Town mouse: A brave feat of endurance
Clive pays tribute to a duo who recently completed a life-threatening challenge


Few people deserved a party more than Luke Birch and Jamie Sparks, who were given one in Kensington recently. Old friends, separated by university-they're undergraduates at Edinburgh and Bristol-they've recently spent 54 days in close proximity, completing the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. This meant rowing the Atlantic in a boat about the size of a walnut shell. The feat took mental courage as well as physical brawn. After a strong start on leaving the Canary Islands, they found themselves blown practically back to the beginning by bad weather. Sometimes, they faced 40ft waves.
But, on they went, in two-hour shifts. Salty and soaked, they developed-as a video graphically showed us-agonising sores. They hollowed out their foam mattresses to relieve the pressure on tender parts, but, then, the mattresses themselves were washed overboard.
A bad moment was the loss of Jamie's last iPod. After 3,000 miles, each looked like a cross between Ben Gunn and an Indian guru, but they raised more than £300,000 for Breast Cancer Care, entered Guinness World Records as the youngest rowers to cross an ocean and staggered, with wobbly legs, onto the quayside at Antigua, with a fuller sense of what it means to be alive. I know what my children would say: ‘Epic.'
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Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
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