I received this book for my birthday a couple of years ago from my friend Caroline (who is featuring heavily on my website this month as she accompanied me to Lapland just before Christmas). It was delivered by Amazon, with a typed note inside saying, ‘I’m really sorry that they thought of this first. Heard this guy being interviewed on the radio and he was slightly mad.’

I read the book and was not sorry they thought of it first (frankly the journey sounded a little bit hairy in places) but the author’s insanity grabbed me so warmly that, when Caroline’s birthday came round a couple of months later, I sent her a copy back. (It was a different copy, of course.) And I’ve been giving copies to people ever since.

The premise is this: Terry Darlington (who is probably more than slightly mad) his wife Monica (who is either slightly mad or exceedingly tolerant) and their whippet Jim (who is crazy for pork scratchings) make a journey on their narrowboat from Staffordshire, across the Channel, and along the canals of Belgium and France to Carcassonne. Eagle-eyed readers will have grasped the three words of that sentence that are completely and indisputably barking. Those three words are, ‘across the Channel’.

But really this isn’t a suicide-mission book about breathtaking derring-do. It’s the ordinary that Darlington does so well. His journey may be a long and imaginative one, but the parts that make you laugh out loud are Darlington’s observations on the recognizable and the everyday – he’s funny about the French, he’s funny about pints of beer and packets of crisps, and he’s very funny about the antics of his whippet called Jim. And the great news is that there’s another book featuring Terry, Monica and Jim due out in April (in the UK and next year in the US); it’s called Narrow Dog to Indian River and is about a voyage from Virginia to Florida.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Picador Books)by Eric Newby

Everyone goes on about this book, so about a year ago I finally felt sufficiently embarrassed by the fact I hadn’t read it that, faced with an Amazon virtual shopping basket that was one book short of qualifying for free delivery, I stuffed it in.

The story starts in 1950s London. Eric Newby is working in the fashion business. He doesn’t like it and so, one lunch-time, he sends the now-famous telegram to his friend Hugh Carless: CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?

As one does.

Off they go, famously ill-prepared (their mountaineering training comprises three days in Wales) on the kind of adventure that inspired the rest of the world not to look up to the English, but to think us a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. And the result is enchanting. Yes, there are incredible vistas, wonderful people and cultural insights (and all this in an area that, since those days, has seen horrors). But for me, it’s Newby’s wry humour, self-deprecation and very human rattiness with his companion (combined with a number of particularly horrible stomach upsets) that really make this a joy to read.  

The most often-repeated part of the book comes at the end when Newby and Carless meet Wilfred Thesiger who tells them, when they blow up their air beds, ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies.’

My favourite passage, however, is this: ‘While I was being noisily ill in the street, a solitary man came to gaze. “Shekan dard,” I said, pointing to my stomach, thinking to enlist his sympathy, and returned to the work in hand. When next I looked at him he had taken off his trousers and was mouthing at me. With my new display of interest, he started to strip himself completely until a relative led him away struggling.’

Should you ever go on a modern-day journey that is truly horrible, just be thankful that you weren’t enlisted as one of Magellan’s crew. Their journey would have made incarceration in a stinking Chinese country bus seem like Cliff Richard’s toe-tapping summer holiday. And the whole terrible tale is brilliantly told in this book by Laurence Bergreen.

In September 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set out from Spain with five ships and 260 men. He was heading to the Spice Islands (now a part of Indonesia): in those days, a single bag of nutmeg could make a man rich for life. Because of a papal edict, however, Magellan wasn’t able to sail directly east. In response to the belligerent empire-building of both the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Pope had in 1494, divided the world in half. The western half he bestowed upon the Spanish and the eastern part upon the Portuguese. And so Magellan (Portuguese by birth but sailing under the Spanish flag) had to go the long way round: he proclaimed that he would travel to the east by sailing through Spain’s territories to the west.

The big problem was that maps of those days had no idea of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. Magellan had thought that, once he’d traversed the strait in modern-day Argentina that now bears his name, he’d reach the Spice Islands in a matter of days.

He didn’t. When his ships finally limped back into Seville’s port after their three-year voyage, just eighteen of the original 237 men had survived to tell their tale, and most of those were so ill that they could neither walk nor speak. Magellan himself wasn’t among them. He had been butchered by Filpino tribesmen after a foolish attempt to show off his fleet’s military prowess backfired.

This a story of one of the most horrible journeys ever undertaken, of mutiny (and its gory repercussions) of terrifying giants, bawdy excess and appalling deprivation – and Bergreen.relates the whole horrible saga with rip-roaring panache.