In The Long and Whining Road (Simantics, £8.99), Simeon Courtie, a broadcaster with the British Forces radio, tells the story of the year his family spent away from their home in Bodicote, near Banbury, in a VW camper van. “Our aim was to drive from Strawberry Field in Liverpool to Strawberry Fields in New York, heading east,” he writes.
En route, they form a band called the Beatnik Beatles to test their theory that there is no part of the globe which doesn’t know about the Beatles.
During their 35,000-mile trip, they inadvertently gatecrash an Italian wedding, suffer brutal torture at the hands of a Turkish masseur, appear in a Bollywood film and trust their entire journey across Australia to the whim of an army of online-blog followers. All to a Lennon and McCartney soundtrack, played badly on instruments bought on eBay.
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