Red Széll

H.G.

Wells does exactly the same.

And the reader is...

The reader probably knows that it's fiction, but how much of it is based on fact?

Yeah, no, fascinating, because they have nothing else to refer to.

You know, there's no television, there's no radio, there's no next-door neighbour who went to Goa last year to tell you that actually India's nothing like that.

So it's... I rather admire...

and feel slightly jealous, actually, of those less enlightened ages.

It's certainly something that I was talking about with the latest guest on My Life in Books, which comes out this week, R.C.

Shaw, who's a Canadian surfer and educator.

and adventurer.

And he was inspired by Joshua Slocum, the Canadian who was the first man to circumnavigate the world single-handed.

in 1898 and his account of this circumnavigation which took three years and was something like 48 000 miles his account of it sailing around the world has actually never been out of print since

And it's the foundation text for R.C.

Shaw to retrace some of the formative steps of Joshua Slocum in Nova Scotia.

And as such, he takes a very heavily laden cargo bike.

his surfboard and a tent, a hammock tent, and embarks on his own epic journey.

And in this clip, we can hear exactly why he wanted to do that.

And I think, you know, you can hear from that, travel does make you a better person.

Putting your phone aside and actually interacting with other people, putting yourself at the mercy of their hospitality, which is exactly what Joshua Slocum did in his single-handed sailing around the world.