720 Hours in This Scept’red Isle: A Literary Odyssey

“720 Hours in This Scept’red Isle: A Literary Odyssey” captures Muchugu Kiiru’s experiences in England—London, Durham, Holy Island, and York—as a graduate student in Counselling Studies in the Durham University for 30 days between July and August 1999.  England and the 30 days are the Scept’red Isle and the 720 Hours of the title of this travelogue that uses the diary form.  Employing and subverting this form, the writer takes the reader on a literary odyssey that transcends Durham and 1999 as he alludes to literary works by Andrew Marvell, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Dickens, Chinua Achebe, Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. B. Yeats, William Blake, and William Shakespeare as he uses the form as a vehicle in which the reader travels the writer’s experiences in the past in the United States of America, South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya and into the future as the writer—on board the plane in Heathrow—prepares to travel back home in Nairobi.