[2] Written as a travelogue, Coasting describes Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch, the Gosfield Maid.

His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War.

The Prime Minister talks about sovereign territory being invaded by a foreign power, but to Raban '...her cross, nanny's voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea.'

And it is his negative feelings towards an increasingly alien Britain under the dominance of Thatcher that finally persuade him to make the decision to leave his homeland, although the paradox is that they share a like-minded attitude towards its rigid social hierarchy: I grew up with a sentimentalised version of the English past, of the enshrined holiness of the squire in the grand house and the tenant farmer and the exact place you occupied.

However, rather than taking the battering ram approach of his eccentric predecessors (men like Middleton, McMullen, and Hilaire Belloc), he uses beautifully crafted language to describe the life of a single-handed sailor in great awe of the sea, with detailed almost lyrical descriptions of the characters he encounters along the way.

Raban sums his family's situation up in his own clinically detached manner: 'We belonged nowhere, We had the money of one lot, the voices of another - and we had an unearthly goodliness which removed us from the social map altogether.'