Downshifting celebrates places where the nourishing values of literature survive; places where the technological revolution and celebrity culture fails to intrude upon enduring and deeply felt human values. It also contains several meditations on the writer's childhood, assenting to Auden's dictum on the key shaping of the adult by the things to which one's love is firstly and voluntarily drawn. Above all, Downshifting seeks to sing all its tunes with a light touch, to eschew the po-faced, the solemn, the overwrought and obscure.

Downshifting celebrates places where the nourishing values of literature survive; places where the technological revolution and celebrity culture fails to intrude upon enduring and deeply felt human values. It also contains several meditations on the writer's childhood, assenting to Auden's dictum on the key shaping of the adult by the things to which one's love is firstly and voluntarily drawn. Above all, Downshifting seeks to sing all its tunes with a light touch, to eschew the po-faced, the solemn, the overwrought and obscure.