Welcome to Everytown by Julian Baggini

Did you know that there is a place in Britain where no one has ever heard of "fair trade"? A place where grown men, instead of sipping frappucinos and leafing through the LRB, congregate in communal drinking venues, known as "pubs"? A place where people regularly watch a competitive display of athletic endeavour known as "football"? It seems too sordid to be true, but pinch yourself: this place really exists. It's called Rotherham.

I know because Julian Baggini - sometime contributor to The Guardian and a co-founder of The Philosopher's Magazine - went there and wrote a book about it. The stated aim of Welcome to Everytown: a journey into the English mind was to find the most typical area in England (postcode S66 - Rotherham) and live there for six months. Baggini would then try to work out our "folk philosophy", or "what the English really think". To this end, Baggini confined himself to reading only the most popular papers (the Daily Mail and The Sun); only quaffing the earthiest, most proletarian drinks (pints of bitter instead of red wine); and only holidaying in Mallorca. He even learned to drive a car. "I didn't see the point of going to Everytown if I was going to stand aloof from what went on there," he writes.

What did he learn? Not enough. More to the point, what did he do? We hear about his shopping in Morrisons and going to the pub and meeting the locals, but that's about the long and short of it. What's more, all these humdrum adventures are delivered in what can only be described as the English Very Plain Style. Baggini, careful not to use exclusive academic language, takes a lifetime to tell anecdotes - and several lifetimes to form conclusions. Which wouldn't be so bad if the pay-offs one waits for patiently weren't so feeble.

One particularly excruciating chapter concerns his afternoon at a Rotherham United home game against Walsall. "Of course," notes Baggini, "it is the emotional engagement with the team that makes it so gripping and inspires this loyalty. And to really feel that you need a strong sense of tribal loyalty and attachment to place." It gets worse. "The referee's performance is, of course, judged in nakedly partisan terms." Has Baggini really never witnessed a football match? Or is he just playing the naïf for our benefit? Either way, it's deeply embarrassing. However, just as the football action finishes, and one has stopped reading the book through one's fingers, Baggini goes to a Sheffield Steelers ice hockey game, and it's twice as painful.

"The hockey provided another example of how things have not altered as much as people often suggest," writes Baggini. "In his book The English, Jeremy Paxman confidently wrote, 'No one stands for God Save the Queen any more.' He should visit the House of Steel, where this is exactly what everyone does before a match."

At this point, Paxman would have throttled him, and told him what anyone who has owned a television in the past 20 years would also have known: that the reason people stand at the ice hockey (a decidedly niche entertainment in England) is because the entire franchise has been borrowed from America, where the national anthem is sung before every game. In itself, that might have made an interesting point about Britain's cultural debt to America. But Baggini, because he seems rarely, if ever, to have looked up from his books, makes entirely the wrong conclusion.

This is all most frustrating - all the more so, because Baggini is not wholly bereft of insight. His extended treatise on how the English are naturally communitarian in outlook - New Labour's "no rights without responsibilities" slogan is quoted as a paradigm of the mindset - is tightly argued. One does have the nagging suspicion, though, that Baggini had formed this opinion long before he arrived in the North.

One theorem that is developed in situ is Baggini's attitude towards racism. Upon hearing the ubiquitous use of the word "Paki" among all ethnic groups, Baggini jots in his notebook: "Racism. I'm afraid it's rife." But, having talked to the locals, he revises his outlook, concluding that "the use of 'Paki' is therefore not primarily a symptom of race hatred but of a divided nation". Is Baggini right? By then, it doesn't matter. It is simply a relief to have been guided from observation to argument so quickly.

Perhaps this project was doomed from the outset. The English "folk philosophy", as the author calls it, is delicate and nuanced and contradictory. To approach a proper understanding of what the English really think one must have a decent idea, before one begins, of what they do. Baggini spends so much of the book recovering from the shock of microwave meals and noisy traffic, that there is little room for insight. At least he has the good grace to acknowledge that his "study would say as much about me, and those like me, as it would about the English mind I was investigating." He was right. This book should have been called Welcome to Notting Hill.