BLOG POST: Here Comes The Fun
We were delighted to welcome Ben Aitken to the woods this summer for our Words In The Woods day festival.
Ben is bestselling author of Here Comes The Fun: A Journey into the Serious Business of Having a Laugh (Icon, July 2024). Perhaps you have read The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple (2022), The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (2020), A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (2019), or Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island (2015)?
He has also been published in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The i and The Big Issue. He’s a very busy man…Here is a link to his most recent article as this blog goes to press, July 2024
Here is Ben in his own words:
Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He is the author of five books: Dear Bill Bryson, wherein he followed Bill Bryson around the country for no good reason; A Chip Shop in Poznan, wherein he worked in a fish and chip shop in Poland; The Gran Tour, which involved six budget coach holidays with people much his senior; The Marmalade Diaries, which involved moving in with an 85-year-old widow on the eve of a national lockdown; and Here Comes The Fun, which takes a playful look at the serious business of having a laugh. He was conceived by a nurse and a shipwright, grew up in Portsmouth, studied in London and Manchester, then worked as a carer throughout his twenties, all the while scribbling on the side. The theme of Ben’s newest book is Fun. Here’s a flavour of his thinking.
Six Things Ben Learnt About Fun (in no particular order):
- I learnt that having the life scared out of you can be an enlivening experience.
- I learnt that one way to measure something’s fun factor is by counting the number of times you subsequently mention that something. By this metric, the most fun I had during my year of making merry was spotting Keira Knightley at Waterloo station.
- I learnt that I am more emotionally demonstrative playing bingo than in any other area of life.
- I learnt – via Dr Helen Czerski, who told me about an ocean-dwelling worm that grows a pair of eyes on its backside – that the act of marvelling is up there with any other positive verb in the continuous tense, including laughing and smiling and delighting and so on.
- I learnt that on top of being wildly subjective, fun is also fickle; that while today it’s one thing to you and another to me, tomorrow there’s a fair chance the whole thing will turn around and it will be to you what it was to me, and to me what it was to you.
- I learnt that my favourite fun thing was just sitting on a bench. (Closely followed by cheerleading. Closely followed by lawn bowls.)
July, 2024