Jos Simon's memoir could be about growing up in any small town, anywhere in the UK, at any time. A childhood spent roaming the countryside, collecting birds' eggs or making catapults. An adolescence exploring smoking, underage drinking and the company of the opposite sex. Even golf.
But this is the Llŷn Peninsula, in north-west Wales. So add beauitful beaches, patchwork fields surrounded by dry-stone walls, an annual influx of English holiday-makers, and Butlins Camp.
And it's at a time when Britain was emerging from the drab post-war Fifties into the psychedelic youthquake that ws the Sixties. So throw into the mix Gerry and the Pacemakers at Criccieth's Memorial Hall and (blast of celestial music) the Beatles in Llandudno.
This is no "misery memoir". It's a gently humorous account of growing up in, and then away from, a small Welsh town, of returning with children and eventually grandchildren, and, in old age, of pondering what it means to be Welsh.
