Neil Turner

Which UK counties have I visited?

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A map of the UK with the counties I have visited highlighted

Something that seemed popular on Bluesky last week was Sophie Stone’s UK Travel Visualiser. There’s a map of the UK (plus the Isle of Man) showing each county, and you can select each one to mark whether you’ve lived there, stayed over, visited, stopped or passed through. I’ve uploaded an excerpt of mine above, and included the full image below (converted from SVG to PNG because I can’t be bothered amending the WordPress config file to enable SVG uploads).

Here’s a text based breakdown for the counties I have visited:

Counties I have lived in

Just two: North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. I was born in York, in North Yorkshire, and then moved to Bradford in West Yorkshire when I was 18. Then, when Christine and I decided to move in together in 2010, we moved to Sowerby Bridge, also in West Yorkshire, where we still live now. Christine meanwhile has also lived in Lancashire and Derbyshire.

Counties I have stayed in

I’ve interpreted this as ‘counties where I have stayed overnight for at least one night’. There are a lot more of these:

  • Berkshire – last visited in 2021 when we stayed in Slough, ahead of a trip to Legoland Windsor.
  • Bristol – I last visited for work in 2014, which involved a couple of overnight stays.
  • Cheshire – an overnight stay in Chester in 2012 with Christine, marking a year since we got engaged.
  • Cumbria – lots of hiking trips to the Lake District, but I think our most recent stay was with a friend from university who has now settled in Kirkby Lonsdale.
  • Derbyshire – another hiking trip, this time to Dovedale in 2009.
  • Durham – we stayed overnight to attend a wedding in 2016.
  • East Riding of Yorkshire – my grandparents lived in the East Riding and so stayed over many times in the past.
  • East Sussex – on holiday in 2021.
  • Greater London – I last stayed over last year, however Christine has been more recently.
  • Greater Manchester – before I could drive, we used to stay over in Manchester after various music gigs. The last time was in 2014, when we saw Delain and Within Temptation at the O2 Apollo. Also spent a couple of nights there for a stag do in 2015.
  • Hampshire – we’ve stayed over at the Travelodge by Portsmouth Ferry Terminal a few times on the way back from France, most recently in 2023. Also that year, we spent an afternoon in Southsea.
  • Herefordshire – way back in the late 1990s, I went on a week-long PGL holiday near Ross-on-Wye.
  • Hertfordshire – another overnight stay for a wedding, this time in 2013, in Stevenage.
  • Kent – though we visited Kent in 2021, we stayed in East Sussex. The last time I stayed overnight in Kent was in 2000, on a short break ahead of a few days in the Pas-de-Calais region of France.
  • Lancashire – Christine lived here when I met her, and so I stayed overnight a few times during 2009 and 2010 before we moved in together.
  • Leicestershire – another overnight stay for a wedding, this time in 2018. The wedding was at the National Space Centre in Leicester, incidentally.
  • Lincolnshire – I had a few days in Lincoln with my parents in 2001.
  • Merseyside – shortly before the lockdown in 2020, we had a couple of nights in Runcorn as it was handy for Chester Zoo. Before that, we had an overnight stay in 2016, and our last visit was a day trip to Wirral and Liverpool last year.
  • Norfolk – last visited in March for Sci-Fi Weekender.
  • Northumberland – last year’s holiday.
  • Nottinghamshire – my grandparents used to have a canal boat based out of Nottingham marina, and we stayed overnight on it a few times in the 1990s.
  • Oxfordshire – most recently in 2018, on the way back from our holiday. We have family there, and will be back there later this summer.
  • South Yorkshire – stayed overnight in Sheffield in 2019 when attending a previous Sci-Fi Weekender.
  • Staffordshire – again, I have relatives here but our last overnight stay was in 2015 – once again, for a wedding.
  • Surrey – stayed overnight as part of our 2023 holiday.
  • Tyne and Wear – our most recent trip away was last weekend, when we stayed overnight in Gateshead to visit Beamish. Even though Beamish itself is in County Durham.
  • Warwickshire – spent a night in a hotel in 2019, so we could visit Warwick Castle.
  • West Midlands – not a wedding, but a stag do in 2013.
  • Worcestershire – my ex-girlfriend Hari had family on Worcestershire, so spent some time there up until 2008.
  • Edinburgh – last visited in 2011 when we stayed for a few nights. Well overdue for another visit.
  • Clwyd – another hiking trip, this time in 2009. We’ll be back there for our summer holiday next month. Also passed through in 2018 on the way to…
  • Gwynedd – our first Sci-Fi Weekender was near Pwllheli in 2018, which was the last one to be hosted there.
  • Isle of Man – technically the Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency and not officially part of the United Kingdom, but it’s on the map. Christine and I had our first holiday as a couple there in 2010.
  • Fife – one of my mum’s university friends lives in Fife and so I’ve been a few times. Our most recent visit was in 2015, and, in what is becoming a theme, it was for a wedding.
  • Perth and Kinross – very early in our relationship, Christine and I joined two other couples on a long weekend near Callander in Perthshire, in early 2010.

