Friday book review - A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison

Once described as “Enid Blyton meets Cosmo Girl,” Louise Rennison’s books are hilarious romps for teenage girls who love sparkly nail varnish, Topshop and boys.

With their fluorescent covers and wacky titles, Rennison’s stories are snapped up in their millions by fans around the world. Her last novel, Withering Tights, won the 2011 Roald Dahl Funny Prize, set up by writer Michael Rosen to celebrate books that make children laugh.

Withering Tights was the first of a trilogy about an irrepressible teenage heroine called Tallulah Casey, who enrols at Dother Hall, a performing arts college in the wilds of Yorkshire, only to discover that she can’t actually act or sing. Oh, and at first glance there don’t seem to be any boys around either.

Now the second in the series, A Midsummer Tights Dream, is out and it’s just as crazy (and strewn with exclamation marks!!!) as the first. After a barnstorming performance as a comic Heathcliff earned Tallulah a place at Dother Hall for another term, she’s determined to throw herself into the experience with gusto. The trouble is that she's worried about her gangly legs and her cousin Georgia’s “scoring system for snogging” and her feelings for local bad boy Cain Hinchcliff and whether she’ll ever “climb the ladder of showbiz.” And if all that isn’t enough, it suddenly transpires out that the future of Dother Hall hang in the balance.

Warm-hearted, with snappy dialogue and a clutch of laugh-out-loud jokes, girls aged 12 and over will love it. 

A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison (HarperCollins, £10.99)

Hotel review - The Hoxton, London

In my days as an on-the-road reporter I used to stay in hotels quite a lot. Now my hotel stays are as rare as my trips to the gym. But this week I hotfooted it to east London to spend two days with my daughter. After scouring scores of websites we eventually plumped to check into The Hoxton in Great Eastern Street. As well as being just round the corner from Spitalfields, Columbia Road and all the places we wanted to visit, it looked good value and good fun.

And so it proved. The Hoxton, which opened in 2006, focuses on the things customers really care about. The room prices are cheaper the further in advance you book and every so often there’s an online £1 a room sale. Instead of leaving endless reams of literature in your room, they give you the basics about room service and the flat screen TV on postcards labelled the “really boring stuff.” 

Rates for the night include free WiFi (no annoying codes), tea bags, bottles of water, milk, copy of The Guardian and a Pret breakfast of orange juice, banana and granola delivered to your door in a paper carrier bag. Oh, and there’s a corkscrew so you can bring your own bottle of wine and actually open it. The twin room we stayed in was small (with an en suite shower room) but the beds were super comfortable, with fine cotton sheets and duck down duvets.

The best bit was sitting by an enormous open fire on the ground floor, lounging back on a massive leather Chesterfield with the morning papers and a skinny latte. The only drawback was that it was all so comfy that at 11.30am we had to pull ourselves together and actually go out and do something.

When we got back to the hotel that night we were so exhausted that we couldn’t summon up the energy to eat in the hotel restaurant, the Hoxton Grill – all exposed brickwork, huge wooden tables and chic lamps. So we ordered a bowl of chestnut hummus (delicious) and some flatbread, poured ourselves a glass of Pinot Grigio each and settled down in front of the BAFTAs. Bliss.

The flower market at Columbia Road

The flower market in London’s Columbia Road has been on my “must visit” list for years. Every Sunday the narrow street in the heart of the East End is filled with stalls selling everything from hyacinths to narcissi to ten-foot banana trees. I knew it would be exactly my sort of thing.

Reading Joanna Trollope’s Daughters-in-Law a couple of weeks back reminded me it was high time I got my act together and went. In the book, graphic designer Luke lives in a flat “at the very top of a tall and elaborate brick building in Arnold Circus, a stone's throw… from Columbia Road flower market, from Brick Lane, from – oh my God – Hoxton.”

So this weekend, with my husband in the Far East and my son whizzing down an Italian mountainside on a snowboard (scary), I reckoned I had the perfect opportunity. Luckily my student daughter lives just round the corner and she sweetly agreed to come with me. Actually, her favourite clubs, bars and “the best bagel shop in the world” are in that neck of the woods so she didn’t take much persuading.

Sure enough, Columbia Road is everything it’s cracked up to be. Open from eight am till “three-ish” every Sunday, the place is alive with stallholders yelling “three bunches for ten pounds,” shoppers of all ages clutching flowers wrapped in brown paper and 20-somethings dressed in tweedy, old-fashioned outfits that look straight out of a Dickens novel.

Along with the flower stalls, the Columbia Road shops (open on Sundays) are pretty top-notch too. Between the pair of us we bought cards from Ryantown (artist Rob Ryan’s shop), homemade cakes from a delightfully-named bakery and gift shop called Treacle and two gold buttons from Beyond Fabrics for my daughter’s coat.

