Strange case of writer's flock

Chris Stewart is the author of Driving Over Lemons, a book which many people compared to Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Like Mayle, Stewart moved abroad and wrote a witty account of his rustic tribulations. But there were important differences. Stewart did not move to the South of France, but to the south of Spain, which is much more rugged and challenging. Also, he didn't move because he was rich, but because he was poor. He was not a seigneurial British executive on an extended holiday, but a jobbing sheep-shearer who needed somewhere cheap to live. He bought a tumbledown farm in the Alpujarras, the mountains south of Granada, and hoped he could raise enough crops to feed his family.

And he did. He grew olives and lemons and all sorts of vegetables, and kept a flock of sheep. He had trouble with irrigation and people ripping him off. He even built an extension to his house with his own hands, using rocks and logs he chopped himself. But his best crop, as it turned out, was his writing. Here, in what Stewart calls "a sort of sequel", he describes the odd, hilarious state of being a farmer who is actually a writer; he suffers from writer's block, but he also gets a sort of farmer's block. When the writing begins to flow, he finds that "the call of the potatoes was urgent". In the end, the book thrives, but the potatoes get blight.

Stewart writes in the same fluent, Bryson-like style readers of Driving Over Lemons will recognise. He is warm-hearted, but deftly cutting when he encounters people who bore him. If Bryson is an expert on the cheapness and vulgarity of affluent countries, Stewart is a connoisseur of discomfort. Here, he tells us about how, to make ends meet, he needed to make annual sheep-shearing tours of the north of Sweden, spending his time in freezing, stinky barns. Wretched, dressed in "icy, grease-caked shearing clothes", he reaches a low ebb. "I silently cursed everybody and everything," he tells us. "What a way to earn a living! What a waste of life!"

It is everything that made the first book so hugely successful - endearing, heartwarming, self-deprecating, sometimes surreal. He tells us about his teenage years, when he was the drummer in the earliest incarnation of Genesis. Sadly, he was a schoolboy at the time and his parents wouldn't let him leave the sixth form to make an album with the band. He traces his zig-zagging career route, which is funny in itself - he was a drummer with a travelling circus and an unsuccessful Flamenco guitarist before making the sideways move into sheep-shearing and, eventually, autobiography.

You'd have to be a pretty dour soul not to be cheered by this book. At one point, Stewart is confronted by the odd spectacle of a man staring at a dead dog in a tree; he had been trying to hurl it away from his house so his children would not be saddened by the sight of the body. At another point, having become a best-selling author, he awaits the arrival of a "hot-shot reporter" who keeps asking him for beer and pokes through his personal possessions. Later, asked to read at a literary festival, he finds people pointing in his direction and whispering, "It's him! It's him!" Smiling, he turns around to find that somebody is standing behind him - Bill Bryson. Charming stuff, as you can see.