Counties I have visited

This is a much smaller list of places where I have intentionally gone to on a day trip:

  • Cambridgeshire – I’ve been to Cambridge once, for a meetup with other editors at the Open Directory Project, back in 2003.
  • Shropshire and Powys – as mentioned, I have family in Staffordshire and so I’ve been to Shropshire and Powys before on day trips – just not very recently.
  • South Glamorgan – I went on a demonstration against tuition fees in Cardiff in 2004. To date, it’s still my one and only visit to the Welsh capital.
  • Lanarkshire – I’ve also only made it to Glasgow once, in November 2009. I met up with several people in my World of Warcraft guild, including Hari – we had split up earlier that year and this was the first time we’d seen each other since. I’d first met Christine a few weeks before.

Counties I have stopped off in

  • Essex – literally just at Birchanger Green services on the M11.
  • East Sussex – part of Gatwick Airport is in East Sussex and so I would have been there very briefly in 1999.

Counties I have passed through

  • Devon, Somerset and Dorset – in the 1990s, when on holiday with my parents, we came back via Poole and Plymouth on occasion and so will have passed through these counties. But I haven’t visited them properly.
  • Gwent – on the way to Cardiff in 2004.
  • Rutland, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire – these are places I have driven through, but never visited. Christine has recently reconnected with some of her family in Milton Keynes, so Buckinghamshire may rise up the list in future.
  • Berwickshire, West Lothian, Midlothian, East Lothian. These are all counties that we passed through on our way to Fife in 2015.
  • Dumfries, Dumbartonshire, Stirling & Falkirk. Similarly, we passed through these in 2010 on the way to Callander.

Counties I’ve never been to

I’m not going to list them all, but this includes large parts of Scotland, mid Wales, and the whole of Northern Ireland. We’d like to go to Cornwall at some point, but it’s a very long way from where we are in Northern England. There’s a reason why there’s still a sleeper train from London to Penzance. Our nine-year-old has also expressed an interest in seeing the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland at some point.

How many points?

The UK Travel Visualiser also awards points – the longer you’ve spent in a county, the more points you get. I managed 184 points – not bad, but it would have been higher if I had lived in more places. Diamond Geezer managed 241, by virtue of having lived in more places, and being 19 years my senior.

Tuya Zigbee Window Sensors

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A photo of a Zigbee window sensor

I recently picked up a pair of these Tuya Zigbee Window Sensors from AliExpress. At £7.50 for two (plus VAT and shipping), they’re an absolute bargain; on Amazon (sponsored link), expect to pay more than double that for just one. The sensors detect when a window or door is opened or closed, and can both report the current status of the window or door, and be used to trigger actions when the window or door is opened or closed.

Wait, didn’t you rant about Tuya in February?

Why yes, I did rant about Tuya Wi-Fi devices, and I stand by what I wrote. However, you can get many Tuya-compatible Zigbee devices, which can be used with Zigbee2MQTT without having all your data go to servers operated by a Chinese company. So yes, I wouldn’t be keen to buy any new Tuya Wi-Fi devices in future, but I see little issue with Tuya Zigbee devices.

