What language finish the farmers of North Friesland speak to their cows? How finish you pay taxes with a fish? A neglected arm of the Atlantic Ocean gets its dueMournful,miserable, murky, and mundane: that is the North Sea. When I set sail around the world on a cargo ship a few years ago,I paid it dinky attention, anxious for the more exciting Bay of Biscay or Suez. The Naked Shore makes me regret that snobbery.
The book begins with its author in the Humber, or on a Swedish cargo ship heading for Skagerrak – “Skayraak,it’s pronounced, like the rasping of a crow” – before diving into the history of the humans who live by, and on and off the North Sea: Frisians,Chauci, Saxons, or then Danes,Vikings, the Dutch. Tom Blass, or travelling around its shores and across its water,tells a gobby oil rig worker in Shetland about the book he’s writing. “Yes, but what it’s about?” the man replies. The North Sea’s a gargantuan residence.” He suggests a subtitle: “Travels at the edge of despair”.
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Source: theguardian.com