An Audience with an Elephant: And Other Encounters on the Eccentric Side by Byron Rogers
An Audience with an Elephant should appeal to any travel writing fan who has enjoyed Tony Hawks' quest to play tennis with the Moldovans and Pete McCarthy's bar - but here is no manufactured, factitious wackiness: rather a quest for genuine, magnificent eccentricity - and all without ever leaving Britain. Rogers' travels take him to Great Yarmouth, to find the only giant tortoise that is also a living veteran of Gallipoli; to Stalybridge (to travel on the ghost railway train that runs in one direction only); and even to Buckingham Palace, on an out-of-the-blue commission to write speeches for the Prince of Wales. This is a book about the sheer idiosyncratic oddity of Britain: 80-year-old triathletes; compulsive exam-takers; the last tramp in Wales; and other unusual encounters.