As an Essex boy, from deepest South-East Essex, I was quite pleased to start reading a book called Starter for 10 and find that the main protagonist’s home town was Southend-on-Sea. The book is set in the early 80’s – around the same sort of time I used to spend a lot of time in Southend.
In the first few pages I came across this, which made me smile:
Tone loves that stuff; books with maps in the front, and cover-illustrations of big, scary women in chain-mail underwear, holding broadswords, the kind of woman that, in an ideal world, he’d marry. Which, in Southend, is actually a lot more feasible than you’d think.
The scary bit for me was when our hero goes off to university in the north of England in the mid-eighties….. Obviously I’m not a bloke but it was still odd.