From there it was just a brisk walk (it was blooming cold) round to Brick Lane. Famed for its curry houses and vintage shops, the place was as busy as Oxford Street in the pre-Christmas rush. Street artists sat sketching, visitors queued up to buy curries and bagles (tucking in appreciatively as they walked down the street) and old and young alike played chess and a game called Carrom (apparently a cross between draughts and billiards) at outdoor board tables. Hmmm. Curry, flowers and board games – what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?

Images: Columbia Road (top), Arnold Circus (above)

Parking and coffee - the French way

I thought I was clued up about France, but thanks to Michael Wright and his brilliant C’est la folio column in the Daily Telegraph I’ve just discovered something new.

Apparently, if you invite French guests to dinner they will always turn their car around when they arrive, ready for a neat, speedy getaway at the end of the evening.

It’s a brilliant idea – and one my mother took up years ago. She got so fed up with the embarrassment of doing a complicated 36-point turn as her hosts watched that she hit on the idea of always parking her car with the bonnet facing in the direction of home.

I started copying her example after I had lunch with friends in Northamptonshire. They had a very narrow driveway and as I reversed gingerly out, I suddenly saw that their smiles and waves had turned to frantic gestures and looks of horror. But too late. I backed straight into a bollard on the pavement in front of their very eyes, destroying my bumper and most of the bollard in the process...

PS. Michael Wright also pointed out that nobody in France puts milk in their coffee. It just isn’t done. In fact if you even dare to order a café crème after midday in France you’ll get a withering look. It must be a petit café or an espresso. Nothing else will do. In similar vein, if you ask for a “well done” steak you’ll get very short shrift. I once asked for my steak to be “bien cuit” in a chic brasserie in Paris (above). The waiter looked surprised and seconds later the chef, in his cooking whites, stormed out of the kitchen and shouted his head off at me for daring to ask for such a thing. “Not in my restaurant,” he yelled at the top of his voice.

Amanda Hocking and Kerry Wilkinson - self publishers extraordinaire

Self publishing used to be the Cinderella of the book industry. Critics looked down their noses at self-published books and assumed self publishing (or “vanity publishing,” as it was snootily called) was the desperate last resort of writers who’d failed to find a mainstream publisher for their work.

But how things have changed. It recently emerged that US author Amanda Hocking makes more than £1 million a year from her self-published books. Readers, it seems, can’t get enough of her paranormal fiction and she’s selling more than 100,000 e-books a month.

On this side of the Atlantic, the latest success story is Kerry Wilkinson, a Lancashire sports journalist who’s sold more than 250,000 copies of his crime thrillers. Instead of hawking his first novel, Locked In, round the nation’s publishing houses, he decided to self publish it as an e-book - at 98p a copy. Even though he didn’t have an agent or publicist to help him, he soon realised he was on to a winner. Locked In and its two follow-ups, Vigilante and The Woman in Black, sold so well that he was declared the bestselling e-book author at Amazon’s UK Kindle store for the last quarter of 2011.

But despite sales that many better-known writers would give their eye teeth for, Kerry still sounds delightfully down-to-earth. “I’ve only ever tried to do my own thing,” he told the Daily Telegraph last week. “I wrote a book I thought I would like and enjoyed doing it enough to write follow-ups. I had no expectations for it and so this has all been terrific.”

Now other writers are fast getting in on the act. Not only that, I’ve met several authors recently who are self publishing out of print titles. Actually, I reckon I’m missing a trick. I’m definitely going to look at self publishing my first two novels, Hard Copy and Moving On (above), very soon. Watch this space.

PS. When I switched on Radio 4 soon after 7am this morning I expected the news to be full of the NHS reforms, Syria and Greece. But instead, Whitney Houston's gorgeous I Will Always Love You was playing. It seemed slightly odd - and then I realised it could only mean one thing. Such sad, sad news.

Friday book review - The Soldier's Wife by Joanna Trollope

After failing to be 100 per cent convinced by Joanna Trollope’s Daughters-in-Law, I decided to give her latest novel a go this week. The Soldier’s Wife certainly sounded promising. It’s the story of a mother-of-three whose army major husband has just returned home after a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan.

While her husband was away Alexa Riley did everything – looked after their three-year-old twins, coped with the boarding school misery of her teenage daughter, cooked, cleaned, mowed the lawn, serviced the boiler and got offered a prestigious teaching job. But far from being the blissful homecoming she expects, her husband Dan seems unable to adjust to family life again. As Alexa observes:  “He’s back, but he’s not back, not in any sense that’s any use to me or his family. And if one more person tells me just to give him time, or that I knew what I was taking on, or that I’m so lucky to have the security, I will just… kill them.”

