Here Comes the Fun

THE NEW BOOK FROM THE MUCH-LOVED AUTHOR OF THE GRAN TOUR, A CHIP SHOP IN POZNAN AND THE MARMALADE DIARIES

Food fights, fishing and French cooking - bestselling author Ben Aitken's year of actively pursuing fun

Ben Aitken wasn't getting enough. 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. Then - with an almost entirely reformed selfhood winking appealingly just around the corner - he started swimming in cold water and was back to square one.

Despite the setbacks (and hyperventilation), it was becoming clear to him that the very pursuit of fun was a great way of not feeling naff. And so he made a vow to have as much of the f-stuff as he possibly could.

Taking a liberal approach to the subject, he sought out things that he used to find fun a long time ago (i.e. food fights and wrestling); things that he'd never done before but reckoned could be fun (boozy French cooking classes, tantric sex); things whose fun-factor was less obvious and more down to earth (nostalgia, volunteering, edible gardening, watching chickens); and things that he wasn't at all sure about but were fun according to other people (gym classes, caving, TikTok). Unsurprisingly, the results were mixed, but he was undoubtedly left feeling ... better. Which left him asking, if fun is the finest medicine, why do we stop doing it?

Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He followed Bill Bryson around the UK for Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island (2015) then moved to Poland to understand why everyone was leaving. A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (2019) is the fruit of that unusual migration. For The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (2020), the author went on six package coach holidays - Scarborough, Llandudno, Lake Como et al - with people twice or thrice his age in order to see what they had to say for themselves and to narrow the generation gap a notch. The Marmalade Diaries (2022) is the story of an unlikely friendship during an unlikely time, and stems from the author’s decision to move in with an 85 year old widow ten days before a national lockdown.