When I started reading this book, I decided to dogear the page every time it made me chuckle out loud, so that I could find the right bits to quote when it came to reviewing it. But I soon gave up once I realised I was dogearing more pages than not.

Here are some selected highlights:
1. "A TV producer once invited me round for 'supper' and I was genuinely flummoxed. Supper means something very specific in the north and I was rather bemused by the prospect of going round to her house in Chiswick at half ten at night in my dressing gown to have digestive biscuits and cheese off my lap on the settee while watching the telly."
2. The fact that Fred Talbot, the weatherman on This Morning who used to do the weather from a giant map of the British Isles floating in the Albert Dock, was Mark E. Smith's biology teacher.
3. The observation that place names such as Oswaldtwistle, Barnoldswick, Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike sound like "driving hail on a tin shed or the clacking of ill-fitting false teeth."
4. The identification of a Hebden Bridge accent. I have one of these: Yorkshire for the most part but with the occasional vowel which has migrated from the south. I pronounce "bath" like a Northerner, "cake" like a Cockney. No wonder I feel so at home in the Midlands.

The only point on which I disagree is this: Bibi's in Leeds is an awful restaurant. Horrible, oversized, overpriced, overly shiny, clattery place. When I went there, the huge screen at one end of the dining... hall was showing Grease II with the sound off. And the toilets are like a maze made of mirrors *shudders*.

This is now on Robbie-Rabble's TBR pile.