Here Comes the Fun: A Year of Making Merry

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I don’t fit in the shirt, which is surely a portent. Problem is there’s only a small one spare, and I’ve got too much spare to be small, if you know what I mean. My warmup is off-the-scale self-conscious. I do some things I remember seeing others do years ago: high knees, star jumps, that sort of thing. The gaffer comes over and says that some of my teammates are genuine veterans. “One of these blokes fought in Vietnam. Another in the Falklands. If you don’t put your head in the way of things they’ll be on to you.” After this attempt at encouragement, the gaffer then makes the mistake of confusing age with ability and puts me in the centre of midfield – the most dynamic position. After 47 seconds, I feel my right calf muscle creak. It’s not a snap, or a pull, but it’s something. A howl, maybe. A protest. He knew it and so did everyone else. He was grumpy, increasingly boring, mostly joyless. So, he joined a lawn bowls club. A week later, he doubled down on the doldrums by learning to dance like they do in Bollywood.

I liked the idea behind this book - looking at different ideas of fun over the course of a way. Except I think the author lost his way halfway through and it meandered a bit too much and turned into a bit of 'I need to try to be funny but instead, I'm a bit of a git' I hadn't read anything by Ben Aitken before and perhaps I'm not the audience but I really felt he was trying too hard to be funny and by the end of the book, I really disliked him. THE NEW BOOK FROM THE MUCH-LOVED AUTHOR OF THE GRAN TOUR, A CHIP SHOP IN POZNAN AND THE MARMALADE DIARIESFood fights, fishing and French cooking - bestselling author Ben Aitken's year of actively pursuing funBen Aitken wasn't getting enough. He’s also one of my favourite authors at the moment. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his four previous books (Dear Bill Bryson, A Chip Shop in Poznan, The Gran Tour and The Marmalade Diaries) and I’m currently reading his latest excellent tale, which is basically a year of trying to have more fun. There’s absolutely all sorts of activities in the book, one of which is joining a veterans’ football team. I thought that would make an interesting article for you lot, so with Ben’s permission, here’s a little taster.I fell for the places first. Over the next year, whenever I wasn’t required to peel spuds or bone cod, I skipped town and hit the road. I went north to Gdańsk and the Polish Riviera, east to Warsaw and the lakes of Masuria, and south to Wrocław, the mountains and Łódź, the Polish Hollywood. Because too much cosiness can kill you – or give you a hangover at any rate – instead of rising early the next day and taking the bus out to the Björnö nature reserve, where the hiking and swimming are said to be sumptuous, I’m given no choice but to sleep through a healthy chunk of Saturday.

On top of its people and places, a country is a constellation of tiny quirks; a galaxy of shifting bits and pieces that, while neither constant nor objective, nonetheless make a solid contribution to a nation’s impression, its aura, its romance. After a year in the country, I was smitten with the place, and I didn’t want that to change

There are some good ideas here and perhaps the issue I have is with the format - it's presented in a linear way which means that we spend 2 weeks on a cruise with the author and that drags the whole thing down. Perhaps he felt it too? I wonder if it had been divided into bigger chunks rather than specific days and months, there would be have been the opportunity to drop some things that didn't work. There is something in Sweden called mysigt. It’s a bit like the Danish concept of hygge, in that it pertains to cosiness and comfort and pleasure and so on. When m syigt happens on a Friday, two of the most powerful elements of Swedish cultural life come together to form something irresistible – Fredagsmys .