It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than make me smile, or emit a sharp soundless puff of breath from the nostrils. But this book made me guffaw. Normally, only P. G. Wodehouse has that effect. It’s tragicomedy, really.
I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is what Francesca Segal achieves in The Awkward Age, published four years after her book, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. She takes six characters — widowed, middle-aged Julia, her teenage daughter Gwen, her grandparents-in-law Philip and Iris, her new American boyfriend James, and James’s teenage son Nathan — and plonks them in sturdy houses in Hampstead, sets the clock, and lets the story play out. Gwen and Nathan are now forced to share a dwelling. Like a good piece of Bach, what unfolds has an inevitability to it but manages also to be surprising at every moment.
It’s not the free movement of people I spend my nights fretting about; it’s the free movement of pests. It’s the thuggy Spanish bluebells invading our woodland and killing our own delicate flowers; it’s the Asian caterpillars devastating our box hedges; it’s the black-winged killer ladybirds from North America wiping out our spotted red ones with a nasty fungal disease. And — particularly worrying for anyone trying to run a household — it’s the tiny webbing clothes moths, thought to have originated from South Africa, their larvae feasting on our favourite cardigans and carpets — probably feasting right now, under the very bed in which we are failing to sleep.
This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day of the week it is by who’s speaking on the station at 9.02 a.m. Published the week that Midweek was abolished for ever, it is Libby Purves’s story of the programme she presented for 33 years. In this brief memoir she has not only immortalised the distinctive flavour of the ‘And now for some lively conversation’ Wednesday-morning 45 minutes. She has also reminded us that Radio 4 is ‘basically, a marvel’: for many people, it is ‘their university and their friend’. All presenters, Purves writes, are aware that they are obsolescent.
Do you, or do you not, fork out for an audioguide — one of those necklace-like, strappy contraptions you’re offered at the beginning of exhibitions, which cost an extra £3.50? The nation is divided. Some loathe them — as I was reminded reading an obituary of the historian Eric Christiansen, which said, ‘The British Museum’s Viking Exhibition in 2014 drew his wrath as visitors blocked everyone else’s view as they listened to their headsets, while ignoring any object which did not have a spoken description.’ I blushed, because that’s exactly what I do. Not in room one or two, when I’m still all energy and excitement and take pains to look at every single item with equal attention.
Of all the reasons for choosing to live in a ground-floor flat rather than a first-floor one, it might not occur to you that your choice could be the game-changing clincher in your child’s educational prospects — but so it is. In the terrifying admissions criteria for Britain’s oversubscribed faith and church primary schools, you will often find these words: ‘If applicants share the same address point (for example, if they live in the same block of flats), priority will be given to those who live closest to the ground floor and then by ascending flat-number order.’ That detail gives a hint of the desperation of these schools to seem ‘fair’, and of the desperation of parents to get their first child into them.
In typical theatrical style, the outgoing Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, he of the sonorous voice and imposing beard, ‘never knowingly underdressed’, ‘the last of the great prince bishops’, attended his final service as bishop at last Thursday’s liturgy at St Paul’s Cathedral for Candlemas — the day on which Simeon spoke the words, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.
If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to enjoy a heartwarming tale of 18th-century babies being rescued from destitution and brought to live in a lovely safe place, you will have found instead that the tale was mostly about babies dying after they arrived. So it is with this fascinating book about the early days of London Zoo. Expecting to read about lions, tigers and monkeys in all their boisterous aliveness, you wade instead into disturbing descriptions of the illnesses they suffered and their pitiful early deaths.
The first Sunday of Advent is 27 November this year. For those of us who prefer Advent services to Christmas ones, the earlier the better, frankly. I relish the frisson of gloom, foreboding and fear of judgment you get at Advent, alongside the hope. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is all very well, but it’s the minor chord at the end of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ that I crave. So do thousands of others, it seems. The Advent service at Salisbury Cathedral, for example, is so oversubscribed these days that it’s repeated on three consecutive evenings, starting on the Friday before Advent Sunday. So, tears barely dry from the Remembrance Sunday requiem, you find yourself queuing in the cloisters for an hour and a half on Friday 25 November.
So, is that it? The end of sweetness, and the end of taste? Physically speaking, those things will no doubt carry on, when The Great British Bake Off moves to Channel 4 next year. We’ll still take vicarious pleasure in the mouth-watering sweetness of someone’s ‘crème pat’. The taste of lavender will still ‘come through’ in a contestant’s 12 identical puff pastry miniatures. But I’m referring to the abstracts: the sweetness, and the taste. I fear that those might have gone for ever.
So, is that it? The end of sweetness, and the end of taste? Physically speaking, those things will no doubt carry on, when The Great British Bake Off moves to Channel 4 next year. We’ll still take vicarious pleasure in the mouthwatering sweetness of someone’s ‘crème pat’. The taste of lavender will still ‘come through’ in a contestant’s 12 identical puff pastry miniatures. But I’m referring to the abstracts: the sweetness, and the taste. I fear that those might have gone for ever.