Installing the window sensors

The sensors come in two parts. One holds the batteries (two AAA batteries, not included) along with the circuitry, and the other, smaller part is what detects whether the door or window has opened. Each part comes with an appropriately sized piece of sticky foam, so you can just stick the small part to your window, and the larger part to the frame. You need to ensure that, when closed, the two parts touch.

To test whether they work, open and close the window or door – if you see a little red light flashing when this happens, then you’re good.

Zigbee devices need to be paired to your Zigbee mesh network. Once you’ve enabled pairing on your Zigbee controller (in my case, Zigbee2MQTT), you need to press and hold the reset button on the window sensor for five seconds. It comes with a little metal pointy thing to help with this – a bit like the pointy things for ejecting SIM cards on a iPhone. Once it has joined your network, you should be good to go.

Using the window sensors with Home Assistant

Any new devices in Zigbee2MQTT automagically appear as new MQTT devices in Home Assistant. Right now, I just have dashboard badges for the two window sensors, so I can see at a glance whether those windows are open. I’m planning to add an automation which switches the heating off when one or both of the windows are open, and potentially a notification at bedtime to remind me if I’ve left a window open as it’s getting dark.

You could add them to a door, so that when you open it, a light comes on, and then turns off when the door is closed, or after a certain time delay.

For now, I’ve only bought two of these. As mentioned, each one requires a pair of AAA batteries, and whilst I could fit them to every opening window, that’s potentially a lot of batteries to replace. At least they take standard AAA batteries which can be easily recharged. I’ve only had them a couple of weeks, and so I can’t yet give an estimate of how long the batteries will last, but they’re both still showing 100%.

Jooooooooooooon

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I haven’t done one of these ‘looking at the month ahead’ posts in a while (March being the last one). It’s usually a sign that I feel the need to write something and I’m running out of ideas. And that’s sort of the case here; I normally write blog posts in bulk at the weekend, and next weekend I’m unlikely to have time.

This month will see both Christine and I travel away for work. Christine’s off to London for a conference; meanwhile, I get to go somewhat further afield. It’ll be the first time I’ve travelled for work where I’ve needed to stay overnight since a trip to Canterbury in 2019, and the first time I’ve travelled abroad for work since my Middle East trip in 2015. Indeed, it’ll also be the first time in a decade that I’ve been on an aeroplane. I’ll write more about it nearer the time.

The weather seems to have become more unsettled than it has been of late, although I’m hoping we’ll get the chance to have some nice days out as a family as well. We’ll see what happens.

There’ll also be one or two more posts in our journey towards an electric car to come this month. I don’t think we’ll end up actually buying an electric car this month, but I’m planning a couple of posts about it pre-purchase.

Integration

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With Home Assistant, I think it’s fair to say that some of its integrations are easier to set up than others.

Some services offer a nice public API, and an easy way for users to get hold of an API key. Then, it’s just a case of popping this API key into Home Assistant, and off you go.

Some services are not so easy. They may offer an API, but require you to jump through hoops to sign up as a developer and create an application before you can get what you need. Or they may not offer an API, and the only way to integrate it with Home Assistant is to scrape web pages. Meanwhile, the integration developers have to constantly amend their integration to carry on working.

Now, this isn’t a blog post about Home Assistant – it’s using Home Assistant as a metaphor for immigration, and it’s inspired by this Guardian Comment piece from last week. We seem to want people who come to the UK to integrate with British culture, but integration works best when both sides work together.

In the late 1990s, there was a pioneering British sketch comedy TV show called Goodness Gracious Me, which was the first to feature an all British Asian cast. One of the recurring sketches was The Coopers, an Asian family that tries a little too hard to be British. I think it’s relevant to this, because, as someone who is white and indigenous to Britain, I have a duty to those who want to integrate with British society to feel welcome. We can’t tell people to integrate harder when we’re unwilling to do the same. Just because we happened to be lucky to be born into a country where lots of people want to live.

Britain is a better country because of immigration. I appreciate living in a multi-cultural society, where I can experience different perspectives on the world. Where there’s a range of different food shops and restaurants from the various diasporas who have settled here. Where the jobs that British natives don’t want to do get done, especially in health and social care. Where Christmas is celebrated alongside Eid, Diwali and Passover. When we all work together so that we can live together in peace, the world is a better place.

