conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Britain, Raban, Thatcher entitled Coasting.. End with the sentence '\nTwo passages that particularly stand out are of Raban's rather hostile meeting with Paul Theroux at Brighton Marina, himself in the midst of researching a similar book about Britain, and a much friendlier one with Philip Larkin at Hull, a city Raban knows well from his student days while working as a part-time minicab driver.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Coasting (book): Written as a travelogue, Coasting describes Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch, the Gosfield Maid.\nAn important point is that Raban sailed with a chart and a hand bearing-compass; he sailed by the look of the coastline.\nHis story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War.\nChapter Two is a description of the dogged insularity of the Manx, who he compares to the Falkland Islanders, whilst the Isle of Man becomes a metaphor for the insularity of the larger island on which he himself had been brought up and lived up till this point.\nRaban himself has commented on his own attitude to England and the influence of Margaret Thatcher on Britain at the time of writing his book.\nThe British he sees as being famous for their insular arrogance and condescension.\nAs he describes them: 'They love fine social distinctions and divisions and are snobbishly wedded to an antique system of caste and class.\nThey are aggressively practical and philistine, with a loud contempt for anything that smells abstract or theoretical.\nThey are a nation of moneygrubbers and bargain-hunters, treasuring pennies for treasuring's sake.\nWhen it comes to sex, they are furtive and hypocritical - and their erotic tastes are known to be extremely peculiar.\nMany Englishmen will pay a woman to take their trousers down and spank them.\nFor the most part, though, the English, both men and women, are afflicted by such a morbid decay of their libido that it has always puzzled the rest of the world how the English manage to reproduce themselves at all.\n' The author is equally bitter about the dominant, hectoring Mrs Thatcher.\nWhilst comfortably moored up in the Gosfield Maid on a beautiful stretch of the River Yealm, he tunes into the House of Commons debate on the Falklands invasion.\nThe Prime Minister talks about sovereign territory being invaded by a foreign power, but to Raban '.\nher cross, nanny's voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea.\n' Equally absurd are the majority of MPs who are baying for Argentian blood.\nRaban turns his radio off in disgust, '.\nsick of the sound of growning men baying like a wolf pack.\nIt wasn't a debate, it was a verbal bloodletting, with words standing for the guns and bayonets that would come later when the fleet reached the islands.\n' and adds, 'Listening to it, I felt that I'd been eavesdropping on the nastier workings of the national subconscious; I'd overheard Britain talking in a dream, and what it was saying scared me stiff.\n' And it is his negative feelings towards an increasingly alien Britain under the dominance of Thatcher that finally persuade him to make the decision to leave his homeland, although the paradox is that they share a like-minded attitude towards its rigid social hierarchy: The book is remarkable for its penetrating and highly perceptive insights into the character and state of the British nation at the time of writing.\nOne also has to greatly admire him for taking on the challenge of a single-handed voyage around the British Isles, a feat that requires great personal courage on the part of the sailor.\nFor most of the book, Raban, rather like Joyce, is able to form an objectively detached view of his country whilst out at sea on board his boat.\nHowever, rather than taking the battering ram approach of his eccentric predecessors (men like Middleton, McMullen, and Hilaire Belloc), he uses beautifully crafted language to describe the life of a single-handed sailor in great awe of the sea, with detailed almost lyrical descriptions of the characters he encounters along the way.\nTwo passages that particularly stand out are of Raban's rather hostile meeting with Paul Theroux at Brighton Marina, himself in the midst of researching a similar book about Britain, and a much friendlier one with Philip Larkin at Hull, a city Raban knows well from his student days while working as a part-time minicab driver.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first paragraph for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Coasting
  The boat was ready on February 24. It was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent—just the right moment for even a disbeliever to take to the wilderness. High tide was at seven in the morning and it was still almost dark when the tubby hull was cranked down the slip into the water. It looked less like the launching of a boat than the eccentric submersion of a thatched tudor cottage. There was no champagne about. The wit from the boatyard yawned, shrinking himself as far as possible into his furry parka. "Give her five minutes, and all you'll see will be the bubbles."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Alfie, my parents' elderly dog, lay like a bundled rug in front of the popping gas fire, his eyes watering. On the mantelpiece, a large whorled ammonite was parked on top of a sheaf of bills.
