Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92738 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Customer Reviews

Writing the dream
This is a record of ten years on a canal narrowboat. Trevor Pavitt's dream was having his boat 'Lady Elgar' built, fitting it out himself, and taking early retirement with his wife to become 'liveaboards' on the canals of England.

Hundreds had already 'lived the dream' before Trevor started in 1994, and thousands have done so since. Most of them seem to have done a lot more cruising than him, and much of his ten years afloat seems to have been spent in working on the boat on a fixed mooring near London, with only a few weeks a year actually cruising. I suspect what makes his dream so different is the quality of his log.

I think I was the first canal blogger in July or August 2003, and I immediately began evangelising about how blogs were a wonderful format for canal cruising logs.

He was only the third or fourth canalblogger, starting in March 2004, but immediately I was struck by his readable, succinct and informative cruising log posts.

The blog 'Lady Elgar Log' was only the last five months of his ten years afloat, but it inspired the whole book. Though the five months of blogging would have been barely enough to publish, he has dug into a decade of written logs to produce this record of what's involved in retiring to the waterways.

Others have covered this territory before (e.g. Iris Bryce, Anthony Lewis, Jeremy Scanlon) but I don't think anyone's written such a clear, spare account as Pavitt. It's not so much a travel book as an autobiography of ten years on the canals.

The weakness to 'Living The Dream' is the limited view we get of the countryside beyond the canals, the boat and his immediate family.

Nevertheless, I think it's a lovely vignette of an English couple enjoying the last ten years before they claim their pension. Living The Dream has become Reading The Memory.

I should declare an interest: I'd long ago praised his blog fulsomely on my own blog, and I said that it would make an excellent start to a book about the waterways. (As it turned out, it was to be the ending to his book.) I'd not met or corresponded with the author before (except for passing comments on the newsgroup uk.rec.waterways). I met him only once by chance at a boat show earlier this year, and he said he'd seen my compliments online, and he was flattered and presented me with a gratis copy of the first edition (published by Trafford).

This new edition is by Lulu, and seems to be better promoted and has a different cover, although I don't know if it's different inside.