Our journey towards an electric car – part I

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Christine and I have decided that we’re going to get a new (or rather new to us) care in the next few months, and we’ve decided that it’ll most likely be an electric car.

Last March, I talked about how our current car was starting to get expensive. It had been in the garage four times in as many months, and April made it the fifth consecutive month to clear the particulate filter. Since then, it’s been behaving itself a little better – so far, it’s only been in the garage twice this year. But there are still some issues. There’s various squeaks and knocks that, whilst not seemingly affecting our ability to drive it, are starting to get annoying. The air conditioning system doesn’t work any more – on a hot day, it just emits hot air. And, throughout the whole six years we’ve owned it, the tyre pressure monitor hasn’t worked properly.

More recently, we’ve noticed a patch of rust on one of the doors. Getting that fixed is likely to be expensive, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t want to throw more money at the car. I’d rather save it, and use that money towards buying a newer car.

Going electric

I’ve deliberately made this ‘part one’ of a series, as I have a few blog posts in mind between now and after we finally get a new car. When I say ‘new’, I mean ‘new to us’ – I doubt we’ll be buying a brand new car. We also haven’t decided on a particular make and model, but what we have agreed is essentially the following:

  • It’ll be roughly the same size, or smaller than our current car.
  • It’ll be electric, or a plug-in hybrid.

We want a smaller car, because our current car (a first-generation Peugeot 3008) can be a pain to park sometimes. And 95% of the time, we don’t need such a big car – we’re just burning extra diesel to carry excess air around. For the times when we do need more space, we’ll look at buying a roof box instead.

We’ve also decided that it’s about time we made the jump to an electric vehicle. We have the ability to charge one at home (more in that in a future blog post in the series) and, as we have solar panels, we’ll be able to do so very cheaply. Plus, more electric vehicles are becoming available on the second-hand market, so we’re more likely to be able to afford to buy one.

Like I said, I’ll be posting more about this in future blog posts over the summer – especially once we’ve bought the car.

How to: read a not-so-smart export meter

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A photo of our electricity meter showing our export reading

Somewhat annoyingly, our smart electric meter stopped being smart on the 26th March. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but since then, we’ve not had any automatic electricity readings sent to our energy supplier.

After a week, I reported the issue to Octopus, who are our energy supplier. We exchanged some emails back and forth, and tried various things, but apparently to no avail. What was weirder was that the gas meter still submits regular readings.

This web site has loads of information about smart meters, including how they work and how they communicate with your energy supplier. As well as the gas and electric meters, all homes with a smart meter have a ‘communications hub’ that sits on top of the electric meter, and it’s this that sends the data. So even though it was sat on top of our electric meter, it was only sending data from the gas meter. Weirder still is our ‘in home display’ (IHD) – the small black screen that sits away from our meters in our dining room. That was still accurately displaying data from both gas and electric meters.

With Octopus unable to fix the problem remotely, we’ll need an engineer to come out. And right now, there’s a long wait for smart meter engineer visits, as energy companies are currently prioritising those with a ‘radio teleswitch’ (RTS) meter. These older meters were used for (for example) Economy 7 tariffs, and listen for a radio signal to switch to a cheaper tariff – they’ve been around since the 1980s. Alas, the radio signal is being switched off at the end of next month, and there’s an estimated 400,000 RTS meters still in use. That doesn’t leave very long to have these replaced with smart meters.

Going back to manual readings

So whilst our gas readings are being sent automatically on a regular basis, we’re back to doing manual readings for electricity. As we have solar panels, we have to do two separate readings – an import reading, for the energy we use from the grid, and an export reading, for the energy that we sell back to the grid.

For the import readings, we can just use the IHD – press a few buttons, and it’ll give us our usage. But the IHD doesn’t display export readings. For that, we have to take a reading from the screen on the meter itself.

