By popular demand, here's the Telegraph review of Surf Nation by Andy Martin. Also a few quick thoughts before you read it:
1. I have no axe to grind with Andy but when I read his review I felt aggrieved on behalf of British and Irish surfers. It seemed to me that he selectively cited blown-out days (that occur anywhere in the world) rather than mention any of the great waves I caught or witnessed in Surf Nation.
2. I agree with some of those who commented on my previous post on this issue - expertise in a given sport is not a pre-requisite to writing or commenting about it. If it was, we wouldn't have Norman Mailer's The Fight, still less John Motson.
3. The Fight is a classic, and so is John Motson. Without them our lives would be poorer.
4. Surf off at Sennen? Fine - it's two miles away for me - but a long way from Cambridge.
5. The problem with a surf off is, speaking for myself at least, that it won't make for much of a spectacle.
6. The surf off idea brings us back to what Surf Nation
is about in the first place. It's not about me surfing, or Andy Martin surfing - it's about the characters who make up surfing on our shores and the great waves they surf.
7. Andy was a bit cheeky in correcting me on mistakes that he's made himself (cf. p.14 of Walking on Water), without informing his gentle readers of that fact.
8. But anyway, that's enough thinking. You want to know what he had to say? Well read on (and thanks to Ian Smith for the photos, first of UK surf-skate legend Stef Harkon in a Brims barrel and then of another Brims' wall at last year's O'Neill Highland Open. These did not appear with the Telegraph piece).