mike daunt

'I have never done a day's work in my life,' mike Daunt once said. 'this is not because i have private money –- i haven't –- but because everything i have done has been such fun.

This merry memoir tells how the author has lurched through a life full of friendship, laughter and bad behaviour. He has bonded with some of the most famous names in show business; drinking with Lee Marvin, lunching with Richard Burton (and a couple of ferrets), fishing with Chris Tarrant and Eric Clapton, laughing with Ronnie Corbett. Here, too, is the story of his great love for a famous actress and the joy and pleasure they had together, as well as the sadness of their eventual parting.

Somehow, the author also ran a highly successful fish and game business in London, employing a team of handsome public-school boys to deliver the goods to the dining rooms. Unsurprisingly, the core of the enterprise was entirely based on well-bred bonking. Here the reader will also learn why a live Smithfield prize bull arrived in the kitchens of a famous advertising agency.

In the course of his extraordinary life the author has slept in the longhouses of Borneo with head hunters and guarded Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, in Berlin's Spandau Prison. He has caught salmon in Russia's bleak Kola Peninsula Russia, marlin off the coast of Kenya, bone fish in the Bahamas – and hunted rats with as amusing and bibulous a cast of reprobates as one could meet.

By turns funny, outrageous, and poignant, the book is at once a picaresque rogue's memoir, a salute to the independent life well lived, and a celebration of a certain type of character who is nowadays all too rare.

'Mike Daunt is a dedicated disaster of a man…His life is deliciously debauched daily drama' – Chris Tarrant

'This is the story of a man who has made a point of living well through every decade of what Nanny would describe as a mis-spent life. He has known almost everyone, done almost everything during a time, the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, when taking part in all the delights that were available was quite a feat. Read this book if you want to understand how we thought then and what we wanted. In truth, I have come to the conclusion that making every day a treat and an adventure is probably the greatest achievement any man can claim' – Julian Fellowes