Our electricity meter is in our cellar, under the steps down from the kitchen. After we had our kitchen renovated, we also improved the access to the cellar, but it’s still in an awkward place. I have to move our tumble dryer out of the way, and crouch in the small space under the steps to take the reading.

It’s also not the most straightforward process. The meter itself has a small screen and two buttons, and you need to know which combination of button presses are required. Thankfully, Octopus offers this excellent guide to how to read various types of meters, and so I was able to submit both import and export readings. The next day, we were credited £116 for all the electricity we’d exported since the 26th March.

Hopefully, it won’t be too long before an engineer visits and fixes the issue for us. In the meantime, I’m also waiting to see if we can get an Octopus Home Mini, which bridges across to your home Wi-Fi network and sends data in near real-time.

Birthday blogging

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Today is my 41st birthday. After turning 40 last year, it’ll be a long time before I have another big birthday to celebrate.

I’m once again lucky that my birthday has fallen over a bank holiday weekend. We’re off to Beamish again; as we went there last July, we have annual passes with a couple of months left to run. It also gives us an opportunity to visit the areas that we missed last time – namely the 1940s and 1950s farms, and the funfair. Our visit also coincides with the Festival of Transport, so we’ll be able to travel on the short steam railway which wasn’t open last year.

We’ll be staying overnight nearby, as it’s a two hour drive each way.

How many UNESCO World Heritage sites have I visited?

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A photo of Salt's Mill in Saltaire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bradford.

Something I used to do was ask my Facebook friends a new question every day. It started in 2022, and I managed to keep going every day well into last year before running out of ideas for new questions. One of those questions was how many UNESCO World Heritage Sites have you visited?

I think, in my mind, UNESCO World Heritage Sites are relatively unusual, and that most people would have only visited one or two in their lifetimes. As it happens, there are well over a thousand UNESCO World Heritage Sites across the world, in over 160 countries. 35 of these are in the UK alone. So, with this in mind, here are all of those that I have visited, split by country.

United Kingdom

A photo of Bridgetown in Barbados, a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Barbados

Barbados has just the one UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is its capital, Bridgetown. I went on holiday with my parents in 2000, as I’d turned 16 and it was their 25th wedding anniversary. To date, it’s the only time I’ve been to the western side of the Atlantic Ocean.

A photo of one of the canals in Bruges.

Belgium

  • La Grand-Place, Brussels. I had a weekend in Brussels with my parents in the early 2000s. At the time, my mum worked for a charity that was applying for a six-figure sum of funding from the European Commission, and so it was decided that she would submit the funding bids in person so that there was no risk of it getting lost in the post. We therefore went as a family and made a weekend of it, travelling down on the Eurostar.
  • Belfries of Belgium and France. These include belfries in Brussels and also Bruges, which we visited in 2014. Speaking of which…
  • Historic Centre of Bruges. The whole of central Bruges is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it’s easy to see why as it’s lovely. Previously I’d been briefly with my parents in 1992, on our way back from a holiday in eastern France.
A photo of Mont St Michel in Northern France

France

France is the country that I’ve visited the most after the UK, so it’s not surprising that I’ve visited several UNESCO World Heritage Sites over the years.

Greece

I have been to Crete, which is home to several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but as I was only three years old at the time, I don’t really remember it.

Ireland

I have been to Ireland – well, Dublin. There are two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Republic of Ireland, but neither of them are in Dublin, so I haven’t been to them.

Italy

I have been to Italy twice – once to Venice, in 1999, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and once on a day trip in 2001 to Ventimiglia, a town known for its markets on the French border, which isn’t.

Jordan and Oman

I have been to Amman in Jordan, and Muscat and Salalah in Oman, but this was a work trip so I didn’t get to see any of the heritage sites whilst there.

Romania

I was lucky enough to go on an A-level Geography field trip to Romania in 2001. Whilst there, I got to see the Danube Delta and some of the Villages with Fortified Churches in Transylvania.

Spain

I’ve been to the northern coast of Spain once, staying near Santander, but it was thirty years ago and so I can’t remember whether we visited any of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites there.

Switzerland

I’ve been to Geneva once, all the way back in 1992, but not to any of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites elsewhere in the country.