  For in their transfer from the parsonage the Ancestors had suddenly lost all their old power to hex. They used to follow one around the house with their offended eyes; a board of unapproachable trustees who could be seen to wince every time one touched a piece of their precious furniture or waded into the mashed potatoes with their crested forks. In the world of Miss Tress and the Pakistanis, they had become merely quaint. They might have been anyone's distant relatives. They certainly didn't look related to us. He had shoe boxes of index cards listing dates of sailings, rigs, tonnages, harbor dues, prizes, cargoes. Little twelve-ton luggers, which had slipped out of port under cover of night in filthy weather in the 1760s, had succeeded in escaping the attention of the revenue men only to find themselves caught in the act by my assiduous father.
  There were two men in my father's chair. One was my contemporary; a cheerful plain-clothes, bearded, radical de-bunker. I could only see the other, a far older man, if I squinted hard. His gaunt cassock fell in shiny folds around his knees; his lips were tight-reined, his shaven chin was pumice-gray, and his forehead was rippled in a permanent frown. While my father talked I tried and failed to get the two men to coalesce into one person, but they wouldn't go.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about preparing.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Alfie, my parents' elderly dog, lay like a bundled rug in front of the popping gas fire, his eyes watering. On the mantelpiece, a large whorled ammonite was parked on top of a sheaf of bills. 
  For in their transfer from the parsonage the Ancestors had suddenly lost all their old power to hex. They used to follow one around the house with their offended eyes; a board of unapproachable trustees who could be seen to wince every time one touched a piece of their precious furniture or waded into the mashed potatoes with their crested forks. In the world of Miss Tress and the Pakistanis, they had become merely quaint. They might have been anyone's distant relatives. They certainly didn't look related to us. 
  My father was preparing a twenty-thousand-word paper on the subject for a scholarly journal of local history. He had shoe boxes of index cards listing dates of sailings, rigs, tonnages, harbor dues, prizes, cargoes. Little twelve-ton luggers, which had slipped out of port under cover of night in filthy weather in the 1760s, had succeeded in escaping the attention of the revenue men only to find themselves caught in the act by my assiduous father. 
  There were two men in my father's chair. One was my contemporary; a cheerful plain-clothes, bearded, radical de-bunker. I could only see the other, a far older man, if I squinted hard. His gaunt cassock fell in shiny folds around his knees; his lips were tight-reined, his shaven chin was pumice-gray, and his forehead was rippled in a permanent frown. While my father talked I tried and failed to get the two men to coalesce into one person, but they wouldn't go.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I went on writing into the winter, at one with the home lacemakers, carpenters, potters and weavers. Soon after the first frost, the pheasants and partridges were shot. I thought it was my typewriter to begin with, but it resolved into the flat echoless popping of gunfire. The plowed ridges of the frozen fields glinted like wires in the sun as the beaters and guns fanned across the marshes. The drifting specks in my vision were dead birds falling out of the sky. The following dogs left jet-trails of white breath behind them as they sprinted to pick up the corpses.
  Above this small and brilliant war, there was a tantalizing rim of sea. The masts and deckworks of two coasters showed over the line of the seawall, moving almost imperceptibly from left to right, more slowly, even, than words.
  People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. When North Americans reached the Pacific, there was nothing to do except build the end-of-the-world state of California. For people who live on islands, especially on small islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home. It's what you have to cross, even if you do it by plane, whenever you want to strike out and make a break for it. Islanders also know how the sea goes on and on, in a continuous loop of shoreline and life, without a terminus. Knocking about from port to port, you keep on going past the port you originally started out from. In that regard at least, coasting is a lot more lifelike than those epic journeys which reduce the world to a magnificent straight line of conquest; and the coaster's chronic itch, to be moving on only in order to get nearer home, his never-quite-knowing whether he's returning or running away, are more real, in a daily way, than the exotic compulsions of the serious travelers who voyage intrepidly from A to Z.
  It is laughable, this business of moving around a small quarter of the world in one's own boat. It is maddeningly slow, frightening, strange, dull, uncomfortable, lovely, in-convenient, revelatory and undignified—all in the right proportions. It teaches you about a world you'd never guessed at when you were on land, and makes you obsessively alert to distinctions invisible to the people you've left behind there. It turns you into a creature of luck and weather. It shortens your horizon and makes you live by the minute and the hour. It grants you a floating detachment (sometimes serene and sometimes appalled) from the land on the beam. But it is the silliest possible way of getting to Brighton, if getting to Brighton was ever the point of the thing.
  I had thought that I might well cure this coaster's itch by writing about it, but the condition seems to have worsened, if anything, during the writing. All through this iron winter, I've been steadily adding to the roll of mint Admiralty charts. The sextant, adjusted for index error, is back in its oak case on the boat: we'll need the sextant for this next leg of the voyage.