To the Baltic with Bob by Griff Rhys Jones

To the Baltic with Bob by Griff Rhys Jones (2005)
Read: May 2012

Scotty read this book quite a while before me, and we bought it in a charity shop spending-spree quite a while before that too. Scotty was not too impressed with it, but persevered through. I think I enjoyed it more than he did, but it wasn't the rip-roaring adventure that the cover promised.

I was prepared for the wit and self-deprecating humour of Griff having followed his adventures in the Three Men In A Boat specials on TV. This definitely featured in the pages, along with his knowingly poor nautical knowledge being made up for by enthusiasm and determination (read as sometimes pig-headiness). So I was prepared for the book and liked this aspect of it - it reminded me of what I enjoyed about the Three Men in a Boats.

As with the Three Men in the Boats, there were very different personalities on the boat and there were differences of opinion (apart from in the case of Griff, who always had a high opinion of himself). I am sure that Griff intended most of the humour to be self-deprecating, but it often turned out to also appear condescending to his crew mates on board. The weird dynamic between the crew becomes clear about half-way through the book when it transpired that Griff was going to have to start paying Bob & co. to join him. It was never clear where the relationships really stood - friendships or professional?

For a travel book though there wasn't enough about the interesting places they visited - most of the action stayed on the boat. What I might have liked would have been a photo of the boat to help me as a non-nautical type get an idea of what Griff was writing about. But maybe that would have taken the emphasis off his descriptions.

Save Way Book Corner

Save Way is the small corner-shop-cum-supermarket where we do nearly all our shopping. It's very 'local' which means it doesn't have five different flavours of Betty Crocker icing like the more expat stores (well it doesn't have any Betty Crocker icing come to think of it) but it does have what we need day to day; bread, eggs, veg and water.

Sometimes we do go to other places to get our veg, but we keep coming back to Save Way for the main items because although it doesn't have the range (you can be sure to get potatoes, tomatoes, onions and courgettes or carrots there all the time, most of the time you can get peppers too, but anything else tends to be short-run), the veg is much better quality than anywhere else.

In the front corner of Save Way when we first moved in they used to have a newspaper and magazine rack, but that gradually faded out of use about two years ago (possibly because the kiosk on the other side of the Grand Mall started selling papers).  Since then the area has been used as a storage area piled high with boxes of crisps or crates of soft drinks. Last week though I noticed that they were starting to clear part of it up.

What has sprung up is a small book store! It's all new books and imported titles (apart from a small AUC Press section) but it looks very good.  As the guy was arranging the books I took a look around and they had an 'Egypt' section which I browsed. Since finishing the Matt Rees series that I loved, I have been on the look out for something else to read that might be similar. On Amazon I managed to find an author with a similar character/setting, Barbar Nadel's series set in Istanbul.

Then by chance I noticed that in the stands was one of her books, quite reasonably priced I thought at 65LE. It was a random book from the mid-series and so I asked the guy if he might be able to get the first in the series. I've asked at bookstores for them to order me books, but not had much luck, so I wasn't holding out too much hope - I knew I could always pick it up from Amazon in the UK in the summer if I wanted to.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I went in to Save Way to pick up some things for lunch today and he came up to me to say he had the book! Well, he didn't actually say he had the book. He actually held another of her books and said to me '10 minutes' and then he dashed off. Ten minutes later (I'd already paid for my shopping so was just browsing his books again) he did indeed come back with the book I'd asked for. Brilliant!