A book titled Life in the Old Dogs Yet is resting on a stone wall overlooking a scenic rural landscape with rolling green hills and distant mountains near the sea.

While moving into my new home office (formerly the back of the garage), I realised just how many unread books I actually had. So, I grabbed this one off the stack at random, and started reading. I bought it some years ago, having enjoyed one of the author’s other books. He seems to have a brief spell as a published author, doing adventure travel books, before ended up self-publishing.

This is a short tale of the short trip he and three of his retiree friends took around the Dingle peninsula in Ireland.

It’s entertaining and diverting, and does raise some smiles, but it’s certainly not “laugh-out-loud”, as the back of the book claims. It’s mostly a wry look at the foibles of the travellers and the people they interact with, with very little sense of the landscape they’re moving through.

Did I enjoy it? Yes. Will I be keeping it on my (new) bookshelves? No.

In the same way that some meetings should be an email, this book should have been a series of blog posts. It’s much like spending a couple of hours down the pub with some old chaps telling slightly unlikely stories of their adventures. And that’s no bad thing.

Finished reading: Life in the Old Dogs Yet: a short amble in Ireland by Richard Guise 📚