Going in search of "Middle England" is fast becoming as much a staple of Middle England as all those spurious examples - Marmite, hedgerows, the Spitfire, Mr Pooter, old maids cycling - that these very journeys are meant to be seeking. Every five years or so, a treasured writer/broadcaster - Bryson, Paxman, Marr, now Stuart Maconie (previously the author of Pies and Prejudice) - brings out a book about it and in between a host of lesser journalists apes them.
You know the kind of thing. He (it's usually a he) will get off a train in some emblematic non-London town with the potential to exemplify this nebulous state of middling grace - Cranford (Knutsford in real life), or Tunbridge Wells, one of Austen's handsome Regency spa towns or a butt of jokes like Surbiton or Slough. They will note down the small ads in the newsagent's, visit the funny or winning or pathetic little museum and have a pint with the locals in both the revered old horse-brass place by the canal and the evil blue-alcopop Wetherspoons. The resulting travelogues have often been diverting enough, even if none can really claim to have "found" Middle England.
Maconie comes no closer than his predecessors to discovering exactly what, or where, this place is that politicians constantly court and satirists lampoon. But, goodness, what a journey he takes us on. Adventures on the High Teas is magnificent: sprawling in its research, illuminating, quirky, saddening, fun, often angry, and always intensely readable. Maconie does all the usual museum-pub stuff, but what elevates his account is his fabulous hinterland of knowledge. Better known as a radio presenter, biographer of, among others, Blur and all-round northern lad, here he displays a vast, rapacious capacity to know things. What he doesn't know, he finds out.
Thus, amid the travels, we get mini-essays on Vaughan Williams versus Elgar, 60s architecture, geology, the British food revolution, Oxbridge myths and realities, Tolkien's Birmingham, bad public art, Nick Drake, Ronnie Barker's waistcoats, Larkin's angst, Jim Morrison's posturing, stoicism, cocaine, proper ice cream.
He is, unusually for a writer these days, confidently unafraid to quote from Orwell. This is apt enough. Partly because in touching on, and updating, similar material - Donald McGill's postcards, the English literary murder - it would be wilful not to; but partly because, were the lugubrious one still around, I suspect he would applaud Maconie, at his best, as a dissector with a similarly cunning scalpel.
Politically, he wears his heart on his sleeve, which could militate against impartiality but actually helps this grand book (the absolutely worst thing about which is the title). Apart from the fact that some of his posh-boy-bashing gets repetitive (what has poor Tom Parker Bowles ever done to him?), the fact that you know where Maconie's coming from makes you trust him. It also makes you want him to have his mind changed a little.
As, of course, it is. He ends up falling a little in love with Middle England, or what he's found of it anyway. England, it turns out, is a far more tolerant country than his bete noire, the Daily Mail, would have us believe. It is a country where schoolboys can still be alarmingly polite, where harried, underpaid waitresses and check-out girls can be shockingly, Bafta-winningly funny. A country that, despite its bad points - as he says in one throwaway phrase, we are still, bizarrely, a nation that loves experts but hates intellectuals - still charms.
It's still a place where, at its best, when the train stops at one of the few small stations left (there's a fabulous diatribe against Beeching which will make readers as retrospectively angry as they have ever been against thoughtless blight), and no one gets on and no one gets off, no one really minds.
He's been compared with Bill Bryson (who, again, he is winningly unafraid to quote). Fair enough. But Maconie's hinterland of knowledge here sets him above that stranger on these shores; there are very few of the "so that was nice enough" tail-offs or bemused rhetorical going-nowhere questions. Maconie, if he asks himself a question, particularly a political one, tries his best to answer it, and having lived here for ever, and soaked it up, with attitude, he most often succeeds.
At his best, he is as funny as Bryson and as wise as Orwell. And - this is entirely assumed, and possibly deeply unfair, and I know we all love Bill and revere George - he has far, far better taste in music than either.
