Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist

"They stuck their coaches on ride-on, ride off ferries, whisked through France and Italy moaning about garlic and rudeness, then bored the neighbours to death by having them all round to look at their holiday watercolours". Most people associate the Grand Tour with the baggy shirted Byrons of its 19th-century heyday, but someone had to do it first and Thomas Coryate, author of arguably the first piece of pure travel writing, "Crudities", was that man. Tim Moore travels through 45 cities in the steps of a larger-than-life Jacobean hero incidentally responsible for introducing forks to England and thus ending forever the days of the finger-lickin'-good drumstick hurlers of courts gone by. Coryate's early 17th-century bawdy anecdotes include being pelted with eggs, pursued by a knife-wielding man in a turban and, finally, being vomited on copiously by a topless woman with a beer barrel on her head. Tim Moore has no trouble keeping up the modern-day side. And his authentic method of travel to replicate these adventures? A clapped-out pink Rolls Royce, of course.

About the Author :
Failed dandy Tim Moore lives in West London with his wife and slightly too many children. His writing has appeared in several publications including the SUNDAY TIMES, the INDEPENDENT, the OBSERVER, ESQUIRE and the EVENING STANDARD.

Review :
Was The Grand Tour about 19th century aristocrats travelling Europe in order to become elegantly educated in languages and the wider culture? It was as likely to be a drink-fuelled extended bout of sexual tourism, according to Tim Moore. For his own irreverently amusing and picaresque version of the Tour, the author of Frost on My Moustache has had the inspired idea of following in the footsteps of probably the first ever Englishman to make it - the Jacobean eccentric, Thomas Coryate, who is credited with having introduced the dining fork to Britain. The liveliness of his travel book Coryate's Crudities can be adequately guessed at by the fact that its frontispiece depicts the author being spewed on by a topless woman with a beer barrel over her head. Moore himself can't quite match this, but is tirelessly entertaining in his own overgrown student and self-confessed "failed dandy" way - doing France, Italy, Germany and Holland in a spirit of Bill Bryson-ish detached amusement, and in a pink Rolls Royce.