Where next

I’ve hinted at a few places that we may go back to in the UK. Next month, there’s a possibility I may check off another international UNESCO World Heritage Site, but I can’t be sure that it’ll happen yet.

How to: Use automatic Octopus tariff data in the Solax app

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A screenshot of the page where users can generate an Octopus API key

If you have a Solax inverter attached to your solar panels, and get your energy from Octopus, then you can now calculate your earnings using live tariff data in the Solax app. I gather this feature has been there for a few months, but I’ve only recently found out about it. Here’s how to set it up.

Firstly, open the SolaxCloud app. On the home screen, tap the Earnings section. At the top right, you should see an icon that looks like a calculator with a lightning bolt on it, so tap that. You’ll now see two tabs – ‘To Grid’ and ‘From Grid’.

Get your Octopus API key

Before we continue, you’ll need to generate an API key. Log into your online Octopus Energy account (on the web, not on the app). At the top, it should say ‘Hi, [your name]’, display your account number, and then show a link called ‘Personal Details’. Click that link.

You should now see several boxes, one of which is called ‘Developer settings’. Click the ‘API access‘ button.

Scroll down a bit, and you’ll see a box labelled ‘Your API key:’. Copy this key, and preferably save it in a password manager. You can only have one API key, but you can use it for multiple things – I use my key for the Octopus Energy integration for Home Assistant, for example. You can regenerate your key, but it’ll invalidate your previous key, and you’ll only be shown it once on the Octopus web site. That’s why it’s best to treat it like your password.

Whilst you’re on Octopus’ web site, make a note of your account number too, as you’ll need this in a moment.

Enable automatic tariff setting

Back to the SolaxCloud app. Below the ‘To Grid’ and ‘From Grid’ tabs, you should have two further tabs: ‘Customized’ and ‘Automatic’. Tap ‘automatic’.

A new box called ‘Tariff provider’ appears, so tap this, and select ‘Octopus’. There’s another option called ‘Nord Pool’ which may work if you use a different energy supplier. I don’t, so I’ve only tested this with Octopus.

Now, you’ll have two options: ‘API Key’ and ‘Select a package’. ‘Select a package’ lets you manually choose your tariff and region, but it won’t update automatically if you change your tariff. So, we’ll select ‘API key’. Here, enter your account number, and then the API key, and tap ‘Save’. You should find that your current tariff and meter point access number now appear in the app. Scroll down, and you’ll be able to see the underlying tariff data, both as a graph and the raw data.

I’m on a fixed tariff with Octopus, so at present there’s no fluctuation with my import and export prices. However, if you’re on a tariff such as Octopus Agile, you’ll now see this data in the SolaxCloud app. What’s more, any future earnings will be calculated using this tariff data, and so it’ll more accurately reflect how much money your solar panels and/or battery are saving you.

Join Octopus

Octopus is now the UK’s largest electricity supplier, with a market share of 22%. And, with features like API access, the chances are that if you’re geeky enough to read this sort of blog post, then you’re already signed up. However, if not, here’s my referral link – you’ll get £50 off your first bill if you sign up. Financial incentives aside, of all the energy companies that I have used, Octopus have had the best customer service by far.

Authors I’ve read 5 or more books by

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Last weekend, on Bluesky, there was a meme going around where you listed the authors where you have read five or more of their books. I duly complied, but felt it was also worth a blog post to provide a bit of commentary on top.

The ordering of these is essentially the three authors that came to mind, and then the rest were from my Goodreads profile. Also, when I say ‘read’, this includes books that I have listened to as audiobooks. Indeed, this is primarily how I consume books, but I do try to fit in e-books and paper books where I can.

Terry Pratchett

I have read a lot of Terry Pratchett over the years. As a teenager, I read the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, and then started with the Discworld books in 2017. I’ve now read every core Discworld book (all 41 of them), as well as some of Pratchett’s non-Discworld works like The Carpet People, his Long Earth series with Stephen Baxter, and Truckers, the first book in the Bromeliad Trilogy. I tried to get our nine-year-old into the latter, but they weren’t interested and didn’t get a lot of the references, alas.