A typical Kentish town, with its grammar school at one end and its secondary school at the other, is a throwback to the Bad Old Days, or the Good Old Days, depending on what your views are on academically selective state education. If Theresa May’s plans go ahead, the whole country might look something like this. In my childhood home town of Sandwich, Kent, the two schools, Sir Roger Manwood’s grammar school and the Sandwich Technology School, have staggered going-home times to avoid the fights on the station platform that used to happen every afternoon. Their uniforms are tellingly different: the Manwood’s students wear smart blazers and ties, the Tech ones wear casual black polo shirts and black jerseys. There’s a slight shiftiness in the afternoon atmosphere.
Jeremy Corbyn may not be right about many things, but when he sat on the floor of a train, hoping to raise awareness about overcrowding, he was at least on to something. Of course, in classic Corbyn style, he proved to have ignored reality to make his point: there were plenty of seats on that particular train. It was nonetheless a point worth making. Millions of passengers jostle for standing space every day; Britain’s rail system is in urgent need of help. And there is apparently money to be spent. It just won’t be going on the most overcrowded lines. Instead, the cash is destined for High Speed 2 — one of those mysterious vanity projects that refuses to go away even though common sense begs it to. Polls show the vast majority of us are against it.
With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on the bedside book over the last few weeks. When, in this true Victorian murder mystery, I came to the sentence, ‘Ebeneezer Pook, however, had no intention of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure’, all I could see in my head was Jeremy Corbyn emerging from his house, ducking under the prickly rosebush and refusing to stand down. And when I came to this complicated passage: Mrs Thomas’s story buttressed the account that William Sparshott had given and would dovetail with the account Olivia Cavell was about to give.
Early on the morning of Friday 24 June, Darren Gratton went into his butcher’s shop in Barnstaple and changed his wall signs, which at this time of year are mostly about barbecue packs. Emboldened in the Brexit dawn, he deleted all references to ‘kg’ and replaced each one with ‘lb’. Tempted to do the same to the labels inside the display cabinets, he decided not to, for fear of a threatening call from Trading Standards. But that small act of wall-chart insurrection was enough to spark an article in the local paper, which triggered a deluge of emails from other shopkeepers across the country in support of his brave action with the squeaky pen.
Blue plaque spotting is one of the mind-broadening pleasures of British life. A walk to the dentist can be transformed into a serendipitous encounter with a forgotten genius from the past. ‘Luke Howard, 1772–1864, Namer of Clouds, lived and died here,’ says the blue plaque on 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Even if you’ve never heard of Luke Howard, you instantly take a liking to him — and never again will you hear the word ‘cumulonimbus’ without thinking of him. ‘Lived here’ is the key: you’re passing the very house where the person woke up for breakfast each day, and the intimacy of that is what makes the encounter so much more affecting than merely reading about him or passing a statue of him.
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms: the dining-rooms and living-rooms, mainly, of five elderly, thin, Jewish bridge-playing ladies, Bette, Bea, Jackie, Rhoda and Roz, in a desirable suburb of New Haven, Connecticut. Their napkin rings are made of silver, porcelain, tortoiseshell, bamboo and Bakelite, and they put on their best necklaces and get out the best coffee cups when it’s their turn to host. They have met together to play bridge every Monday afternoon for over half a century. ‘Five ladies, luncheon of silvery fish, two decks of cards and a scoring pad nearby.’ (It’s five in the club, by the way, so there’s an extra if one of them is ill.
Major anniversary of her birth today, on 21 April. A ‘national treasure’, epitomising a certain kind of stoical, homely, female Britishness. Revered and adored by millions. Her family home a major tourist attraction. A life dedicated to self-sacrifice and the service of others. Plainly but elegantly dressed: not a follower of fashion. Rather severe-looking when not smiling. Yes, I’m thinking of Charlotte Brontë, and so should we all be, in this her 200th anniversary week. The third of six children of the Revd Patrick and Maria Brontë, all of whom died long before their father did, she wrote a revolutionary novel so grippingly, movingly brilliant that people still love it even if it was their set text. ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake, not a parish church: they must be rich, with all those gold-coloured vestments and choristers in ruffs. But if we want our cathedrals to be alive and singing psalms in 20 years’ time, this misconception about cathedrals must change. Indeed, the sub-dean of Coventry is openly clamping down.
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From the back seat of the old Chevette, heading north, the boy asked his question into the restless air. The restless air? The reader makes the mental adjustment: it’s not the air that’s restless, it’s the boy and probably his whole family. So why the transferred epithet at this early stage? It sets the tone for a transferred-epithet-filled novel so full of anguish and poetic touches that you’ll find yourself reading it in a hushed voice. Jim, the boy in question, ‘read the air around people, the calm or seasick air’. His mother, Nancy, notices how ‘the sun was warming his sunrise bones’.
