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