Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens [Paperback]

Did you ever watch Northern Exposure in the nineties, and think "I'd like to live there in that hostile and cold, moose-filled place with those few and quite mad people"? Or watch Hamish MacBeth and fall inexplicably in love with Robert Carlyle and his dimwitted villagers? At a stretch, did you not entirely want to have the whole of Ballykissangel electrocuted with Dervla Assumpta Kirwan because you might like to move there and you'd need someone to be manning the pub?

Well, I have fallen for a little village in Norfolk, where there's a pub and a bowling team, and an 18th century cottage, split down the middle, where, in a shared back garden some chickens live. In one half of the cottage lives Tony (who is short) with his wife and kids. In the other lives Alex and his long suffering LTLP (long term life partner) who puts her head in her hands quite a lot and they have a very special bookcase. This is where Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll is set.

This little Norfolk village -- the name of which we will never ever know, lest it befall the same fate as the village that was the protagonist of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence" and gets over-run by twots in Volvos -- is just like Ambridge in my head (only the interior of the pub is unlike The Bull and the villagers are far less preachy about sustainable farming) and I would like to live there if it weren't for the fact that I already live in a village that twots would like to descend upon in their Volvos.

I laughed out loud and sniggered and grinned all the way through Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll. I never laugh out loud when I'm reading, rather like the fact that I don't drink on my own... although now I've discovered that laughing out loud on my own at chickens and lawn bowls and really quite brilliant musical careers is quite fun, I may start drinking alone too.

It is just really, really funny, gently funny, sad funny, hapless funny, and recognisably true funny. Alex's account of being a London-leaving newcomer with a new job title of househusband and being a bit hapless and crap at housework resonates with this London-leaving newcomer housewife who is quite hapless and crap at housework. It also made me feel extremely homesick for so much of England, such an English village, such an English story, such an English use of the English language.

I love this book, loved it from the first page to the last and I shall be reading bits of it to those among my Portuguese friends who still need to be schooled in what is utterly brilliant about the English.

Alex Marsh writes in the first person and presents this book as a memoir, but it can't be, quite, because the central character is such a hapless, hopeless Everyman that he would never have been able to write such an entertaining and readable book. Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll is a series of very funny sketches within a well-paced and cleverly structured narrative. This is great observational comedy writing; I hope Alex Marsh is writing for sitcoms and stand-ups. I'd put him somewhere between Sid Kipper and Jeremy Hardy (but younger, of course).

This may be the first in a new sub-genre: comic memoir. (If it's not the first, I'd love to know, because I'd like to read more books like this.) There's lots of bowling, which is surprisingly interesting and funny; numerous droll rock and roll references and incidents; and the amusingly depicted sex happens entirely in fantasy (apparently there must have been at least one actual event, but it happened offstage, so to speak). The book is a bit sweary, so if you don't like that, you may find it off-putting. But if you enjoy skilful, humour-filled, true-to-life writing, with characters you may well recognise from your own life, then this book is definitely for you.

Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll is a warm and funny tale of a man trying to embrace his new life in Norfolk - being a househusband, keeping chickens and playing bowls - whilst remaining true to his teenage dreams of rock stardom.

What sets this book apart from any other moving to the country memoir is the self-deprecating charm with which the author relates his minor domestic disasters and past musical "triumphs". Like a good wood the book is well-aimed, perfectly paced and rolls happily along to a very satisfying conclusion. It is also very, very, very, very funny.