This book has taken me a LONG time to read, I will admit. But this is not because it was terrible and I had to really plough my way through it to get it read. Actually, it is quite the opposite, as Dixe Wills’ book is light and airy and as daft a book as a book can be and made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions due to its quirkiness and eccentricity. Reading it from cover to cover would take something away from it, I think – it is truly what I would call “a dipper”: if you read it all the time, it would lose its power as a novelty: its unique discussion of places would begin to be less amusing and more trite. However, if you read a couple of Wills’ descriptions a day, they keep their freshness and will continue to entertain you in a way that will tickle and surprise.
It is ostensibly a book about the places in Britain that begin with Z and if you thought there were not enough of those to make a book about them, then Wills is here to prove you wrong. The book is alphabetically ordered starting with Zabulon and ending with Zulu Farm and spanning the whole of the British Isles although some regions have a greater concentration of place names beginning with Z than others, it would seem.
Reference is made to their location but also to other features which may or may not be of interest, such as their role in the English Civil War as well as what is found in the green bins and also, reference to the wildlife spotted presumably at the time of the visit with the category of “What’s furry?”. All of this is done with a dry wit and a sense of the surreal which combines to create a book which is funny in a way that startles you with the fresh and revealing ways that the author has decided to not only view but also to describe his findings.
Wonderfully daft, irreverent and British to its core.
Scuffed Granny 