This is the first book of Tony Martin’s memoirs, it precedes A Nest of Occasionals and there’s one more book to follow called Scarcely Relevant which I plan to buy in ebook next month after I get paid. I could say all the same things about Martin’s background but I won’t repeat myself.

I have a love/hate attitude to this book. The problems I have with it include the bullying that went on in the 1970s which still goes on today. Martin details it quite thoroughly with the name calling and the ‘funny’ jokes at other people’s expense, he goes through how he coped with it, it’s well written but I’m just not comfortable with bullying.

Martin had an ‘interesting’ childhood, I’ve lost track of how many times his parents were married, it might only have been twice each but I got confused somewhere along the way with the step-siblings and with who was living where and when. Step-families are rarely like The Brady Bunch where everyone manages to get along with everyone else most of the time and all the wrinkles are ironed out by the end of the episode, Martin shows us the other side to merged families and a good thing he does. He talks about how co-parenting from the child’s point of view and how sometimes one sibling will go and stay with the other parent, he talks about the fights between the parents of the merged family and how it can get rather supercharged, he even mentions how they would hide outside as far from ground zero as possible and then be careful not to walk through the loungeroom in bare feet for weeks afterwards for fear of getting shards of glass in their feet. There’s no Brady Bunch goodness here.

He also has an interesting, and apparently fairly common, medical problem – Haemochronmatosis. It’s apparently a problem with iron, not like mine where I have too little but the total opposite where he has too much and has to have some taken out regularly in order to keep healthy. The chapter where he’s diagnosed and has the first couple of years of bloodletting is incredibly funny and is almost exactly the way I deal with my health problems when I’m seeing a doctor i.e. make jokes about it. There is a follow up to this in A Nest of Occasionals where he talks about giving blood every two months, a little more often than you’re allowed.

On the whole I loved this book, it gives a generous and funny insight into his world. How he writes about his landladies and landlords is just hilarious. I would definitely recommend it but be careful as there is the odd swear word.