Another good book from Maconie. Interesting trawl around the north ( )

Stuart Maconie's writing is excellent, he makes me laugh and think and this is a marvellous gift. He tells me things about the north I didn't know and reminds me of places I have enjoyed visiting. He strings together wonderful stories of day trips and visits and does this very well. ( )

Read about 100 pages of it. Too many colloquialisms, too much about soccer and rock music from the 1980s and 1990s.

Maconie is a columnist, radio personality and travel writer from the Northern town of Wigan. In this book he travels from his adopted home of London, in the South, to all places North. He goes to inland towns and villages and along much of the Northern coast, stopping at lots of apparently ugly places filled with rude people, but he does like a couple of places and more importantly, he imparts information, like why people in Newcastle are called "Geordies" and why Liverpool and Manchester put so much effort into football rivalry.
I've read another by Maconie, Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England and liked that one a little more, probably because it included a lot more music history, but this was a good one. ( )

Maconie’s voice transfers convincingly to the page, and this is always entertaining and readable. It’s an affirmative account of the North of England, and its culture, a joky tone set by the use of Christopher Eccleston’s introductory gag as a Dr Who (“lots of planets have a north”: funny, but meaningless) to frame it. Although it’s kind of interesting to know which town is the birthplace of both Eric Idle and Ridlley Scott, or how the Nissan car company has made itself part of Wearside culture, it is only kind-of. Much of the language and the descriptions do work evocatively, and so too where the author pays tribute to the poetry of place names and local vernacular like the imagined odyssey of “...Wetherby, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, Darlington and eventually the 'fabled Scotch Corner where I would buy a Cup-a-Soup for a passing lorry driver...” But with not quite enough meat to this book, he finds himself diverting here and there to his mum’s wonky recall of family lore or a remembered slight from a cabbie.
Maconie can write well enough -, but really, he needs to find something to write about. This is enjoyable but light fare (as with his Middle England book). ( )