"All Points North" is a meandering trip around the north of England (mainly Lancashire and Yorkshire) with some humour and social and political commentary thrown in (he is not a fan of the Conservatives).

Although the book features a number of interesting anecdotes, featuring lessons around tipping well if you're a politician and want to remain one, it never gels together as it should. Indeed my main memory of "All Points North" is that I crashed my car immediately after buying the book. ( )

Didn't connect with Simon. I think he's the kind of guy you have to see live rather than read...it must be all in the delivery.

He has me interested in two films though - Kes and Regeneration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kes_(film) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(1997_film).


1 0f 23 books all for $10 ( )

(21 January 2000)

Another Armitage read before going to see him at the Book Festival. This is an excellent collection of autobiographical (?) pieces about The North (mainly), including a marvellous day trip to Iceland with his Mum. Like his poetry, concrete (in language rather than form) and blunt, using down-to-earth words and images that nevertheless convey precision, beauty and emotion. Sometimes moving, sometimes downright funny: I’m glad I’ve been compelled to re-read this.

My review from April 2000:

“A delightful, wry, runny, lyrical, never-too-whimsical look at the North, as seen through this excellent poet’s eyes. The use of the 3rd person took a while to get used to, but this wonderful book is both absorbing and rewarding”. ( )

An engaging collection of prose pieces exploring different aspects of "the North" (in particular, Lancashire and Yorkshire). Prose literature occasionally has a little fling with Northernness — there was the Winifred Holtby / J.B. Priestley era in the thirties, and the John Braine / Barry Hines thing in the fifties and sixties — but on the whole, it's poets, playwrights and film-makers that regularly venture north of the Watford Gap. Armitage is definitely a poet, with a distinctive prose voice that sounds remarkably similar to the voice he uses in his verse: very natural and direct, but always conveying a sense that there's something deeply strange about the ordinariness of life.

The pieces here include memoirs of Armitage's childhood and his time with the probation service, brief comments on things he's seen in the news, the scripts of a couple of radio and TV pieces he's done, an extended outline for a TV play that seems to be a kind of Yorkshire Under Milk Wood, and some slightly baffling (to the uninitiated) notes on local football and cricket. Whilst gently undermining the comforting Last of the summer wine, cloth-caps-and-whippets view of the North, he clearly does believe that there is still something distinctive about the way people in Lancashire and Yorkshire see the world (and indeed, that the border between the two is a line of deep significance), even at the close of the 20th century. ( )

The book is worth the price simply for Armitage's explanation of how to write a script for "Last of the Summer Wine". A wonderful book. ( )