The Blunt End of the Known Universe: Road Trips and Modern Fables
by Dave Roberts
“Now you’ve got to be ‘passionate’ . . . The vast panoply of available language reduced to a fig leaf after a mass culling of dictionaries, with only casual superlatives now available.”
Dave Roberts wrote his award-winning book The Blunt End of the Grid: A Memoir of Motor Racing and Other Escapades in 2019. In my review here I wrote that his mastery of self-deprecation and wry wit reminded me of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. In my world, compliments don’t get much better than that. Even if you aren’t interested in motor racing, I recommend that book as it describes a world very far removed from the glitz and glamor of Formula One, now the reality TV show Drive to Survive.
And now Roberts has written another book, The Blunt End of the Known Universe. Even its subtitle, Road Trips and Modern Fables, doesn’t fully prepare the reader for the diversity of its contents. Its 36 chapters, typically of 5–15 pages, span subjects ranging from taxi-driving escapades to Christianity, and from road trips (UK, Europe, and USA) to the Olympic Games. The chapter titles sometimes barely hint at what to expect, never more so than the masterfully titled “Fucked by Vulcans at the Skills Centre.” As a testimony to the broken Britain of the 1980s (which was almost everywhere except the City of London’s gilded Square Mile) it has few equals. There are echoes of Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff*, seasoned with Full Monty** sauce.
Dave Roberts lives in Hull, the port city on the east coast of England, famous for being home to the late poet Philip Larkin, the finest Poet Laureate we never had. Roberts is Hull’s homegrown Renaissance Man, with a degree in psychology and a master’s in information technology. He’s the guy who rejected the thrill of quantity surveying as a career, and, as he puts it, “having gained a place at Trent Polytechnic Art School . . . I dropped out of society with more of a flurry.” The day job has, as often as not, been van, truck, or taxi driver and I think that has given him insights into late twentieth century/early noughties Britain which a more academically employed author couldn’t have matched. There’s a whiff of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and if he were a filmmaker Roberts would be more Ken Loach than Richard Curtis. But with a much better sense of humor!
The author takes a kaleidoscopic approach that is essentially autobiographical, and this reader couldn’t help wondering what he decided to leave out. Self-deprecation is still Dave’s shtick, and he has a wonderful knack in identifying the inherent absurdity of even the most stressful landmarks in life. I guess it’s the privilege only an outsider’s perspective can endow—most psychology graduates don’t drive taxis, do they?, and not too many taxi drivers I’ve met can juxtapose everyday chat with reflections on Islam, while name-checking authors from Hunter S. Thompson to Shakespeare. Dunno about Uber drivers though . . . . And I loved his thoughts on learning to weld—“Here, at last, was a task which put me at one with the universe, or specifically, a small pool of molten metal moving from one side of my field of vision to the other.”
The world needs more people like Dave Roberts, the autodidact who is ever curious to find out more. The guy who deploys streetwise savvy and innate decency to identify the chancers, carpetbaggers, charlatans, and tyrants who people life in the 21st century. You know who they are, and so does Dave.
Do read this book. It’ll make you laugh. And it will also make you think.
* “Boys from the Blackstuff” is an award-winning 1982 TV drama that highlighted the fate of a group of unemployed men in Liverpool
** “The Full Monty” is a 1997 film comedy about how unemployed steelworkers formed a striptease act
Copyright 2025, John Aston (speedreaders.info)
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