The Mission
Exactly why would three men attempt to travel across England at 15 miles per hour in an ugly second hand milk float? Unsurprisingly, the answer does involve a beer mat and a sunny afternoon punctuated by the clink of Nonik glassware, but also a sense of reckless adventure and a determination to find out something, anything, about the country they called home.So, one morning in May 2007, like Che Guevara and Fred Dibnah before them, Dan, Ian and Prasanth set out to discover their own country in order to discover either an unhurried romantic England or just a bloody-minded and unhelpful one and they wondered which it would be. This is the story of that journey.
The Book
After planning the entire trip on the back of a beer mat, buying a 1958 decommissioned milk float on eBay and charging its tired batteries, the team set off from Lowestoft to Lands End.
On the way they discovered their float needs to charge for eight hours for every two hours on the road. Relying on the milk of human kindness, they found themselves at the mercy of strangers every night, sometimes even wiring into people’s cooker mains just to keep the show on the road.
En route, they stopped at the grave of their inspiration, Jerome K Jerome, succeeded in blacking out a Cornish campsite while charging their float (now dubbed The Mighty One), were treated to tea and rock cakes by the Vice President of the WI, stayed with the monks at Buckfast Abbey where they undertook a vow of silence, and, having driven five hundred miles to Tintagel, the birth place of King Arthur, found it was closed.
They toured a bed factory, watched badgers and catapulted a telegraph pole with soft fruit for an hour – all in the name of discovering lost England.
'A lovely story' - Sue Baker, Publishing News
'Slow travel and much hilarity result' - The Bookseller