An Audience with an Elephant

Any travel fan who has enjoyed Tony Hawks' quest to play tennis with the Moldovans and Pete McCarthy's bar should enjoy "An Audience with an Elephant". Byron Rogers' travels around Britain prove to be a quest for genuine, magnificent eccentricity.

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"An Audience with an Elephant" should appeal to any travel writing fan who has enjoyed Tony Hawks' quest to play tennis with the Moldovans and Pete McCarthy's bar - but here is no manufactured, factitious wackiness: rather a quest for genuine, magnificent eccentricity - and all without ever leaving Britain. Rogers' travels take him to Great Yarmouth, to find the only giant tortoise that is also a living veteran of Gallipoli; to Stalybridge (to travel on the "ghost" railway train that runs in one direction only); and even to Buckingham Palace, on an out-of-the-blue commission to write speeches for the Prince of Wales. This is a book about the sheer idiosyncratic oddity of Britain: 80-year-old triathletes; compulsive exam-takers; the last tramp in Wales; and other unusual encounters.