"Zen and the Art of Hip-joint Maintenance", by John Caunt
Chineway Press, 2003 (Reviewed at author's request)
If you walk, or cycle, or motor-bike, (and probably if you drive, fly, swim or canoe) from Land's End to John O'Groats there's a club you can join, or a register you can enter your name on, to mark your achievement. But as far as I know, there's nothing similar (yet) for people like this author who make the journey in several stages partly on foot and partly by bike. And before we go any further with John Caunt, let me explain for the benefit of non-UK readers that the trip from Land's End, (the most south-westerly point of the British mainland), to John O'Groats, (a place which is neither the mainland's most north-easterly nor most northerly point, but is not very far from both), has a unique appeal to us Brits. We walk it, run it, do it for charity or for pure self-gratification, in either direction, and love to tell the tale.
Which brings us to this book.
At the age of 55, John Caunt decided he needed to do something to get himself off the path of decline into curmudgeonhood, or as he puts it on the back cover, becoming "a grumpy and obsessive old git". Like many others before, the physical challenge lured him. Like quite a few of the others, he decided to write a book about it too. So we have the common clichés of a middle-aged man setting off with ill-fitting boots and an overweight rucksack. But does he have anything new to say about the experience?
You'll find here accounts of pub dinners, fish & chip suppers, B&Bs, youth hostels -- some good, some bad, many indifferent -- that will be familiar to any traveller in the UK. There are encounters with other people, but compared, say, to Nicholas Crane's journey in Two Degrees West, the cast of characters is limited. The tone of the book is humorous: at its best when light and on the mark, but sometimes laboured, and sometimes degenerating into rants about the (many) things that annoy him. The rants, I suspect, come from the heart, and although I can believe he is inviting us to laugh at him in his old git role, what we get is more soap box than comedy stage.
The journey itself, completed in stages, by definition covers familiar territory. But it's nice to come across some old familiar places: Bishops Castle and the Long Mynd in Shropshire (but how did he miss the amazingly painted houses and the witches' shop in Bishops Castle?); the sticky toffee pudding post office in Cartmel and the pub in Coniston; the Old Dungeon Ghyll; the Dunbeath Hotel. I found the later stages of the journey more interesting. I certainly think an analysis would show the 'rant ratio' to be lower in the later parts of the book.
I'm trying not to damn with faint praise when I say I enjoyed the book more than I expected. But I think Caunt missed a trick in the way he chose to write about his experience. Although he set out on a journey of self-appraisal, he doesn't say much about his personal feelings, and when he does it is with a thick gloss of humour as, for example, in his reflections on his own anger. This is a shame, because occasionally we get a glimpse of a different, more sensitive, man behind the grumpy git. The passage describing his mother (whose "capacity for worry is prodigious") in a restaurant is amusing, warm and sympathetic. And I can empathise strongly with his thoughts on whether to visit Lockerbie (he decides against it), and by association Dunblane, and the problem of applying the same principles to historic places of tragedy such as Glencoe. I shall remember the quote he reports from a Dunblane resident "who pointed out that, six years after the event, minibus-loads of people still turn up at the site of the massacre to weep and hold each other up. She described them as 'strangers in a town they think they know'".
Caunt has written four self-help books, and also sells life coaching services, so I assume he can analyse his own experiences but in the end he leaves us not knowing if he got what he was looking for out of his journey. He hints that it has given him a taste for more challenges, and as someone who recognises some of the symptoms and hasn't given up the challenges, I wish him well. Will he be less of a grumpy git in future? Who knows. But with luck, maybe he'll find that the more he does, the more he'll be able just to go with the flow, and the things which rile him now become things he can just shrug his shoulders about and move on. ART
Overall verdict: Interesting enough for a quick read, but needs something more to stand out from the crowd.
