Product Description

At home, I'm a cantankerous old git. On the boat, after a week's cruising, I'm just a cantankerous old git with dirty hair.Steve Haywood has a problem. He doesn't know where he comes from. In the south, people think he's a northerner; in the north, they think he's from the south. Judged against global warming and the sad demise of Celebrity Big Brother, this hardly registers highly on the Richter scale of world disasters. But it's enough to worry Steve. And it's enough of an excuse for him to escape his long-suffering partner Em for a voyage of discovery along England's inland waterways.Travelling by traditional narrowboat, he heads north along two newly opened Pennine canals, a trip that takes him from Banbury in deepest Oxfordshire, through the vibrant modernity of Manchester, to the trendy affluence of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire's answer to London's ciabatta belt. With irrepressible humour he recounts the history of the waterways and stories of his encounters with characters along the way, and attempts to define the magic that makes England's waterways so appealing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9098 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Leicester Mercury, July 22 2008
'light-hearted and self-deprecating... a good summer read with good humour - ideal for anyone planning a canal holiday'

Review
'quietly humorous account... through secret hidden worlds he succeeds in evoking and capturing on the journey'

Review
`Haywood imprints his inimitable humour on his descriptions of the people and places he meets along the way.'

Customer Reviews

Up the creek without a poodle
Another humorous outing by Steve Haywood who ventures north this time in his trusty narrow boat, `Justice'. A road trip from Banbury to Yorkshire and back would take little time, even in Steve's old Triumph. However with various delays and the tribulations of shallow canals, rusty locks and scary tunnels it becomes an odyssey consuming most of a summer. Steve's style is self-deprecating and dry. He is clearly an expert in the field but is never too esoteric or supercilious in his narrative. Quite the opposite in fact. Reading the book you come to understand locks, lock-keys and dog-soiled towpaths like an old boatman. Not all the action is on the water. He describes a visit to an award winning Yorkshire pie shop in detail, with the local housewives observing that `Oo `e likes `is pies' as he gets carried away with his purchase. The trip becomes as much a search for himself as much as for the northern canals. He competes in a one boat race with himself to get to a certain bridge before impending repairs there close the canal. He becomes obsessed with acquiring a canine companion after an encounter with a canal dwelling couple and their dog. Steve also visits lots of towpath pubs. Does he end up with a dog? Does he get to the bridge on time? And does he get through all those pies without a coronary? Well I'll leave it up to you to find out, rest-assured it's a compelling and enjoyable read.

Much more than a book about canals
"Narrowboat Dreams" is a book in the well tried English tradition of combining a journey with social commentary. It is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, not only for the canal enthusiast, but for the general reader, richly combining multiple narrative strands.Centred on the narrator's expedition into the world of recently reclaimed Pennine canals, the book takes a wry look at the north-south divide and the general state of contemporary British society. The narrative voice, which I take to be the author's own, is humorous, cantankerous and lyrical by turns - the voice of a man experiencing the changes in life and attitudes which mid-life brings. As such, it has a consistent authentic tone, which adds greatly to the reader's pleasure as he or she shares the ups and down of this strenuous single-handed voyage.
As the narrator says at the end of the book: "Journeys as I've said before, are in the mind, not on maps. They're about what's inside, not out. A personal CAT-scan, not a window on the world." It is this personal view, along with vivid evocations of varied English landscapes and townscapes, that makes the book much more than a travel guide.

Narrowboat Laughs
What a great read! This is a hilariously funny follow-up to Steve Haywood's earlier canal journey in "Fruit Flies Like a Banana...".
He has managed to capture that sense of "where do I belong?" that so many of us East Midlanders experience. As a Nottingham man, I can even forgive him coming from Leicester because he kept me smiling for 300 odd pages.
What I particularly like is the way he captures the singlemindedness of the lone adventurer as he lovingly describes the narrow world of canal life without ever losing the priorities of his sickly Mother and his partner Em.
Just read it.
Mind you, I bet you will never eat a cornetto with the same enthusiasm again.