You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain [Paperback]

I first picked this book up with a smug air of satisfaction: I was going to enjoy ripping this one apart. I had had enough of doing nice positive reviews, it was time for some good old fashioned vitriol and this tome- another road trip around the UK by some poncy metrophile southerner- would do the job perfectly.

And the first few pages appeared extremely promising in this regard; the prose came across as aloof and solidly within in the ageing, middle brow `Daily Mail' zone of humour. The sense that a precious, condescending take on the nether-regions of our battered Britain- dragged over the coals as they have been and left out to wither and die by the establishment elite for the last three decades- was in the offer only reinforced my sense of inverted glee. I was going to love tearing this one to pieces.

And then without any warning it all suddenly changed. Tim Moore started describing his purchase of an Austin Maestro and the history of the car with such affectionate pathos, coupled with a relentlessly funny narrative that literally had me in tears with laughter. And from thereonin, the book just got better, and better and better...

Now then, it has to be said that Moore's book unashamedly goes for laughs as its base point; but what's so good about his book, is that it isn't laughs at any cost and the humour isn't used as a shallow gloss to hide the experience he is really having. Nor, importantly, is his humour used to belittle the places and people he meets. It is in fact very cleverly, used to the opposite effect.

Moore's overall idea is wonderful in its simplicity- he decides to go to what are catalogued as the worst places in Britain, travelling in one of the worst cars we have produced, listening to the worst music we have ever knocked out, staying and eating in the worst places wherever possible.

This sets the scene for some wonderful but also extremely poignant set pieces throughout the book. Tim Moore never loses sight of his own pretensions and failings, and to my mind never loses sight of the humanity and grace- both past and present- in the places he visits either. This is a terrific accomplishment that the awful cover and title of the book doesn't do credit to, although I can understand the marketing executive demands for a book in this terrain.

Being from the North East originally myself, I found his journey through that region particularly good, although that is probably more personal bias than anything else, as all the areas he trundles through in his Maestro are treated with the same level of fascination and- dare I say it- more than a little bit of love. And I'm indebted to the author for explaining the origins of one of the NE's most peculiar fast food inventions- the parmesan or `parmo'- which was a complete education for me.

So without gushing on anymore, I would just say this is a great book well worth a read. His journey around the lost margins of the UK is affectionate, at times painfully acute and, by the end, actually quite moving. In fact behind the accomplished humour, there is a rich vein of some deeper issues to intellectually mine and mull over, and makes you realise that much of Britain these days is like the places described in this book, when you actually think about it. Beyond the hype and gloss of the London-bound media and it's luvvies, away from the Cotswolds and other gentrified pockets of provincial cities and shires, much of the British population are looking, numbed and a little shell-shocked, at the world around them and wondering... what the hell has happened to us, and why? Very much like, perhaps more than we'd like to admit, the seasoned citizens of Hull and Middlesbrough.

As an end note, I would just point out that this is an analysis of the UK that Jeremy Paxman would not be able to write. On that consideration alone, I think you should immediately get hold of, and read, this book.

"A quick flip of the wipers, and off we ... oh. I heard frail machinery endure immense strain and surrender with a reverberating twang; I saw the wipers flop limply down on to the bonnet, useless and dead." - from YOU ARE AWFUL, about driving Craig

"I watched my reflection settle into the now familiar blend of horror and exhilaration - the face of a man who has gone in search of the truly dreadful, and found it ... Five minutes later I walked outside (the barber shop) wearing a crested grebe plucked from an oil slick." - from YOU ARE AWFUL, about a haircut in St. Helens

"Drained and stained, the irregular-shaped pools seemed sad and creepy; the primary-hued plastic employed from everything from water slides to snack huts had dulled and roughened like an old toothbrush. The whole Chernobyl fairground look." - from YOU ARE AWFUL, about Rhyl's Sun Centre, off-season

Early in his marriage, travel essayist Tim Moore and his wife got lost on a day trip to Leeds Castle and ended up on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary at the decaying beachfront resort of Leysdown-on-Sea. Twenty years later, this experience inspired Moore to do a driving tour of Britain's most vilified and blighted places as pronounced by various polls and surveys. Thus YOU ARE AWFUL (BUT I LIKE YOU), an unusual work of humor and bad experiences which is sprinkled with words like: horrid, rubbish, worst, loathsome, unhappiest, dreadful, and ugly. For the reader, it's great fun. Brilliant, actually.

Dedicated to the concept of Awfulness, Tim acquires his ride for the adventure, perhaps the worst engineered British car in recent history - the Austin Maestro - which he names "Craig." Inserting the needle under his fingernail even deeper, he programs the on-board sat-nav with the most obnoxious voice available from among celebrity voices, that of "Ozzy" Osbourne, and loads his on-board music player with 358 British songs voted by listeners as the most terrible.

And he does his round-the-island journey in the winter.

Sounds like a lark. Who among us could resist an offer to ride along?

So, it's up along the east coast (Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Goole, Hull, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Gateshead, Howick, Forth, Methil, Lochgelly), then down the west coast and through the Midlands (Cumbernauld, Barrow, Southport, St. Helens, Rhyl, Doncaster, Sheffield, Nottingham, Walsall, Merthyr Tydfil, Slough).

(Even having holidayed in Great Britain more than a dozen times and been from Land's End to John O'Groats, up the east and west coasts and down through the center, I can't recall having spent significant time in any of these places except Nottingham in 1975, and that was to satisfy my desire to visit the Nottingham Castle of Robin Hood legend. I was much younger then, and naively uninformed. In any case, there's very little of that fortress left; I was vastly disappointed.)

And what a wealth of horrid experiences! A bad haircut, dismal hotel rooms, atrocious food, decrepit seafronts, blighted industrial towns, depressing pubs, deserted museums, and execrable public architecture. Among other things.

At one point, the author invites the reader to interactive participation when he writes of the scabrous Pontin's Southport Holiday Park:

"You don't even need to go there to see how bad it looks: as viewed on Google Earth, that weathered concrete wheel says correctional facility or abandoned military intelligence compound."

I viewed, and it does.

Throughout YOU ARE AWFUL (BUT I LIKE YOU), Tim displays an eye for detail, a caustic dry wit, a self-deprecatory humor, and a more-or-less stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. And, in the end, Moore gains from the experience:

"But something had happened to me over the past few months ... I had taken a crash course in grubby discomfort, and relearnt the lost native skills of taking the rough with the smooth, looking on the bright side, making the best of a bad job."

Bravo! This is a gem of a travel narrative worth savoring with your next meal of parmo (Middlesbrough) or Chinese Lemon Chicken (Doncaster).

The sheer horror of some places in Britain is well portrayed, with an overriding humour which helps to ease the pill.
Don't know how some of the residents feel about it though!.