highly sensitive power

British writer Tim Moore has charmed me thoroughly. He writes irreverent, utterly hilarious travel memoirs with the twist that he’s frequently and unabashedly incompetent at what he sets out to do.

My favourite Tim Moore adventure is told in French Revolutions, in which he hoists his unfit body onto a recently purchased bicycle and sets out to follow the route of the 2000 Tour de France six weeks before the real race begins. What follows is a tale of mishaps wound around Moore’s keen devotion to the lore of the Tour. Whether he’s begging his wife to drive over from England so he can get a ride up the Alps or cheapskating his way through France’s lesser known lodgings, he recounts his bumbling journey with enough muscle behind his wit to make me a devotee.

No, I’m not very interested in competitive sports in general or in the Tour de France in particular, but I’m hooked on any writing that makes me laugh out loud – and Tim Moore’s a professional in this regard.

“A big-faced man with a moist neck made me pay up front before entering my name with difficulty in his soiled register of the damned; as I trod carefully towards the lift he issued a two-tone grunt of dissent and without looking up thumbed at a dark stairwell. My fourth-floor window overlooked a forgotten courtyard full of dead pigeons and an avant-garde installation entitled One Hundred Years of the Fag End. Inside, the view wasn’t much better. The wardrobe was the size of a child’s coffin and contained a vegetable. Rolling back the tramp’s blanket on a bed of institutional design, I beheld a pillowcase that might have been used to filter coffee. But of course it hadn’t: after all, what’s the bathroom towel for? Still, clicking off the Bakelite switch with wet hands I wished I’d used it. The shock was so violent it flung me halfway to the bed – not bad seeing as the bathroom was a shared one right down the end of the corridor.”

~ Tim Moore, French Revolutions

My next favourite Tim Moore book is an earlier one called Frost on my Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer, in which he revisits the Victorian-era Arctic adventures of Lord Dufferin. Again, Moore exploits his own weaknesses for the sake of his readers’ glee. This time, the setting is colder. Beginning with a crossing to Iceland on a container ship and ending on Spitzbergen, a Norwegian island well into the Arctic Circle, Moore recounts his own trip along with the history of Dufferin’s, the two stories interweaving in starkly contrasting ways often involving Dufferin’s competence as compared to Moore’s.

“Going down was worse than going up, and somehow required me to bellow out a detailed live commentary of the movements of my limbs. By the time I staggered back to the road I was drenched with rain and sweat and walking like the infant Bambi.”

~ Tim Moore, Frost on my Moustache

I’ll be eternally grateful that Moore has been willing to sacrifice himself for the public’s benefit. Both books reside permanently in my toolkit for lightening up, since a reread of either provides a reliable fix.