Trollope has clearly researched army life meticulously. Indeed, as I mentioned last week, an army wife interviewed by Jenni Murray on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour said she’s got every single detail right in the book.

I don’t know much about modern army life but my father was in the RAF when I was little and lots of Trollope’s observations resonated with me. The married quarters painted in magnolia, the formality of the officers’ mess, the constant moving house (between the ages of five and eleven I went to six schools) and the dilemma of how army wives can keep their own careers going when they’re never in one place for more than two years. Some women put up with it – as a brigadier’s wife says in the book “you just adapt your skills and career ambitions to the Army” – but a growing number of wives, Alexa among them, are starting to question the frequent upheavals.

With military wives (and the brilliant Military Wives choir) very much in the news these days, Joanna Trollope has cleverly captured the zeitgeist in her latest novel. A far more substantial and satisfying read than some of her most recent books, it gives a moving snapshot of what life as an army wife is really like. Warts and all.

The Soldier’s Wife by Joanna Trollope (Doubleday, £18.99)

The loveliest hotel I've stayed in

The icy weather and sub-zero temperatures are making me dream of the House With No Name. Of long, lazy lunches under the plane tree and games of boules on the dusty courtyard. I’m kidding myself of course because it’s minus six degrees in our part of France and I’m just hoping that the cheeky dormouse living in the attic hasn’t moved all his mates in.

I got to thinking about France because a brochure for one of the loveliest hotels I’ve ever visited has just arrived in the post. Twenty-five miles from Avignon, Hotel Crillon le Brave (above) is perched on a Provençal hilltop – with amazing views across tiled roofs to vineyards, olive groves and majestic Mont Ventoux in the distance.

We stayed there en route to the House With No Name one year and it was my idea of heaven. The evening began with a glass of chilled rosé on the terrace. A jazz duo played softly in the background and as darkness fell, we had dinner by candlelight, spellbound by the dark clouds gathering over 6,000-ft Mont Ventoux. The immaculately-attired Maitre D didn’t bat an eyelid. “There will be a storm in the middle of the night – not before,” he assured us. “I know Mont Ventoux well and I am confident.” His prediction was right, of course. After torrential rain overnight, we woke next morning to brilliant sunshine and blue sky.

When it opened 20 years ago Crillon le Brave consisted of one house and 11 rooms. Now it has 32 rooms and seven buildings, a mini spa and the most charming hotel staff, all bilingual. But it’s the stunning decor that’s the icing on the cake. Pale grey shutters and woodwork, blissfully comfortable beds, stylish bathrooms and cool terracotta floors. Now if only I could make the House With No Name look like that…

David Beckham and the art of being an embarrassing parent

“Have I ever been an embarrassing parent?” I asked my son the other day. “Quite often,” he muttered with feeling. 

He then proceeded to list everything I’d done to show him up, from the day I fell off a fairground roundabout (stone-cold sober, I hasten to add) to all the times I’d insisted on staying to watch him ride his bike at the skate park. I pretended I wasn’t with him by sitting on a bench and reading the paper, but he still wasn’t best pleased.

So I felt an awful lot better when I picked up this week’s issue of Grazia and read an interview with David Beckham to mark the launch (this was the crowd that turned out!) of his new Bodywear range for H&M.

Asked what his three sons (presumably baby Harper is too little to have an opinion) make of his posing in his pants, he admitted: “They come out with remarks like ‘Oh my God, Daddy, not again,’ or ‘Everyone’s going to see you in your pants!’”

The pictures, emblazoned across thousands of billboards, are clearly working though, because Beckham’s boxers, vests and even long johns are flying off the shelves. And if it’s any comfort to Becks, embarrassing your children is part of being a parent.

I remember that when I was about 11 me and my sister went shopping in Bournemouth every Saturday with my mum. She didn’t drive in those days so on the way back we’d get a taxi home from The Square. As we turned into our road, she’d lean forward and say to the cabbie “it’s just past the fifth lamp-post on the right.” For some inexplicable reason I’d squirm with embarrassment every time she said it. “You always say that,” I’d protest. “Well it always is just past the fifth lamp-post on the right,” she’d reply.

Image © Nick Harvey

Lost in the fog - and Jools Oliver's new children's range

For a moment I nearly panicked. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in freezing fog, with no phone signal and not a clue where I was going. I was off to my monthly book club, with a copy of Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women tucked in my bag, but it looked like I wasn’t going to make it. 


Of all the stupid things to do, I hadn’t checked where I was heading before I set off. The February meeting was at P’s new house in one of the loveliest villages in Northamptonshire. She’s only just moved in and I hadn’t visited before - but I assumed finding it would be a piece of cake. After years as a news reporter, haring off all over the country at a drop of the hat, my sense of direction hasn’t failed me very often. So all good, except I don’t have a sat nav and I’d left in such a hurry that I hadn’t phoned P for directions or printed out a map. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll just get to the village and ring P from there.”

