Here Comes the Fun: A Journey Into the Serious Business of Having a Laugh - Hardcover

Aitken, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1837730059 ISBN 13: 9781837730056

Publisher: Icon Books, 2023

Synopsis

'What Aitken writes about fun is worth reading' Mail on Sunday

Are you getting enough? Bestselling travel writer Ben Aitken wasn't.

Increasingly flat and decreasingly zen, Ben gave boredom the boot and stress the cold shoulder by embarking on a whimsical journey into the serious business of having a laugh.

He did a pilgrimage in Spain, a summer camp in Kent, and a cruise of the Baltic with 2,000 grannies. And when he wasn't on the road, he searched for merriment at home: by giving bridge a go, volunteering a chance, and gardening a crack of the whip.

By incorporating the thoughts of key thinkers and boffins, Here Comes the Fun offers a satisfying balance of the playful and the profound, the serious and the silly, the daft and the deep.

About this title

About the Author

Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He was conceived by a nurse and a shipwright, grew up in Portsmouth and was in a boyband for a spell in the noughties, then worked as a carer throughout his twenties. He is the author of six books: Dear Bill Bryson, A Chip Shop in Poznan (a Times bestseller), The Gran Tour ('Both moving and hilarious', Spectator), The Marmalade Diaries, Here Comes the Fun and Shitty Breaks. He writes for The Guardian and The Times, was the TCG Travel Journalist of the Year in 2024, and is an occasional lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.

From the Back Cover

Increasingly flat and decreasingly zen, Ben Aitken knew that something had to change. So he joined a lawn bowls club. About a week later, he continued his assault on the doldrums by taking a cheerleading class. Then - with an almost entirely reformed selfhood winking appealingly on the horizon- he went cold-water swimming and was back to square one.

Despite the inevitable setbacks and missteps, it was becoming clear to Aitken that the very pursuit of fun was a great route to feeling less naff. And so he made a vow to go after the f-stuff with as much gusto as he could muster. (Starting with the crossword.)

Over the next year, he filled his calendar with a plethora of potentially pleasurable pursuits. He did things he'd never done before but reckoned could be fun (a pilgrimage in Spain, afternoon bingo); things whose fun-factor was less obvious and more down-to-earth (volunteering in a charity shop, sitting on a bench); and things he wasn't at all sure about but were fun according to other people (improv, wakeboarding, learning Welsh).

Although the results were mixed, the author's year of making merry left him feeling undoubtedly ... better. Which invites the question: if fun is such a reliable mood-swinger, shouldn't we be having more of it?

Edition details

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1837730059
• ISBN 13: 9781837730056
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312