Libby Purves

Libby Purves likes doing things. Long walks, sailing boats, travel, adventure. She also likes her five year old and three year old child. So as it would clearly be harsh to expect them to cope without Mummy for two months, she decides to sail a yacht round the British Isles with her husband and both kids.

It's a lovely book for the geography of the British Isles. I recommend reading it with a good map, and savouring their epic long sails and their pottering from loch to loch. It's also a good book for remembering to live life with the weather. There are weeks they can go nowhere. There are days they sail 100 miles in a single bound.

It's also a good book for a pragmatic approach to challenges. They snip off a tiny corner with the Crinan canal. They do a lot of it motoring under engine. But they clearly have sailed round Britain.

I wonder if it would work nowadays? That whimmish ability to just moor up in remote corners of Scotland. I hope it still works like that, I fear it probably doesn't. It was a bit of an eye opener when I realised I was born at the same time as the kids.

Libby is very keen to tell us all how middle class she is, but it is the sort of middle class with a nanny and horses and a yacht, and there are many things they worry about on their trip, but never whether they can afford mooring fees, or the taxi to casually go inland.

It charts the family moods fairly frankly as well, they all hit the odd pockets of 'why are we doing this, it's a bad idea', and then all brush themselves down and get on with it. And are all pleased to have done it at the end.… (meer)

‘Write about what you know’ is a popular maxim (not to be confused with the popular Maxi, which was a popular family car produced and sold in Britain in the 1970s. Because this was the 1970s, the roomy interior featured plenty of imitation Formica in the dashboard, and leatherette seats. The effect, combined as it was with the popular habit of smoking in the car for adults and passive smoking in the car for the kids, and less than draconian drink-driving laws, led to the interior of your average Maxi being not unlike that of a working mens’ club of that time. Of course in these enlightened times the only insalubrious feature one is likely to encounter in a family car is a sticky carpet, courtesy of children being careless with snacks, drinks or bladders) the idea being that in order to write convincingly and with authority about something, you need to know the subject. This is especially true when it comes to medical textbooks, but is also applied to fiction.
The author is ‘Casting Off’, Libby Purves, is a radio presenter for Radio 4. As a radio presenter one might expect that if she were to follow the popular maxim, she would decide that her first novel should be about a woman journalist moving into radio broadcasting.
Possibly picking up on public sentiment that journalists are about as popular with the reading public as IBS on the ISS, she has decided to go down a different route. One might reasonably expect that women broadcasters present programmes about cookery, the menopause and other domestic matters, and maybe they do. Our author has decided to ignore those topics completely, almost. One might also consider that ‘Casting Off’ is going to be a novel about knitting, or at least a knitting circle in a sleepy but picturesque village, untroubled by event until one night one of the circle is found murdered, with a knitting needle sticking out of her back. This is the time for armature sleuth and star baker Izzy Cotswold to step in, step up and solve the crime in time to have her Victoria sponge on the judging table for the village fete. Actually, I’d read that.
As it turns out, our author is also a keen sailor and, as the picture of the boat on the front cover might indicate, this is a story that features sailing. The only time radio plays a part is the shipping forecast, and the news, which is actually a major plot point now I come to think of it.
‘Casting Off’ has a memorable opening, with a set of keys thrown with force and accuracy by a woman (I know, a lady, throwing with force and accuracy, the sexism in the observation comes from the unwitting recipient of the keys who, despite being unexpectedly hit by them, can appreciate a bloody good throw from a moving boat when he sees, and indeed feels, one) from boat to shore.
In fairness this sexism is described as the residual ‘schoolboy’ in the chap who gets the keys in the shoulder, from a woman described as ‘just his type’. A typical Hollywood cute meet were it not for the fact that the woman in question is sailing away.
The woman on the boat has cast off her ropes and her responsibilities and is sailing out of port when all the other weekend sailors are making their return. Her husband is ashore, but adrift.
And so begins our protagonist’s journey. Essentially a domestic drama set afloat, it’s a frothy and charming enough tale of a middle aged woman deciding enough is enough and sailing, if not quite into the sunset, then at least away from the things that irritate her. Things are rarely so simple though and irritants follow, including in the form of a media that the author skewers with delight.
The author obviously knows here stuff about sailing, and those same readers who delight in details of life aboard Royal Navy warships during the Napoleonic wars might also delight in the descriptions of sailing a small craft here.
In all, a salty saga of a domestic dispute given something extra with a nautical escape.… (meer)