Only it wasn’t as simple as that. The snow has vanished from Oxford as fast as it arrived but the winding country lanes of Northamptonshire are a different story. As I drove at snail’s pace along the back roads, past snow-covered hedgerows, rabbits skittering in the ice and posters emblazoned with the words “No HS2 Rail Link” fluttering from the trees, thick fog descended and I could only see about two metres in front of my nose.

Finally, half an hour late, I drove gingerly into P’s gorgeous but alarmingly hilly village. Reaching for my mobile in the pitch black, my heart sank. “No service,” said the illuminated words on the screen. I’d stupidly failed to appreciate that in the wilds of the countryside O2’s signal is patchy to say the least. I drove up the hill, peering at the country cottages, all shrouded in darkness. There wasn’t a soul about and I briefly contemplated knocking on doors, reporter-style, but was too much of a wimp. After managing a scary 28-point turn to avoid ending up on the icy verge, it seemed my only option was to concede defeat pathetically and drive the 40 miles home.

And then suddenly, for a second at the top of the hill, a tiny bit of signal miraculously appeared. Another book club friend answered my call and yes, I made it to book club after all. Late, flustered and slightly incoherent, but I made it.

PS.  I’m not usually a fan of celebrity collaborations but I reckon Jamie Oliver’s wife Jools is a great choice to design a range of children’s clothes for Mothercare. The mother of four (three girls and one boy) is ultra-stylish, down-to-earth and I reckon she’ll come up with clothes that mums want to buy and children want to wear.

Why this year's snowfall made me sad

We were walking along St Giles when the first snowflakes fell. With temperatures below zero and our feet turning to blocks of ice, the snow had been threatening to arrive all day – and finally it had. With a vengeance.

My teenage son took one look and immediately walked faster, keen to get back to the warmth of home and the excitement of his Xbox. I felt a bit sad. This was the first time snow hadn’t made him leap up and down in excitement. Up until a year ago he’d take one look outside and think “sledges, snowmen, snowball fights with the boys next door.” Before I knew it, he’d be grabbing a jumble of clothes (no coat of course) and would be frantically unlocking the back door, desperate to hurl himself into the wintery world outside.

He’d be as happy as Larry all day. He’d get through four changes of clothes (all those snowballs), build a snowman taller than himself and rootle about in the garden shed for the sledge my mother gave him. I remember the year he came back inside at the end of the day, soaked to the skin, exhausted and beaming with happiness. He then rushed upstairs to post a cheery message on Facebook. “Yay, no school,” he wrote. “Thank you snow.”

But now he’s 17 he’s not interested in a paltry few inches of snow. It might make the dreaming spires of Oxford look even more beautiful, but he needs several feet of the stuff to play in. He wants to leap off mountains and do scary twirls in the air on a snowboard. Sadly, our current frosting of snow just doesn’t cut the mustard as far as he's concerned.

PS. My husband times his work trips to the Far East impeccably. While I’m gingerly picking my way along the icy Oxford pavements in my grippiest shoes and wondering whether I can get the car out, he’s on a flight halfway across the world. Next stop – Kuala Lumpur. Temperature – 25 degrees C.

Image: Oxford snow by tevjanphotos, Oxford Light

The only time you see teenagers out with their parents

At the crack of dawn next week my son will thrust a hastily downloaded Google map at me, plug his favourite Justice tracks into the car’s audio system and we’ll set off for yet another university open day (snow permitting!)

The only trouble is that after visiting a handful of universities already, they’re all starting to blur into one. Neither of us can remember which boasts 22 Nobel Prize winners, which has a library with four million books and which serves coffee that tastes like old socks.

University open days are a new and weird phenomenon in our lives. When I went I more or less stuck a pin in the map and hoped for the best. Today’s teenagers get bombarded with leaflets and letters, spend hours trawling through the UCAS website and are encouraged to visit universities all over the shop before applying. The only trouble is that when they get to open days they meet academics in tweed jackets quoting statistics like 1,000 applicants for fewer than 100 places.

Even more bizarre is the sight of thousands of 17 and 18 year olds trailing round campuses with their middle-aged parents. Some look dead embarrassed to be seen out with their mums and dads, while others are clearly livid that their parents have muscled in on the trip. I’ve scored a double. I’m in both categories.

And this year there’s something new to worry about. The newspapers are full of doom and gloom about tuition fees trebling to an eye-watering £9,000 a year and students being saddled with debt for the rest of their lives. I take one look and stuff the papers in the bin. This university lark is hard enough without worrying about that right now…

PS. Forget my hankering for a 2CV. I’ve just spotted my new dream car outside Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Islington (see above!)

