Robert Crisp

Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

I looked again at the folded map of Europe in my hand. Then I crossed the road to the Continental booking office and bought a ticket for Salzburg in Austria.
"Return?" asked the clerk.
"Definitely not," I told him.

In December 1966, the New Year looked exciting for fifty-five-year-old Robert Crisp. As a man whose youth was spent in constant adventure, leading a calm, domestic life in England had become a burden from which he needed to break free. Named by Wisden as "One of the most extraordinary men ever to play Test cricket" Crisp served as a soldier in the Second World War in Greece and North Africa for which he was decorated for bravery, later becoming a writer and journalist.

With his marriage over and his sons old enough to fend for themselves, Crisp decided to start a new life. With sixty pounds in his pocket, his wartime disability pension of ten pounds a month, and a plan to write about his adventures under a pseudonym, his journey began. Through twenty columns filed from abroad over years of rustic living and travel, Crisp, as Peter White, shared his experiences of hitch-hiking through Yugoslavia, settling in a beach shack in Greece where he attempted to cultivate the stubborn land, and a nearly fatal solo boat trip around Corfu. As the first year of his dream life came to a close, he found out that the stomach pain he had been suffering was not a side effect of too much Greek wine, but cancer. With a prediction of only one year to live, he set off on a trek around Crete, his only companion a donkey with plenty of personality.

Robert Crisp's account of his travels, originally serialised in the Sunday Express, is an honest, funny, touching account of this charming rogue's journey through a foreign land and culture in search of inner peace and happiness.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 228
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. September 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448215225
• Artikelnr.: 43663203

Autorenporträt

Robert Crisp was an extraordinary man: a Test cricketer described by Wisden as "one of the most extraordinary men to play Test cricket"; a decorated soldier (DSO, MC); a journalist who founded the South African newspaper, Drum, and wrote for The East Anglian Daily Times and The Sunday Express; an author, a mink farmer, an adventurer, a charmer. In short, a man of many talents.

Inhaltsangabe

Foreword
A Note from Editor
Prologue: A Hankering for Pericles Smith
Part 1: Greece
1 The Pattern of My Magic Carpet
2 Rich Beyond the Potency of Wealth
3 An Enormous Contentment
4 A Small Piece of Warm Bread Dipped in Hot Olive Oil
5 Money Itself Was Becoming Meaningless
6 This Unlikely Foreigner
7 It Was All Going a Bit Too Well
8 I Could Have Happily Wrung a Million Speckled Necks
9 What I Was Really Looking For Was a Miracle
10 A Feast to Assuage Any Sort of Hunger
11 Operation Whitewash
12 My World Was Full of Spectacle and Conundrum
13 Mugs Like Me
14 Water, Water Every Where, Nor Any Drop to Drink
15 Profuse Green Hands of Thanksgiving
16 A Wiser and Better-Equipped Man
17 I Was Due to be Haunted
18 I Taught the Children of Gythion a New Game
19 Sounds of the Sea and the Sky and the Earth
20 The One Signal Failure of My New Career
21 I Knew I Had to Come Home
22 Eat, Drink and Be Merry
Part 2: Crete
23 I Liked to Think of Myself as a Leader
24 My Travels with a Donkey
25 It Seemed like the Savoy Hotel to Me
26 An Ignorant Alien Who Didn't Know an Ass from an Elbow
27 An Explicit Manifestation of a Trackless Waste
28 I Had Seldom Felt More Alive
29 No Place to Take a Donkey for a Walk
30 Heraklion Lay Behind Me and All of Summer Lay Ahead
31 A Tradition as Old as Crete
32 Where Sea and Sky and Earth Blended in a Haze of Infinity
33 A Scene Straight from the Bible
34 I Was a Successful Experiment
35 The Ultimate Peninsula
36 The Crowd Shouted Their Approval
37 A Hell of a Day
38 A Mixture of Sadness and Joy
39 Donkey for Sale - Speaks English
40 Damnit, I Wanted to Be Recognised
41 I Was on This Small Floating Paradise
42 I Took the First Strokes of My Odyssey
43 I Became Sensitive to Such Imperceptibles
44 I Was Strangely Happy
45 The Civilising Presence
Photographs
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
His Final Message