Footloose

Footloose is a set of evocative tales from David’s travels around the world, starting in the 1960s and finishing, on a suitably elegiac note, with a return visit to Dahab in Egypt in 2014. These journeys David sometimes made by himself. At other times with L, his German girlfriend. Not once but twice as the cook on a yacht sailing across the Atlantic. And much later on with his aging father. But the physical journeys are only part of the story. The people met along the way, with their kindness and often their strangeness, from Morocco to the Canary lslands, from the Dominican Republic to Tibet, from Kuwait to Turkey, are brought unforgettably to life. ln the gaps between the travels are stories from when David was back in the British Isles, working as a nightwatchman, or in a gang repairing Norwich's Anglican cathedral, or living in a London flat which was being bugged by Special Branch, presumably because of the activities of some previous occupants, or running an out-of-the-way lrish youth hostel that lacked all modern sanitation. And tying these tales together are the meditations they produced, on life and on the arts, and in particular on literature, which was David's passion and his driving force.