Friday book review - Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope

The first Joanna Trollope book I ever read was The Rector’s Wife. I was so captivated by her 90s tale of a vicar’s wife who shocks everyone by taking a job at a supermarket to make ends meet that I was desperate to read her earlier books. The instant I’d finished that one I rushed out to buy another, feverishly working my way through her backlist in the way I used to gobble up Enid Blyton stories as a child.

But in recent years I haven’t found her books quite so gripping. She’s as prolific as ever – Daughters-in-Law, her 16th Trollope novel, came out in paperback last month while her 17th, The Soldier’s Wife, is published in hardback this week. I’ve clearly got a bit of catching up to do because I’ve only just read Daughters-in-Law and while I found it enjoyable enough I wasn’t bowled over by it.

In theory Daughters-in-Law sounds exactly my cup of tea. It’s the story of Rachel, the mother of three grown-up sons. She’s devoted her life to bringing them up in an idyllic-sounding house near the Suffolk coast. But now the trio have their own lives to lead. The three sons, Edward, Ralph and Luke, have all married and two of them have children of their own. Suddenly Rachel isn’t at the heart of everything, as she once was, and she clearly doesn’t like it. As she tells her endlessly patient husband Anthony: “…nobody wants me to do something I’m good at any more.”

The trouble is that I didn’t care enough about any of these characters. Rachel isn’t exactly the mother-in-law from hell, but she’s blooming annoying, with a tendency to feel sorry for herself when things don’t go her way. Ralph, her middle son, doesn’t know whether he wants to be a city slicker or to drop out and live by the sea, and as for his hippyish wife Petra, well I didn't find her believable at all. I also had a problem with Trollope’s dialogue. It’s full of wise observations, articulately expressed, but everyone sounds exactly the same. If I closed my eyes and listened to it, I’d be hard-pressed to work out who was speaking.

But despite my reservations I’m still keen to read The Soldier’s Wife. It focuses on the lives of army families and sounds a far more substantial read. An army wife interviewed on Woman’s Hour this week glowingly said that Trollope had got every single detail right. Praise indeed.


Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope (Black Swan, £7.99)

Marian Keyes and her new baking book

The best news of the week is that the brilliant Marian Keyes has written a new book - and it's out this month.

For the past two and a quarter years the bestselling Irish novelist has suffered from debilitating depression, unable, as she writes in her latest (and very moving) blog, “to get out of bed or concentrate on a sentence or motivate myself to do anything.”

But on her better days she found the one thing that appealed to her was baking cakes. In fact she found it so comforting that she started writing the recipes down, and hooray, her book on the subject (called Saved by Cake) is out in two weeks time. It’s not only an honest account of how she coped with depression but how baking helped her get through the day. As she baked and worked out the recipes, she found that little by little her depression started to lift.

Keyes has also revealed that she’s almost finished a novel – great news for her millions of fans. Part love story, part thriller, it doesn’t have a title yet but will be out in the autumn. I can’t wait to read it.

 

I discovered Keyes’ novels when I had to spend a month lying on my side after an eye operation. I couldn’t read, use the internet or watch TV, so to pass the time, my daughter downloaded a ton of audio books for me to listen to. The hours flew by as I worked my way through all the books Keyes had written.

I don’t know how she does it but she manages to puts a smile on your face and makes you think. All at the same time. Her books - my favourites are Last Chance Saloon and The Other Side of the Story - are warm, witty and wise. Even when she’s writing about hard-hitting subjects like divorce, depression or alcoholism, she’s never preachy or pious. Her dialogue is true to life (unlike other novelists I could mention) and her characters are utterly believable. And how can you not love a writer who comes up with cracking one-liners like “never trust a man with two mobile phones” and “there’s not much in life that can’t be fixed by cake?” As she's found out herself.

Picture: Neil Cooper

Nails Inc and the rise of the nail bar

It's not just the weather that's chilly right now. The economic climate is bleak too, and shopkeepers are struggling to make a living.

But there’s one bright spot on the horizon – and that’s nail bars. Apparently we can’t get enough of them.

Up and down the country they’re among the fastest-growing businesses on the high street. Sales of nail varnish soared to a staggering £179 million in 2010, while in the last three years nail bars have accounted for a sixth of all new retail outlets. Actually, I can vouch for that. A local town near us boasts four nail bars in one short street!

Former Tatler fashion editor Thea Green spotted the trend way ahead of the crowd. She set up Nails Inc in 1999 after visiting nail bars in New York and realising that customers on this side of the Atlantic would love them too. Nails Inc now has 59 stores across the UK and is making plans to expand abroad.

I’m a big fan of Nails Inc (especially the witty London-themed names of their polishes). My idea of a real treat is to walk into Oxford, sit at the sleek white Nails Inc desk on the first floor at Debenhams and have my nails painted a chic grey shade called Porchester Square. For next time I’ve got my eye on a silver-blue glittery one called Maida Vale or Portobello Polish, which is bright orange. You can even buy an aptly-named base coat called Harley Street and hand cream called Kensington Caviar.

