Dan Kieran

Ian Vince

With a top speed of 15 miles per hour and fuel efficiency of a penny a mile, a decommissioned milk float is the ideal vehicle for an epic journey between England's most easterly and westerly points. After planning the entire trip on the back of a beer mat, buying a 1958 decommissioned milk float on eBay, and charging its tired batteries, the team set off from Lowestoft to Lands End. On the way, they discovered that their float needs to charge for eight hours for every two hours it spends on the road. Relying on the milk of human kindness, they were at the mercy of strangers every night, sometimes even using other people's cookers just to keep the show on the road. En route, they were treated to tea and rock cakes by the Vice President of the Women's Institutes, succeeded in blacking out a Cornish campsite while charging their float (now dubbed The Mighty One), stayed with the monks at Buckfast Abbey where they undertook a vow of silence ,and, drove 500 miles to Tintagel, the birth place of King Arthur, only to find it had closed—all in the name of discovering lost England. You may be thinking: why on earth don't these men drive a car like normal people? But this is no ordinary journey. This is an eccentric odyssey through the English countryside. Three Men in a Float is about all things English and the pleasure to be had if you are prepared to slow down, get out of your car, and go off the beaten track.

Across England at 15 Mph

Three Men in a Float

A compendium of insane British Bureaucracy Everyone has a call-centre story or some nightmare encounter at the hands of 'customer services' to relate. The Little Black Book of Red Tape is a kind of compendium of such stories, a sort of almanac of the bullshit of the modern world, and a catalogue of individual heroic battles against the corporate state. It features the Derby householder who is selling off minute plots of his back garden to well wishers around the world for £1 each to prevent the council putting a bypass through it; the Shropshire bus service that doesn't stop as 'stopping disrupts the timetable'; and the hospital recently fined £2.5 million for using 'spare capacity' to treat patients quickly.

Ian Vince

About

Books

Join the club