Miles Morland - The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank and Went for a Walk across France

Miles Morland was born in India and grew up all over the place but chiefly in Iran, Iraq and Jersey. He has two children and was divorced twice by their mother, now a Jungian analyst. Today he divides his time between increasingly idiotic adventures, a houseboat on the Thames and a house on the marshes of North Norfolk. The Man Who Broke Out of the Bank, about chucking up his job and walking across France with his recently remarried wife, was a Sunday Times bestseller. His most recent book is A Cobra in the Bath, published by Bloomsbury in 2015.

About to Shout Down a Phone

Leaving South Kensington

Gatwick

The Dead-beetle position

The Montagne dAlaric

Fore-and-afting

The melancholy Canal du Midi

One of the hotel sheets

The Gers plotted and pieced fold, fallow, and plough

Head down, eyes closed

Dressed for dinner, Bassoues

The yellowy-blue thing

How did you ever dare to go out dressed like that?

The Chteau de Jottes where I checked the lawn for corpses

Somehow it falled to collapse

Saubusse: the river was flowing the wrong way

a suffi

First published in Great Britain 1992

This electronic edition published 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 1992 by Miles Morland

The moral right of the author has been asserted

by Neil Hyslop

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eISBN: 978-1-4088-6364-0

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A Cobra in the Bath

To Guislaine,
the hero of this book

The first thing that struck me about walking across France was how easy it was. We climbed over the boulders at the edge of the beach and there was the road ahead of us, straight as a ruler along the channel that led from the sea. All we had to do was walk. Easy, really. Here, one foot in front of the other, juggle the pack a little, breathe in the warm, sea-salt air and thats fifty yards gone. We had expected it to feel different. The Mediterranean to the Atlantic is an unthinkably long way for two middle-aged wrecks who consider a walk round the Serpentine exercise. I squeezed Guislaines hand.