I was a nail-biter as a child and even now, seeing my nails buffed to perfection and expertly polished feels special. Even better, it doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, fat or thin. You can still have style at your fingertips for a fraction of the cost of a new outfit or hamdbag.

PS. If having your nails painted one colour is old hat, try Wah Nails. Founded in London’s East End in 2008 by Sharmadean Reid (who wanted to open a salon where you could have “whatever you wanted on your fingertips”), it turns nails into work of art. You can have everything from gold glittery leopard print nails to miniature stars and stripes. I might just give it a go…

Picture:  SFriedbergPhoto on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Snow - and my embarrassing attempts to learn how to ski

Snow is on my mind. The far north is blanketed in the stuff and there's a cold weather alert for the next couple of days, with temperatures predicted to drop to minus ten degrees. Brrrr. 

Further south there have only been a few flakes, but I saw loads of snow yesterday when my son asked me to drive him to Milton Keynes for a snowboarding session. 

SNO!zone (above) boasts an indoor ski slope made of 1,500 tonnes of real snow and he reckoned it would be the perfect place to hone his skills for his forthcoming school trip. He could hardly contain his excitement as he hired his salopettes and board. But I was distinctly underwhelmed. Why? Because just watching the scores of skiers and snowboarders whizzing stylishy down the slope at SNO!zone reminded me of my ultra-unsuccessful attempts to learn to ski.

The first time I tried was at Aviemore, when my mum’s best friend Sally sweetly took me and my sister on a skiing holiday. We travelled overnight from Victoria station on a Wallace Arnold coach and the moment we arrived we headed straight for the beginners' slope.

The biggest ignominy was that neither of us had any proper skiing gear. We’d learned to sail that summer and for some reason everyone thought sailing waterproofs would be fine to ski in. I’ll never forget the horrified look on our ski instructor’s face as we pitched up in bright yellow oilskin trousers and tops (mercifully we left our matching souwesters at home). Worst still was the fact that the oilskins had no grip at all – so every time we fell over (which was a lot in my case) we slid embarrassingly to the bottom of the mountain.

As well as having no aptitude whatsoever for skiing, I couldn’t get to grips with the dreaded T-bar lift at all. Almost every time I used it I fell off halfway and couldn't scramble out of the way fast enough with my skis on. The upshot was that the whole system had to be stopped countless times as irritated instructors hurried across to disentangle me.

As I watched my son zig-zag elegantly down the slope at Milton Keynes I sat in the café and read my book. Skiing and snowboarding are clearly great fun – but they're not for me. 

The glorious David Hockney exhibition - A Bigger Picture

My serial moving habit is something I’ve written about before. We’ve moved house (take a deep breath here) an embarrassing 12 times in the last 25 years and I’ve got a sneaking feeling that we might do it again one day. 

But one of the places we lived when my children were small was Yorkshire, in a sweet redbrick cottage with horses that popped their heads over next door's fence and views over the rolling fields. They were happy days – days that came flooding back to me last week when I pitched up at the glorious David Hockney exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

Hockney is a Yorkshireman through and through. Now 74, he was born in Bradford, studied at Bradford Art College and seven years ago swapped the delights of sunny LA for life near Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast. "On the road to nowhere," he told Andrew Marr when the broadcaster visited him in Brid for BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.

His new show, which includes oil paintings (many of them massive), charcoal drawings, sketchbooks, iPad paintings and short films, is a breathtaking tribute to the Yorkshire landscape. 

Hockney loves to observe the same place at different times of the day and during different seasons of the year. One of the most stunning collections of paintings is his 2006 Woldgate Woods series - he placed his easel at a fixed point and returned to the same spot countless times to capture it. Another room is devoted to paintings of hawthorn blossom, while the largest gallery features The Arrival of Spring on Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty-Eleven), a huge installation made up of 32 oil paintings and 51 iPad drawings printed on paper.

The colour in many of his paintings is vibrant and bold, with purple roads winding through the countryside, stripey orange hayfields, violet tree trunks and turquoise hills. Some critics, including his own former art teacher, have found them “too garish,” but I adored them. Their zinging colours are a dramatic contrast to the more muted hues of his earlier work but bring the landscape he loves dazzlingly alive.

The tiniest details rekindled memories of our far-flung Yorkshire days. A small, red-roofed farmhouse sitting squarely in a field, a tunnel of trees near Kilham and handsome Salt’s Mill – all these and more were the perfect tonic to a chilly midwinter's day.

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture is at the Royal Academy of Arts till April 9 2012.

