A Year in Cricklewood is a collection of short humourous items written by Alan Coren and published The Times from June 1990 to May 1991. Cricklewood is the London suburb where Coren lived at the time. I imagine that the ideal original reader would read it at the breakfast table with the Times propped against the coffee pot. So, in accordance with the spirit of the original medium, it is not a book to be read through at a sitting, nor have I done so: although to spread it over a year would be excessive. There is however a problem with reading it a bit at a time, which is that when you get to the end, you can't remember what the early pieces were about and will be unable to separate them from similar pieces which Coren wrote in other years.
Each piece is only about 800 words long, but nicely crafted. There are plenty of allusions to various aspects of British culture - theatre (especially Shakespeare), sport, films, Bible.
To give some idea of the contents, I'll cite a bit from the first column of each month: not because they are the best, but just as a way of making a random selection.
It can't be denied that this is not a book for everyone, but I hope that I can encourage more people to dip into his books. If you can't easily get this one, try one of his other collections.

June: In Hard Cheese, Coren has taken the wrong suitcase in the middle of the night at Heathrow, and someone else has taken his, which contains a large amount of cheese.

• I left the small suitcase, and took a piece of paper which said "Details of your missing luggage have been entered into a world-wide baggage-tracing computer system" (the heart sank) "and, in the unlikely event you have not been reuinited with your luggage within 24 hours, ring …"
  I almost wept at "reuinited". I had seen a lot of movies like that. True, they had not involved men and suitcases running towards one another in slow motion, weeping, while Henri Mancini brought up the string section, but the princple was not dissimilar.

July begins with Six Legs Bad, Two Legs Worse, which starts

• There are no flies on me. So why is one of my ears larger than the other? Were this a decent comic, that intriguing little prolegomenon would be followed by (Answer: foot of col. 6), whereupon, having turned the page upside down, the reader would immediately fall about, slapping his thigh and hooting, and repeating the joke to as many neighbours as he could manage before being asked to stand in the corridor.

A wasp has stung his ear, although he tried to lure it from his ear onto a book: if I were innocently exploring and I was prodded by a hard object hundreds of times my size, and I had a sting, I too would be sorely tempted to deploy it, so my sympathies are with the wasp. (His correct course of action would have been to dip a finger into his beer, or icecream, or at a pinch the butter on his sandwich, and hold the finger near the ear, but without touching. The wasp would fly from the barren ear to the nourishing finger. He can then hold the finger away from his ear, while holding his book in the other hand to read it, until the wasp has fed and flies away. The downside is the dilemma that either the beer or icecream gets warm, or he has to pause his reading.) On consulting books on wasps at his local library, he learns many interesting things about them, in particular, that they are a wonderful friend to man. Apparently they do not tell him that friendship is a two-way street, and that an occasional lick of ones beer is a small price to pay for the benefits they bring.

August: Sick Leave
August brings summer holidays to the Coren household, and most of the holiday is to be spent in France, i.e. Abroad.

• While I yield to no one in my admiration either for medical science or for the industries which convert its unflagging research into tubes, phials, tins, jars, boxes and bubble-packs, there is no question but that their insistence on constant breakthroughs makes the prospect of each succeeding holiday exponentially glummer.
  …
  Once upon a time, and not so long ago at that, the travelling Briton was prepared to enter Abroad with nothing more prophylactic than a stout walking stick and a red-spotted bandanna. It was all there was.

In September he is back home to report, in Uneasy Lies the Head, "the smallest thing ever to go wrong with a house in its owner's absence".

• … when the clock cuckooed, I looked up.
  Owners of clocks of the order cuculidae will not need an explanation for this, but the rest of you might be thunderstruck to learn that that is what you do if you are in a room with one at any time after five o'clock.

October begins with consideration of First Things First, beginning:

• If there were a word to describe today's theme, I would be on my way to immortality. Your grandchildren could look the word up in encyclopaedias, where they would discover that I was the one who discovered what they were looking up.
  But have I? Can I be sure that what I have discovered has not been known all along? Is it simply that it has never had a word to describe it? That is the problem with hitting on a concept, which is what my thing is, as opposed to an object: with an object, there is no dispute.
  If you invent a steam engine … when you chug past …, people will cry: "Stone me! I have never seen anything like that before!" An invented object is indisputable proof of its own originality.
  This is not the case with a concept. It could well have been thought of in a different place, at another time, by someone else; but since they could not come up with a word to describe it, nobody knew.

Coren has hit on his concept while in the bath, in fact, and this is highly relevant, his second bath on this day. This leads to a consideration of the concept which occurred to Archimedes while in his bath.
This is a collection of light-hearted humour. It is not generally considered advisable to break a butterfly upon a wheel, but in the interests of honesty I have to point to the cited passage as an extreme example of the disregard for facts, logic and common sense to which the pursuit of humour often misleads Coren.

November: Fabric Conditioning

• I put the phone down. Bloody buildings. The man had not listened to a word I'd shrieked. He was a literalist: to him, fabric was no metaphor. New conks for gargoyles was what he was after, and a bit of Brasso on the weathercock.
  …
  And what irks me almost as much is that, even for the literalist, cathedrals should top the list … I should have turned myself into the Spirit of Cultural Fabric Yet to Come, dragged him down to Cricklewood, made him cringe at butchered conversion and greenfield encroachment, at jerrycobbled estate and polystyrene precinct; I should have cocked his ear to the curfew tolling the knell of parting suburbia.

December: Change and Decay
Coren knows how many pennies fit into a cigar box, and what they weigh. This is part of how he came to know:

• I find it impossible to throw away an empty cigar-box. Nothing looks more useful. … I now have a large number of full cigar boxes, in which I keep things which are less useful than cigar-boxes and might otherwise have been thrown away. … (It was a big day when the tea-chest arrived. Unable to throw away such a useful-looking item,I stared at it for a long time before suddenly I realised that it was the best thing there was for keeping cigar-boxes in.)

January: Future Present
Depressing thoughts occasioned by being given a personal organiser which can accept appointments up to 2050.

February Same Old Game
The shooting season for some game birds ends on the first and for the rest on the second of February.

• … if you are a bird, copping it on the wing after an even-money dash for freedom must be preferable to gargling your last beneath the slaughterer's inescapable thumb, The eater of roast chicken cannot point the greasy finger at the shooter of roast pheasant.
  My complaint is simply that I prefer that chicken (…) to riddled game on a number of counts, the prime of which leads the rest by a furlong. For though I also prefer the flavour …, far more than these I prefer the absence of anecdote.

March: Dish of the Day

• Let me say quickly that I have nothing against immortality. And let me almost as quickly say that the immortality I have nothing against is, of course, the metaphorical variety, because, even if it existed, I should have a great deal against the other sort. It would be no fun at all waking up on your billionth birthday, opening your billionth batch of jocular cards, and trying to think of somewhere different to go for dinner.

Wise words. Coren however also doubts the value of the metaphorical variety, if the only way to achieve it is to have his likeness glazed onto a 106 piece dinner service.

April: Gnawing Doubts

• One of Our Men is coming. I may have to kiss him on the lips. Either that, or he has to kiss the squirrel on the lips. I'm not too sure about Mafia protocol. This is my first contract.

Later, we learn how the contract was placed:

• I phoned the London Borough of Barnet, and the woman said you mustn't have a squirrel in your loft, once they've found a way in they never leave … they chew the flex off your electric cables, you could have a fire, and did you know your house insurance policy does not cover this, shall I send somebody round.
  

May: The Veiled Lodger
No mere extract can represent this one. You will just have to read the whole thing for yourself.