d been brave enough and if it had been practical. Apart from a tale of revelry and pub dinners and the occasional campfire, it’s also a tale of seeking out new places nearby, looking at and appreciating what’s on your doorstep. After a year of being confined more or less to home, that’s something that resonates. Having local adventures instead of adventures only counting if they’re a long way away. Yes, we like this.
Not that you don’t get a hint of near-death experiences and injuries but it’s more in the spirit of “it’s ok if things don’t go to plan” than a feat of superhuman endurance. Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes plans change and it’s no less of an adventure if you have to drop out or if you end up doing a different adventure to the one you set out to do. But what really sets it apart from the grim big expedition stories is that Anna remains chirpy throughout. You don’t get the agonising and the philosophising, you get Anna changing her plans and making the most of what happens as a result.
I really like this book. I’m going to invest in a hardback copy of it and I’m going to stick post-it flags in my favourite bits.