Queuing for a free Hummingbird Bakery cake

The queue of expectant customers snaked out of the shop, along the pavement and right round the corner. The occasion was the opening of The Hummingbird Bakery’s fifth London shop and they were giving free cupcakes to the first 1,000 customers to visit. News had spread fast via Twitter and Facebook and the mood was very party-like for a chilly Friday morning in January.

I had a meeting near Angel tube station so I jumped at the chance to line up in the sunshine and get my brilliantly named red velvet cupcake (plus buy three more for everyone at home – they’d be furious if I’d arrived back empty-handed). When I reached the front of the queue the staff were charm personified – and impressively smiley considering they’d been handing out cakes at the rate of knots. A couple of hours later the shop posted the following message on Facebook: "Islington, you managed to munch your way through 1,000 cupcakes in just over two hours! That's some incredible cupcake love."

Judging by the turnout, I’m not the only one partial to a freebie, especially in these bleak economic times. Actually, I’ve been really lucky this week. First my local cinema, the Phoenix Picturehouse, offered members the chance to see a free preview of Carnage, the new film starring Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet. Then my daughter, now a Friend of the Royal Academy (a great birthday present from my sister) sweetly took me to see the fabulous David Hockney exhibition as her guest. 

Like everyone I know, my wallet is stuffed full of bits of paper offering discounts and bargains. I’ve got a coupon from Marks & Spencer offering £5 off if I spend £25 by Tuesday and a £2.50 one from Tesco. The only voucher I’m mystified by is the Sainsbury’s Brand Match one promising me the princely sum of 7p off my next shop.  Still, as the Tesco’s saying goes, every little helps...

The Hummingbird Bakery, 405 St John Street, London EC1V 4AB

Friday book review - Farm Boy by Michael Morpurgo

My husband’s the only person I know who didn’t cry at War Horse. Everyone else wept buckets - during the play, during Steven Spielberg’s lavish, Oscar-nominated movie or (in my case) both. Actually, I think the Times reviewer who reported on the New York film premiere got it just about right when he said: “If you don’t cry in War Horse, it’s because you have no tear ducts.”

But up until this week I didn’t realise that Michael Morpurgo wrote a sequel to War Horse back in 1997. It’s called Farm Boy and HarperCollins Children’s Books, who published a new edition ahead of the film release, kindly sent me a copy.

Farm Boy is set in the same Devon village as War Horse and continues the tale of heroic horse Joey ("strong as an ox, and gentle as a lamb") and Albert, his owner.

The story is narrated by Albert’s teenage great grandson, who lives in London but spends most of his holidays in the countryside with his beloved grandfather, Albert’s son. He loves hearing tales of how Joey was sold to the cavalry and sent to the warfront in France and how 14 year old Albert was so distraught he joined up to find him.

“Now there’s millions of men over there, millions of horses, too,” writes Morpurgo. “Needle in a haystack you might think, and you’d be right. It took him three years of looking, but he never gave up. Just staying alive was the difficult bit.”

Former children’s laureate Morpurgo movingly portrays the bond between grandson and grandfather, particularly as the old man reflects on the past and reveals a secret he’s kept to himself for years. He’s wonderful too at evoking rural life – hay in June, wheat in July and potatoes and cider apples in October. Add in Michael Foreman’s illustrations of the rolling Devon landscape and it’s an irresistible mix. Children who loved War Horse will enjoy finding out what happened to Joey when he returned from the war – and I reckon their parents will too.

Farm Boy by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins, £5.99)

World Book Night 2012 - one of my favourite novels is on the list

Realising that one of my favourite books is one of this year’s 25 World Book Night titles has made me rush to read it all over again.

World Book Night takes place in the UK and Ireland on April 23 (the same day as Unesco’s International Day of the Book and Shakespeare’s birthday) and will see one million books being handed out across the country in a bid to boost reading. The organisers are looking for 20,000 volunteers to give out 24 copies each of the 25 books (the additional books will be given to libraries and schools) but you must apply before February 1.

The 2012 list includes classics like Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Rebecca, as well as more recent titles like The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, Small Island by Andrea Levy and (hooray!) How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.

It’s seven years since my daughter suggested I read How I Live Now. Knowing how much I adore I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (another World Book Night title) she kept telling me to read Rosoff’s modern-day “coming of age” novel. I cheated and bought the audiobook and on a long drive back from a holiday in Cornwall we listened to it together. The journey took five hours and for most of that time we were so mesmerised neither of us uttered a word. The moment we got home I borrowed it to read for real.

Rosoff’s debut novel (published in 2004) can be read, and appreciated, by teenagers and adults alike. Not only that, but like all my favourite books, it’s a novel you can read countless times and always discover something you hadn’t spotted the first time round.

