Adrian Chiles, known to many as a football presenter and to more as one of the myriad blokes who used to present The One Show, has been writing a bi-weekly column in the Guardian since 2019. Now the best of these articles have been rounded up and repackaged as his Curious Columns: a leisurely stroll through the well-tended garden of middle-aged, middle-class life.

His musings range from the enjoyably grumpy (rants on everything from West Brom’s poor form to the English language’s lack of pleasant names for female genitalia) to the movingly relatable (a lament on simply not knowing what to do with himself in the wake of his father’s death) to the surprisingly helpful (a no-fuss recipe for Croatian bean stew that turned out to be lip-smackingly delicious). What shines through strongest, though, is just how thoroughly decent a man hides behind Chiles’ rather dour exterior.

Welsh readers, in particular, will enjoy his sweetly earnest attempt to learn our language and his lifelong love of the Gower peninsula. Like Chiles himself, his columns are thoughtful, self-deprecating, endlessly curious and served up with enough bracingly dry wit to ward off banality.