It seems that when I picked books for my holiday I tended to have read them in the wrong order. As mentioned previously I managed to finish the Spanish based Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools before I even set foot on the plane.
During a week in Spain when we were away from England, away from the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Wedding; I find myself reading Tickling the English by Dara O’Briain.
Some of you may know Dara as an Irish comic and the bulk of this book is written as Dara undertakes his latest comedy tour around the British Isles in search of what it truly means to be English.
As Dara states there is a very noticeable difference between being British and English and I think he manages to capture this distinction very well.
I found Tickling… laugh out loud funny in many places and also picked up quite a lot of very interesting points about England including the fact that a newly elected major of High Wycombe is weighed at the beginning and end of his term so that the people of High Wycombe can tell if he has gotten fat at the tax payers expense!
As I said I find all of this quite jovial and interesting but there are points in the book where Dara seems to be reciting paragraphs from an Encyclopaedia or Wikipedia. There’s some heavy stuff in the centre of the book on race and racism in the UK which seems to just be a scatter gun of facts – facts which are shot at you page after page after page. It’s great to have substance and facts but in places this really does distract from the flow of the book and the humour.
I did wade through all the information and even though I cannot confess to remembering all of in, when I completed it I understood the context of all this material and it fitted the book and Dara’s objective perfectly.
It took a lots of criss-crossing the country, lots of questions and the aid of Ken Dodd to help Dara come up with an answer and I must say (being an Englishman), I was surprised and pleased with it.
But of course that is probably just as Dara predicted.
If you’d like to read a candid take on the English and have some of the stereotypical regional variants brought o life (and some completely re-written) then I recommend Tickling the English.
I am still totally bemused as to why I decided to read this in Spain!
Oh and take my advice – never commit a crime in Warwickshire if you know what’s good for you!
Keith Tomlinson Photography 