EXCERPT
17. Protective clothing.
There are a number of styles of protective clothing, depending on what kind of stupid horse riding you wish to participate in
There are a number of styles of protective clothing, depending on what kind of stupid horse riding you wish to participate in
1. Old money fox hunters like to wear a red coat, jodhpurs, riding hat and a supercilious sneer.
2. This is the Disney view of horses – specifically, horses from the cartoon age of chivalry, where men were men and women were basically so pathetic they were unable to do anything more complex than grow 20 feet of blonde hair and ride sidesaddle into a technicolor sunset on a soft-focussed horse. Horses that, like medieval Princess Barbie, have no anus and cannot hurt you because they are kind and love you in a non-alarming way. Not horses that could break both your legs, shit on your face, eat all your sugar and then present you with Rolf Harris’s vet bill. No, not those horses at all, oh no.
The Myway Code was co-written by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince.
Hailed by Chris Morris as a “Treasure trove”, How Very Interesting: Peter Cook’s Universe and all that surrounds it is a collection of articles and interviews with those who worked with Cook during his long and varied career or saw him simply as an inspiration. Contributions from and interviews with, the staff of Private Eye, Will Self, Nigel Planer, Mel Smith, John Cooper Clarke, Auberon Waugh, Eleanor Bron, John Bassett, Clive Anderson, Stephen Fry, John Lloyd and many many more - including the great man himself.
HVI was edited by Dan Kieran, Paul Hamilton and Peter Gordon.
After planning the entire trip on the back of a beer mat, buying a 1958 decommissioned milk float on eBay and charging its tired batteries, the team set off from Lowestoft to Land’s End. On the way, they discovered that their float needs to charge for eight hours for every two hours it spends on the road. Relying on the milk of human kindness, they were at the mercy of strangers every night, sometimes even using other peoples cookers just to keep the show on the road. En route, they were treated to tea and rock cakes by the Vice President of the WI, succeeded in blacking out a Cornish campsite whilst charging their float (now dubbed The Mighty One), stayed with the monks at Buckfast Abbey where they undertook avow of silence,and, drove five hundred miles to Tintagel, the birth place of King Arthur, only to find it had closed all in the name of discovering lost England. You may be thinking: why on earth don’t these men drive a car like normal people? But this is no ordinary journey. This is an eccentric odyssey through the English countryside.Three Men in a Float" is about all things English and the pleasure to be had if you are prepared to slow down, get out of your car and go off the beaten track.
The Book of Idle Pleasures is a restorative gift book for the stressed out, tired and hassled. An antidote to our non-stop culture, it is a welcome compendium of timeless delights. The book lists and reflects on 75 simple pastimes and proves that the best things in life really are free: lighting fires, skimming stones, catching falling leaves, whittling, staring out of the window, dreaming, doodling or taking a nap. "The Book of Idle Pleasures" is a celebration of pleasure for its own sake in a world of consumer overload.
Edited by Dan Kieran and Tom Hodgkinson with beautiful illustrations by Ged Wells.
Originally intended to be a simple Christmas humour book, I Fought The Law, ended up becoming ing rather different.
The premise was simple enough. Dan was going to spend a year trying to break as many stupid old laws as he could find, for your amusement. Imagine if Fred Dibnah met Bonnie and Clyde. This book would have been the result.
You see there are loads of ridiculous laws on the statute book. It is still illegal to get within a hundred yards of the Queen without wearing socks, you can’t flag down a London taxi if you have the plague and you can’t shoot a Welshman in Chester with a bow and arrow before midnight, but you can after midnight. It’s also illegal to beat a carpet in the Metropolitan Police District and to take possession of a beached whale. The list goes on and on. But in the process of researching these silly old laws Dan found a glut of stupid legislation that was equally ridiculous but these laws had one thing in common. They’d all been passed by our current Government. And when he met a man who has a criminal record for eating a cake that had ‘Freedom of Speech’ written on it in icing in Parliament Square the idea of breaking the Adulteration of Tea Act of 1776 started to seem a little frivolous.
Lifting up this legal concrete slab in the garden of England, however, caused all sorts of creepy crawlies to emerge that began to cast doubt on the health of the nation, so Dan’s adventure began to change tack.
His journey ended up taking him all across the country where he found some unlikely heroes fighting back against the no-go estates, ubiquitous high streets, monochrome offices and shopping malls of Corporate Britain. From a lady camping on the roof of a bus station in Derby, to writer, artist and musician Billy Childish, the pensioners who set off stink bombs in a public enquiry, and the history expert paid by Ant and Dec to have custard pies thrown in his beard.
This hilarious book is an unashamedly patriotic call to arms to all those for whom enough is enough.
The paperback edition of I Fought The Law contains a brand new extra chapter ‘The Grey Panthers’ and will be published on June 1st 2008 by Bantam Press
dan kieran
