Going Round the Bend on the QE2

Or How to Cure a Nervous Breakdown for Under £50,000

By: Nicholas Walker

Narrated by: Paul Metcalfe

Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

By a best-selling author, this is the hilarious story about a nervous breakdown experience that led to the author running away to go around the world on the QE2. Unbelievable but absolutely true, this book describes how the author’s sensitive mental state allowed him to have a different slant on world travel and the millionaires he mixed with. This truly different travel book will have you laughing with every word.

This is the true story of how the author cured a nervous breakdown by taking a world cruise on the Queen Elizabeth ll. It is also a peep into the luxury lifestyle of the very rich from the somewhat sardonic viewpoint of someone who is not quite sane.

We visit 40 countries, and each one is treated to the author’s observations, which are almost always humorous and from the viewpoint of someone whose fragile mental state causes him to throw all caution to the wind. But more than that, Nick isn’t your conventional world traveler: He gets arrested in New York and undergoes an intimate body search; he fights off three armed muggers in Jamaica, falls out with Australian customs officers, has a motorbike accident in Bali, is attacked by two old men in the Taj Mahal, and is thrown out of Vietnam.

The book, though, is more about his life aboard the QE2: his love affairs, his growing relationship with the staff and their intimate, closeted lifestyle, the disastrous staff concert that ends up in an all-out fight, the excesses of the super-rich passengers, and the bizarre situations that only happen aboard a cruise ship, such as the night when he is trapped on the dance floor with the three women he was dating. All in all, it is the story of a man making his way back to sanity until he is finally deposited back on the quay at Southampton, where he started. Only now, penniless, he's informed that everything he owned in the world had been thrown overboard into the sea.

©2000 Nicholas Walker (P)2022 Nicholas Walker