Old Man Sailing
by Peter Rhodes (Brewin £8.95, 172pp)
ALTERNATIVES BLOODY
by John Passmore (Samsara £11.49)
There can’t be many publishers who go to bed at night dreaming of bringing out more memoirs by journalists. But these two delightful paperbacks — both the product of Covid lockdown — should prove them wrong.
John Passmore was an Evening Standard feature writer and a Daily Mail columnist, but his love of sailing was all he did. What should Passmore do when lockdown started in March 2020? Passmore was 70 years old and very vulnerable to Covid. But staying inside with just TV and the occasional hike didn’t appeal, so Passmore decided to take his boat and self-isolate in international waters.
The subtitle of this rollicking, moving adventure is ‘Some Dreams Take A Lifetime’. He had always wanted to use his yachting knowledge — he is clearly a most accomplished sailor — and now the pandemic gave him the perfect excuse for a single-handed trip to the Azores and back on the Samsara, his 32 ft sloop.
John Passmore wrote a memoir about sailing and Peter Rhodes, a fellow journalist, has written a book that details some of the most significant events over the past 50 years. (file image).
He disappeared in a vast world of beauty, solitude and adversity for 42 days. He ran out of water, his sails were ripped and there was no heat from the gas pipe.
Passmore may think it is a 24-hour workday for a single-handed sailor. But there are still many hours for reflection as he looks back at a happy life, and his loving wife. It was always a joy to be on the other side of adventure.
When he returned he was interviewed extensively on national radio and found he was being celebrated as the ‘embodiment of the national lockdown dream’, as he puts it. You will be inspired to do it after you read this delightful, cheery yarn.
Peter Rhodes was a celebrated feature writer on the Wolverhampton Express & Star at a time when the regional Press was a major power in the land. The decline of revenue and readership in provincial newspapers is due to the rapid growth in media outlets, as well as the shift from local classified ads to the internet.
But Rhodes was there when the E&S sold hundreds of thousands of copies and went through countless editions. It became a hugely popular paper in the Midlands as well as the Black Country. Celebrities’ publicists, as well as political influencers like Alastair Campbell, knew that a lead story and a feature in a paper like the E&S could be worth far more than many national titles.
Pictured left to right: BLOODY ADJECTIVES by John Passmore and OLD MAN SAILING by Peter Rhodes
And it was a time when regional editors would say things like ‘Looks like civil war in Russia —get Rhodes out there!’ And off he would go. But not anymore. The regional editors of those times wanted their readers to have a balanced diet of international, local and national news. One page could have a report about Tipton bin collection disputes. Another story might be about an attack on Tokyo’s subway.
The editors wanted journalists to be able compete with national Press packs wherever they took them. And, before budgets tightened, it took Rhodes round the world: from the North Pole to the Falklands (he reprints here a terrific piece on the neglect of the Argentine soldiers’ graves called Flowers For The Fallen), from Hong Kong and Vietnam to the siege of Sarajevo, via the first Gulf War and civil strife in Sri Lanka.
His coverage of big events, royal weddings and funerals was moving. He also writes about the humorous side of journalism (including an amazing interview with Miss Piggy from the Muppets). There’s even a collection of gags from readers of his column that beats a Christmas cracker any day.
A beautiful memoir about some of history’s greatest events in the past fifty years. Rhodes’s voice is warm and sympathetic, dryly funny and full of sharp insights into the world of journalism, when print journalism really mattered.