TRAVEL: You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain, By Tim Moore, Jonathan Cape, 277pp. £11.99
DREADFUL PLACES ARE much easier to write about – and, often, more entertaining to read about – than beautiful ones. Such, at least, is the premise that has kept Bill Bryson at the top of bestseller lists for several decades, and such is the premise for Tim Moore's new travel book, You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain.
Moore is a veteran of odd, unpalatable and downright perverse journeys. His first outing, Frost on My Moustache, re-created the 1856 Arctic voyage of Lord Dufferin of Clandeboye; subsequent travelogues have seen him cycle a Tour de France course (French Revolutions) and walk the Santiago de Compostela pilgrim path in the company of a relcalcitrant donkey (Spanish Steps).
In those three books Moore has provided some of my favourite travel-literature moments. The moment when, slushing his way towards a supermarket on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, he realises that the posters that describe polar bears arriving on top of unwary – and unarmed – tourists in “great, supple leaps” aren’t kidding. The moment when his pilgrim donkey solemnly eats a CD. His pithy summary of the bare necessities without which no cyclist can survive the Tour de France: “le pain, le vin, le Savlon”.
In this book the basic material is trickier. As Moore negotiates his way through the introductory pages, explaining his methodology – by way of preliminary research, he consulted a survey of the UK's worst places to live, conducted for the TV show Location, Location, Location– and justifying his decision to spend time in such places as Leysdown-on Sea – "an abandoned wilderness at the end of a 10-mile-long cul-de-sac" – the reader is gripped by mild panic. Is it possible to write about stodgy, ugly places without producing stodgy, ugly prose?
Actually, it is. Here is WG Sebald, no less, describing a meal in a Lowestoft hotel in his classic account of a journey on foot through East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn. "The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it. The tartare sauce that I had had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs."
It’s an auspicious – though also, of course, an intimidating – precedent. Few writers can match Sebald’s historical sensibility, let alone his gift for sudden, wild flights of fancy. But Moore is a merciless observer who can, in two sentences, conjure a scene that will be jaw-clenchingly familiar to anyone who has arrived in a hotel bathroom without first equipping themselves with bottled water for the purpose of drinking, brushing teeth or taking an aspirin. “Though the hot water was hot, so too was the cold. I ran the blue tap at full blast and felt its output warm ominously from hour-old coffee to freshly-drawn blood.”
You Are Awful (But I Like You)– the title is a reference to the cheesy 1970s female impersonations of Dick Emery – has its elegiac side. A figure will loom up out of the gloom on a deserted street; the resulting exchange will hint at a past that, if not rosier, was at least livelier. Most of these unlovely towns and cities once had thriving industries for which, as Moore's scathing commentary makes clear, gauche audiovisual commentaries and vacuous touristy billboards are not a suitable replacement. "Real Hull, so I was pictorially informed, was home to some real boats, a real footballer, and a real waitress carrying a tray of real drinks. It looked like a pretty nice place, if not quite as captivating as Surreal Hull, a city of screaming clockwork moths governed by a giant brass slipper."
Moore is quick to acknowledge pleasant surprises. Having fled a pub called the Troll Cart in Great Yarmouth, “the scene almost visibly simmering with pent-up alcoholic violence”, he encounters a cafe full of Portuguese immigrants, “showcasing the kind of convivial and carefree Latin merriment you don’t often see outside advertisements for cook-in pasta sauce”. He enjoys Anglesey Sea Zoo, “so mundane, yet so mad”.
Pleasant surprises, however, are few and far between as the bleak landscape of roundabouts, grotty high streets, concrete eyesores and postindustrial desolation flashes past. There are plenty of chuckles and many, many groans as Moore manfully tucks into unspeakably revolting fast food – the Lochgelly pizza supper surely takes the biscuit.
There were also, for this reader, a number of irritations. Not least of these was Moore’s insistence on christening his Austin Maestro “Craig” and providing a putative personality to match. I could also have lived without the soundtrack of stonky music – “the 358 least-loved tracks in the history of native popular music” – with which, before taking to the road, he stocked up his MP3 player. Amusingly tedious to listen to, no doubt, but here’s the thing: irredeemably tedious to read about.
In the end, though, Moore’s 6,135km journey turns into a kind of outrageous tribute – and one that will have most holidaymakers, except for the very rich or the very lucky, nodding their heads in recognition. If you’ve ever felt your heart sink as you stepped into the foyer of a hastily booked hotel, or gazed with dismay at the mudfest that stretches between you and the line of grey that is your holiday horizon, you’ll find much to enjoy in these pages.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Timesjournalist
