Our Book

"I laughed so much my head fell off!"

                                    King Charles (the first)

"The best Christmas Present for folk you're not that fond of."

                                   The Authors

A View From The Saddle

Regular readers of our general rambling and meanderings may recall that last year, Giles and Annie spent 100 days researching the impact of climate change on the Olive harvests…

They documented everything they found and, well they’ve only gone and written a book about it and that book is now here!

It’s the story of Op Watertight 2 - the second motorbike journey of a lifetime - that they undertook on their quest to ask 5 simple questions.

30 years after returning from the first Op Watertight and creating Olives Et Al, they decided to get back on the same bikes and do it all again - this time to find out, at first hand, what the changing climate patterns mean for the harvests across Europe.

These are their diaries from the road, the view from their saddles. Raw, unfiltered, uncensored, unedited.          

Funny, poignant and thought provoking in equal measures...

 They want to make this Important Apology:

“This is our tale of daily life – seen from the saddle. It’s what we saw and experienced and any similarity to persons living either now or then is entirely deliberate and we ask their (and your) forgiveness for our blunt portrayals; fruity, real time language and completely unedited and knee jerk writing without the blessing or advantage of an outside ear or hand to guide us onto a path of political correctness. Sorry. Giles & Annie X”

 Here’s a small taster…

“Washing up against a bulkhead somewhere near the ramp in the bowels of a ferry we didn’t want to be on, a loin cloth wrapped around a scrawny body detached itself from the gloom and glared at us with a degree of malevolence that was not instantly calming.

                “Where is rope?” it demanded.

                “Eh? Should we have rope?” we asked.  

                “Rope – tie up motorbikes. No rope?”

                I think it is generally accepted that the one place you can expect to find rope is on a boat. Any boat of any size. Not this one. Realising we had nothing to secure our bikes with, our zealous deckhand proceeded to snatch luggage from the passing embarkees and piled it around our bikes until nothing was left to see except a solitary mirror sticking out of the mound. The last thing we saw, as we were swept up to the deck, was a couple of caged chickens being merrily added to the pile.“

 The last thing they wanted you to know is that this first edition is a very limited print run so if you need a gift for someone you’re not too fond of, this is the ideal thing!