Jonathan Raban describes how he became a lone sailor in For Love & Money (1987): “I floated down the Euphrates on a raft with Freya Stark [and] sailed from Gloucester to the Isle of Wight on a converted Baltic Trader.” He is referring to two features he wrote in the 1970s for Radio Times, when I was its editor. The money “would settle the gas bill, the phone bill, the electricity bill and the month’s mortgage all in one”. He continued: “Another Radio Times piece sparked off two books and an obsession.”
Having joined a sailing ship being used for the BBC1 TV series The Onedin Line, to his surprise he was not seasick, and “in the morning we were edging along the Cornish coast. From three miles or so offshore, England looked as foreign as Arabia – a long, low, moody gorse-clad island … the sea a wilderness as truly wild as a desert or rain forest. The idea lodged in my head and wouldn’t budge. Four years later I was sailing alone past the same stretch of coast in a solid seaboat of my own,” which led to Coasting (1986)
