Bollocks To Alton Towers by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris and Joel Morris

It happens to all of us: we are just walking past some books when we spot one that is so interesting we have to buy it. This happens quite frequently to the BookClubOf1. What is less frequent is seeing a book which is so exciting you have to buy two copies. I spotted “Bollocks To Alton Towers” whilst looking for a birthday present for my Dad and ended up purchasing one for each of us.

The premise of the book (that Britain is full of small, eccentric tourist attractions which can be more fun than the big, famous ones) was one that resonated with my own childhood. Whether through anti-capitalist principles, or financial embarrassment, our parents were always reluctant to shell out for admission to anything. By the time I was 16, it seemed as though everyone in the world had been to Disneyland, Florida apart from me. I had, however, been round an awful lot of iron age hill forts and one nuclear power station.

For anyone with a hint of geek, the temptation is to use this book like a list of Munroes and tick off the attractions as you visit them. So I'm delighted to report that I have already been to Mother Shipton's Cave (visited with my folks when very young), Tebay Services, Portmerion, House of Marbles and Avebury.

Tebay Services is Britain's only independent motorway service station. Imagine that a farm shop and a high class delicatessen had a child together, and that child grew up and, in a fit of teenage rebelliousness, announced it wanted to be a motorway service station. That is Tebay. It will still cost you a lot to eat there, but you will be eating the very best local produce instead of filthy offerings from Planet Ginster. Plus you can buy something like top-notch chocolate or venison sausages for whoever has been looking after your cat. It's worth driving to Scotland just so you can visit Tebay on the way. Honest!

I first visited Avebury for E's hen weekend and my abiding memory is of the horrors of the Mystical Tat Shop. Avebury has two gift shops, one is a National Trust one which sells lots of lavender flavour things for old ladies. The other is the mystical tat shop which sells fearsome amounts of hippy crap covered in Celtic knotwork. It also sells the single most disturbing item I've ever seen in a gift shop: figures of a sort of chubby earth-goddess with her feet round the back of her head and her hands pulling her flaps apart. Apparently, this character is called Sheila Na Gig and she is giving birth to the universe or some such shit. Much as people who are true vertigo suffers don't just worry about falling off high things, they also worry that they might go mad and jump, I had to leave the mystical tat shop for fear that I might go mad and buy several of the things. When I went home and told my husband about the Sheila na Gigs, he was of the opinion that the tat shop owner had missed a trick and they ought to contain bottle openers or pencil sharpeners.

More exciting than the attractions I've already seen, are the recommendations which are very close to home. Diggerland and the Pack O' Cards pub are within a couple of hours' drive, while A La Ronde is actually on my drive to and from work but I've never been because I got in sulk with the National Trust after visiting Castle Drogo (a faked-up, 1920s bauhaus “castle” significantly newer than my own home, but more expensive to visit). These are so close that I might as well go. Both my siblings now live in Fancy London Town where the streets are paved with stabbed teenagers. Maybe they will take me to visit the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs when I next go to see them. And maybe my Oxford-based school friend could take me to the Pitt Rivers museum...

Like Munroes, some of these attractions will be easier to collect than others. For example, next time I visit the Lakes, if the weather's too bad for walking I will be demanding a visit to Eden Ostrich World or the Pencil Museum. I would very much like to visit Bletchly but this involves going to Milton Keynes and I can't imagine why I'd ever go there. Alas, I think I have missed the chance to see Barometer World as I believe it recently closed.

So what have they missed? Well, I can't claim an encyclopedic knowledge of Britain's visitor attractions, never having been to any of the ones that cost more than £10, but here's my cheapskate's rundown of other things you could look at:

1. That nuclear power station I visited as child was Hinkley Point in Somerset and the tour is free. I remember that the guide's Geiger tube didn't even pick up any background radiation for the whole tour, so I assume it was broken. You might want to take your own GM tube just to be on the safe side.

2. The Cerne Abbas Giant. A picture of a naked man with an enormous erection, carved into the side of a Dorset hill. This ticks all the boxes: it costs nothing plus it's good for a snigger.

3. The National Lobster Hatchery, Padstow. I haven't actually been in this one, but my friend AR has and so great was his enthusiasm for it that I pass on his recommendation. This is everything you might ever want to know about lobsters for only £3, apparently.

4. Letterston fish and chip shop. There must be hundreds of fish and chip shops which claim to be Britain's best. They're like splinters of the true cross or Robert The Bruce's caves. This one, however, is the best one I've been to so far. Other honourable mentions go to Chez Fred in Poole, Squires in Braunton and the chuffing expensive one at Dart's Farm.

5. Tinside Lido, Plymouth. I love lidos, they're a reminder of a bygone age when people wore hats and were hardy enough to swim out of doors in the UK. The south west seems to have been the epicentre of lido-building and the Plymouth one is a nice example being recently restored and a good size. For £3.60 (only 45p more than my regular, municipal pool) you can enjoy 1930s architecture and outdoor swimming. Lovely.

6. Big Pit (Pwll Mawr, for those of you who speak Klingon). Big Pit is your chance to go down a real coal mine for free!

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the origins of the internet by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon

As a programmer, I ought to have found this interesting, but unfortunately it was more like doing unpaid overtime. On several occasions I went to bed ahead of my husband, saying I wanted to read a bit of my book, only for him to arrive upstairs minutes later to find that its turgid prose had already stunned me into unconsciousness. Reading about someone else's marathon debugging session is only slightly less horrible than being in the midst of your own.

My one real moment of entertainment came from reading about the work of JCR Licklider. As well as having a funny name, he believed that by working with machines humans could achieve enhanced cognition. As someone who works with machines every day and often seems to be having cognitive difficulties, my response to his idea is a bitter, "Ha!". Most humans don't want their cognition enhanced and are content to muddle along with the same mixture of magical thinking and believing whatever is most convenient that we've been using ever since we were monkeys. We have created this amazing, worldwide network of machines and what do we use it for? Pornography, dating, looking at cute animals, watching amusing films of things in blenders and wanky, ego-stroking popularity contests. Some of the cleverest humans get as far as using it to pretend to be an elf. Quite frankly it would serve us all right if the Internet became self-aware and started exterminating us!

What is a little sad is that although many of the programmers mentioned were undoubtedly brilliant (and obsessive) and working at the bleeding edge of their fields, none of them got rich from their work. What you need to make money appears to middling intelligence, a sharp suit, glossy hair and a disarming smile. Bugger.

Despite the fact that I've not enjoyed this book, my friends seem to be queuing up to read it. I can't persuade them to like my favourite authors but they all want to read this crap. T! Humans, eh? They're just bloody perverse!