How to drink your way down the Thames

We slipped away from Penton Hook, Britain’s largest inland marina, optimistically fringed with palm trees. A 10 minute walk away looms Thorpe Park, where, for £66 a head (provided you clear 1.2 metres), you can be inverted, soaked, and momentarily relieved of your soul. It’s a curious edgeland, where G-force yields to a neat, nautical galley, and adrenaline crashes headlong into the soft furnishings of a quarter-century-old cruiser. The only loop-the-loop on board was a coiled, bright blue mooring rope; the only scream, once underway, that of a frog resigned to the beak of a patient, watchful heron.