This is probably my favourite book of the whole series. It is written as the story of a single holiday, rather than a collection of anecdotes. The foreword is in Michael Green’s normal, self-effacing style. His next book was the excellent “Don’t Print My Name Upside Down”. Perhaps if he had called that “The Art of Coarse Journalism” it might have sold more copies.
Every year I swear I won’t spend my holiday sailing again. Considering I say this annually, it’s surprising how much sailing I’ve managed to do. Each time I returned bruised, battered and suffereing from incipient scurvy, with a great dent worn in my buttocks, and I say, “That was terrific fun, but next year I’m going to do something restful.” And somehow twelve months later I’m banging the same dent in the same place with the edge of the cockpit combing or crawling on hands and knees in some stinking bilge.