From the novel’s arresting first sentence – “My name is Elizabeth but no one’s ever called me that” – I was gripped. The style is raw, edgy and quite unlike anything I’d ever read before. Writing in the first person, often in the present tense and with scant punctuation, Rosoff gets inside the head of 15-year-old Daisy (as Elizabeth is always called) so convincingly that it’s hard to believe Rosoff once admitted her experience of that age group was “zero.”

The novel is set during wartime in a future England. Rich, spoiled, anorexic New Yorker Daisy arrives to stay with her four beguiling cousins at their dilapidated country farmhouse and inadvertently gets caught up in a terrifying war that changes all their lives. 

One moment I was marvelling at the eccentricities of Daisy’s cousins – 14-year-old Edmond, with a  cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a haircut that looks “like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of the night,” drives her home from the airport by himself in a battered old jeep - and enjoying the bitter-sweet account of the burgeoning love affair between Daisy and Edmond. The next, the reverie ends as the country is suddenly plunged into a shocking and depraved war. 

Rosoff’s writing flows with such assurance that it’s easy to rush through this short novel without stopping to admire its skill. But each time I put this book down I can still hear Daisy’s sharp voice in my head. I can still feel her agony at her separation from Edmond and I still want to know if the cousins can ever put the damage inflicted by the war behind them. To me, that shows what a fine book it is.

PS. You can find out more about World Book Night in the UK and Ireland here. There’s a World Book Night in the US on April 23 too. The books are different but you can find more information here.

Andrew Miller wins 2011 Costa Book of the Year

A star-studded party, buckets of champagne and some of the most talented writers in the business vying for the prestigious Costa book of the year prize.

The presentation ceremony for the 2011 Costa Book Awards was never going to be any old bash. Held at Quaglino’s, the chic London restaurant, hosted by TV presenter Penny Smith (looking resplendent in a long silver dress) and with guests including Maureen Lipman, Esther Rantzen, Natasha Kaplinsky, Jacqueline Wilson, Simon Mayo and Fiona Philips, the party totally lived up to expectations. Even better, Andrew Miller’s brilliant novel, Pure, scooped the top award.

When I reviewed the five Costa category winners (novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children’s book) for a newspaper last week I wrote: “If it was down to me, I’d be hard-pressed to choose between Andrew Miller’s novel and Matthew Hollis’s biography of Edward Thomas – two captivating books that both deserve a wider audience.”

The judges, who included comedian Hugh Dennis, actress Dervla Kirwan and broadcaster Mary Nightingale, clearly thought the same.

Announcing the winner, chair of the judges Geordie Greig admitted that the 90-minute judging session that afternoon had been a “tussle” between two books - Miller’s Pure and Hollis’s Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. “There was quite bitter dissent and argument to find the winner,” he said. “The debate was prolonged with passionate views over two books.”

But in the end Pure triumphed and a slightly stunned-looking Miller stepped on stage to accept his prize – a £30,000 cheque to add to the £5,000 Costa novel prize he’d already won. “You spend three years in a room on your own,” he said, “and by the time you give a book to your publisher you never really know what it is any more.”

Andrew Miller caused a stir earlier in the year when he beat Booker prizewinner Julian Barnes to take the Costa novel prize. But his book is one that stays in your head long after you’ve finished reading. Stylish, compelling and beautifully written, it’s the story of an 18^th century engineer charged with the “delicate and gross” task of demolishing an ancient, crumbling cemetery in the heart of Paris.  

Even though Matthew Hollis didn’t take the overall prize, his biography is one of this year’s must-reads. Engrossing and impeccably researched, it's the account of the five years leading up to Edward Thomas’s death at the war front in 1917 – including his inspirational friendship with American poet Robert Frost, his tricky marriage and his move (encouraged by Frost) from writing prose to poetry.

The other three category winners are remarkable books too. I was one of the judges for the Costa first novel award and out of 87 contenders we chose the gripping Tiny Sunbirds Far Away. Written by paediatric nurse Christie Watson, it’s the tale of Blessing, a 12-year-old Nigerian girl who swaps a privileged upbringing in Lagos for an impoverished life in the Niger Delta following the break-up of her parents’ marriage. At times hilarious, it's an uplifting and moving novel from a writer to watch.

The winner of the Costa children’s book prize was Moira Young’s stunning Blood Red Road, which I reviewed on the blog a couple of weeks back, while the poetry prizewinner was poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy for The Bees, a vibrant collection of love poems, political poems and the moving Last Post, written for the last surviving soldiers to fight in the 1914-1918 war.

PS. As if all this wasn’t exciting enough, Costa managing director John Derkach announced at the party that the the Costa Book Awards are to introduce a new short story award (it won’t be judged alongside the five other category winners.) More details will follow later in the year. 

PPS. Andrew Miller and Christie Watson are both University of East Anglia creative writing graduates – proof once again that creative writing courses really do work!