Ten slightly mouldy slices of England's brilliant future failures, each successfully consigned to the pre-apologetic, more successful past. Wonderfully tragic beginnings meet gruesomely happy endings, miserable lives wallow in cheerful second chances. Old-fashioned blokes, being blokes, doing awfully modern bloke things such as inventing stuff and exploring space, but with not a caricature or stereotype left undisturbed. The science is ridiculous, the plots are risible. The opening line of the first story is "Awoogah! Awoogah!" and that's got to be one heck of a clue. This is England's beautiful, bumbling, blue-blooded belligerence, lovingly portrayed in properly-punctuated, politically-incorrect, purple prose.

Enjoy tales of rocket-ships crewed by utter idiots, of hung-over gurus struggling to meet demand, of some minor problems with the shape of the moon and of how we, the Smiths and the Browns and the Greens, side-stepped the rat-race, won the space-race and lost touch with the human race.

This book is not about dogs, there are only two in the whole text and they are mentioned but incidentally. The characters in this book are much less well-adapted to the modern world than are either the Collie or the Labrador – they are Englishmen.

The Dog With The Bakelite Nose
The Rarest Gift Of All
The Omnibudsman
The Man Who Invented Extremely Wet Water
Dry Sherry And Victoria Sponge In Space
Take Me To Your Leader
A Simple Matter Of Suitable Transportation
Woomera, We Have A Problem
Pendulum Swing, Pendulum Do
Voting Makes You Free