John Scalzi

Although I’ve not yet read any of his Old Man’s War series, for which he is best known, I have read a number of John Scalzi books. This includes the Lock In series – well, the two books and the prequel – Starter Villian, The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Android’s Dream. I picked up the majority of Scalzi’s books in a previous Humble Bundle, so they’re there for me to read in due course. I’ll also be picking up his latest novel, When The Moon Hits Your Eye when my next Audible credit is available. It’s once again narrated by Wil Wheaton, who does an excellent job – especially in the newer books.

Scott Meyer

Scott Meyer wrote an inventive fantasy/sci-fi series called Magic 2.0, and I’ve read all of those that have been published so far. If you like Pratchett and Scalzi, then you’ll like this series. I haven’t read any of his other books yet though.

Yahtzee Croshaw

Yahtzee Croshaw made a name for himself doing fast-faced and highly sarcastic video game review videos, in a series called Zero Punctuation which ran until 2023. But he has also had seven books published to date (plus two unpublished works available from his web site) and I’ve read five of them. They are, once again, mainly sci-fi, and include the humour that you would expect.

Roald Dahl

I think I’ve read every Roald Dahl book. More recently we’ve started reading some of them to our nine-year-old, hence why they’re showing up in my Goodreads lists.

Juno Dawson

Last year, I started reading Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. The first two books are fantastic, and I need to read the prequel soon before the final book, Human Rites, is published this summer. I’ve also read several of Dawson’s non-fiction, including The Gender Games and What’s The T? – I recommend both.

Terry Deary

As a kid, I wasn’t into reading fiction so much, so instead I read a lot of books like Horrible Histories. We’re now reading some of these with our nine-year-old.

Matt Haig

As with Juno Dawson, I’ve mainly read Matt Haig’s non-fiction works, like The Comfort Book and Reasons to Stay Alive. But last year I also read The Midnight Library and it fully deserves all of the accolades it received. Just an excellent novel. I need to read more of Haig’s novels in future.

Adam Kay

I remember seeing Adam Kay when he was performing comedy songs in a double act with Suman Biswas, as The Amateur Transplants. We saw them in Manchester – Christine and I were in the early months of our relationship and still lived apart. Back then, Kay was still a practising doctor with comedy and writing as a side-hustle.

Then he published This Is Going To Hurt which was both hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Since then, he’s written a follow-up, Undoctored, but the reason why he features here is that he’s also written a very good series of science books for kids, starting with Kay’s Anatomy. We’ve read all of them to our nine-year-old.

Caitlin Moran

Another author who is here because I’ve read her non-fiction books. Indeed, How To Be A Woman was the first audiobook that I listed to on my Audible free trial, 12 years ago. I’ve also read her follow-ups, More Than A Woman and What About Men? as well as her collections of previously published columns for The Times newspaper. I would recommend them all, although I scored More Than A Woman highest.

Jay Rayner

I think I’ve read all of Jay Rayner’s books – mostly through the audiobooks which Christine and I listen to in the car. Rayner’s dulcet tones have accompanied us on many a long-distance drive over the years.

Gill Sims

Gill Sims is known for the Why Mummy series, of which I’ve read the first four books. There’s also the Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood, which is a free-standing book that tangentially takes place in the same universe. All the books are very relatable if you’re a parent.

Neil Gaiman

I almost didn’t include Neil Gaiman here because, whilst I had read more than five of his books, I won’t be reading any more. I touched on this last week, but following the allegations that surround him, I can’t bring myself to read any more of his work. And that’s a shame, because Anansi Boys was one of my favourite books of all time.

What does this say about my taste in books?

Firstly, I was surprised that I had read five or more books from as many authors as this. Logging what I read on Goodreads has helped here. But I’m also a little disappointed that the majority of authors are straight white men. Admittedly, some of those straight white men, like Pratchett and Scalzi, are/were good allies, but I need to read more books by women and people of colour.

Also, I definitely have a thing for stories with humour, ideally in the sci-fi and fantasy realms, and most of the books that I read have been published relatively recently. Indeed, as I write this, all the authors bar Pratchett and Dahl are still alive.

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