In the opening essay, Shanahan finds himself aboard the eponymous Lady Water, a squalid Chinese barge, which takes him on a torturous trip along the Yangtze River. After a mix-up with his cabin (what is any travel story without such confusion?), the author is coupled with the no-less-eponymous Mr Snack, a sluggish Chinese gentleman with a taste for salted treats and insipid television. Of the country more broadly, Shanahan is unconvinced: ‘Inhumane, bleak, polluted, nationalistic, money-hungry: you could say that about a lot of places but only China seemed to be proud of it.’ While the putative details of any place routinely prove true (cultures have a remarkable capacity to be their own variety of ordinary), it is Shanahan’s persistence with common biases that enervates the collection’s light-hearted, sometimes comic tone.

Where the author displays his greatest comic capacity is in dealing with the various orificial concerns of his destinations (‘Shit is to travellers in India what the weather is to the English’). While such aphorisms may not endear the subcontinent to the reader, they are among the only times when the book doesn’t disappear into mistranslation, and when something resembling a universal truth, however ordinary, is revealed.