Remembering the haunting "Man with a Harmonica" theme from the spaghetti Western "Once Upon A Time In the West", I searched YouTube for a copy of the movie. The algorithms must have me down as a country yokel because, instead of bringing up Sergio Leone's 1968 epic, they took me to an audiobook preview of "Once Upon A Time In The West ... Country", written by the very same Tony Hawks who also wrote "Round Ireland with a Fridge".
I didn't mind! After all, I had already seen the movie "Once Upon A Time In The West", but I had never heard of the book "Once Upon A Time In The West ... Country", which turned out to be the hilarious story of how a series of events led Tony and his wife Fran to uproot their city lives for a rural alternative in deepest Devon. It's full of Tony's trademark mixture of humour, hope, adventure and absurdity, as it charts their journey from the relative ease of city life to the vagaries of a village community. It almost took me back to the time when I tried to settle into Nelligen, except that some of my neighbours weren't as charming.
This may well be the first time that Tony's heartwarming and hilarious tale has been read to the haunting tune of the "Man with a Harmonica".
