The Pull of the Deben by Julia Jones
This is a tale of two Matts. Nicci Gerrard and I met the first Matt -- Matt Gaw -- in the authors' room at Felixstowe Book Festival. He was talking about rivers: we were focused on dementia. The two things could have mixed -- I'll never forget the deep comfort that the Deben gave my mother in her most desperate moments, and how she continued to yearn for the river even when I'd taken her far inland. But our session and Matt's were scheduled to be separate so I contented myself with buying his book. Let me commend it to you. The Pull of the River , is an account of two friends in a home-built canoe, setting out to explore the upper (usually non-tidal) reaches of a dozen UK rivers. Their adventures are of a manageable sort -- though drowning is always an option. It's within the fine-writing, psychogeography genre that (for my taste) can too easily capsize into pretentiousness. It doesn't. Matt Gaw is interested in his own capacities (he gets cold and scared, n...