Book description
Semi-detached Griff relives freezing bus journeys to school and the
impulsive stealing of that half-a-crown from Charlie Hume s money box;
sitting outside Butlins at Clacton (longing to be inside and on the
Waltzer instead of stranded on the pebbles with his dad); hazy summer
afternoons spent with feral gangs in the woods, or storming the mud
flats singing extracts from the Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band. The memories
are like Mivvis, frozen and fuzzy at the edges, but a sweet jam of
pure recollected goo at the centre.
From birth to the BBC, this is a story of a confident middle child.
Griff s devoted parents Gwynneth and Elwyn gave him love, security and
plenty of asparagus soup from a fake wicker vacuum flask with a
plastic top. Griff s father Elwyn, a retiring hospital doctor with a
penchant for sweeties and ice-cream, loathed the tedium of English
social ritual and hid behind his family and woodwork. From tree houses
to boats, puppets to tables, he sawed and hammered his way into his
family s affections.
Griff left the bosom of his loving, irascible, eccentric, solid, all
engulfing family for the firm embrace of real life; via the Upminster
Fun Gang, the Direct Grant System and Party Sevens, losing his
virginity down the back of a bunk in a twenty nine foot yacht,
discovering the romantic advantages of shared babysitting engagements
and the drawbacks of infatuation with identical twins.
If he hadn t moved around so much as a child, would Griff have felt
less like a voyeur, looking in on the lighted window across the
square, the Georgian house glowing in the sun, the clink of glasses
and the bray of public school certainties? Would he be able to tuck in
his own shirt? Would he be fully detached?
A laugh-aloud buffet of baby boomer Britain, Griff s
self-deprecating, elegant, affectionate prose reveals a little bit
better how on earth you got from there to here.
Griff Rhys Jones was born in 1953. He was educated at Brentwood
School and Cambridge University. He has worked as a security guard, a
petrol-pump attendant and a television star and has written for hundreds
of radio and television programmes, and in the press. His
To the
Baltic with Bob
was published by Penguin in 2003.
