Friday book review - The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend

It’s hard to believe that this year marks the 30^th anniversary of Sue Townsend’s bestselling The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾. It seems no time at all since I first read it and so many details, from Adrian’s spots to his obsession with Pandora Braithwaite, have stayed in my head to this day.

Penguin has just brought out a special edition of the book to celebrate (with a foreword by mega-Mole fan David Walliams). And if that’s not enough, Townsend’s new novel has just been published in hardback.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year is the story of Eva Beaver, a 50-year-old wife and mother who reacts in a very extreme way when her teenage twins leave home for university. Eva disconnects the phone, chucks tomato soup over her favourite armchair and goes to bed, not for a quick kip, but for a whole year.

After spending her entire married life looking after her astronomer husband Brian and their gifted but distinctly odd children, she wants some time to think.

As word spreads about Eva’s bizarre behaviour, an army of onlookers gathers outside the house. Some are convinced she’s an angel with special powers, while others swamp her with fan mail and set up a ”Woman in Bed” Facebook page in her name.

With her own family utterly wrapped up in themselves, the only kindness comes from two strangers – the window cleaner and a dreadlocked white van man who helps her empty her bedroom of everything except her bed and paints the whole room white. Her mother is as mystified as everyone else and tells a local TV news team that Eva’s always been “a bit strange.”

The Woman Who Went To Bed for a Year is a patchy read and it’s occasionally hard to keep track of all the walk-on characters, but it’s also a funny, poignant and often bleak look at modern family life. One moment you’re chuckling at Eva’s tortuous instructions to her inept husband on how to “do” Christmas. The next you’ve got a lump in your throat at the ghastliness of being married to a two-timing husband who’s more interested in who’s going to cook his dinner than in talking to his wife. Actually, I reckon Brian’s bedtime routine – which involves gargling, spitting and hunting for spiders under the bed with a fishing net  - would be grounds for divorce. Let alone his affairs, sludge-coloured clothes and dreadful mother.

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend (Michael Joseph, £18.99)

My Supertramp scoop

The interview Prince Harry gave to CBS News at the end of his super-successful Latin America tour didn’t exactly tell us anything we didn’t know already – but it did remind me of my one and only conversation with Princess Diana.

In 1984 I was a feature writer on Woman’s Own magazine, covering everything from stories we thoughtlessly called TOTs (short for Triumph over Tragedy) to pop interviews. Now and again I try and impress my teenagers with stories about the days when I rubbed shoulders with George Michael and Morrissey but they roll their eyes with boredom and change the subject.

Anyway, for some reason Princess Diana asked to visit Woman’s Own one wintery afternoon. She was expecting Prince Harry at the time and when she walked into the features department on the fourth floor she looked incredibly thin and drawn - in a grey coat-dress that drained all the colour from her face.

The editor had instructed all the feature writers to sit at our desks and look like we were working – which was difficult, of course, with a royal superstar in our midst. By the time Diana got to my desk I was so nervous that I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Which is your favourite rock group?” I asked.

She replied with charming alacrity. “All the papers say Duran Duran are my favourites but that’s not right,” she said. “I like Supertramp best.”

Supertramp weren't exactly cutting edge at the time and it was hardly the scoop of the century – but I was thrilled to hear Prince William list his mum’s favourite music in an interview with Fearne Cotton a few years back. Elton John, George Michael, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Bryan Adams – and yes, SUPERTRAMP!

Eating toast and listening to Sade

A pair of size 11 trainers came thundering down the stairs at top speed. “What is THAT?” said my teenage son, gesticulating at my iPod speakers.

“THAT,” I replied happily, “is one of my old Sade albums. I haven’t played it in years.” “I’m not surprised,” he said. “It sounds like the sort of thing they’d play at an 1980s night club.”

I could have taken offence at my son's scathing tone but actually, he had a point. It’s exactly the sort of thing I listened to in the 1980s. That’s why I like it.

Twenty-five years ago Sade was the girl we all wanted to be. I once interviewed her for Woman’s Own at her flat in a disused London fire station and she was stylish and stunning, with the most gorgeous, sultry voice. 

Just listening to her sing Your Love is King transports me straight back to my tiny studio flat off Clapham Common. I’d stagger home from a hard day door-stepping Fergie for the Evening Standard (she lived round the corner in Lavender Gardens so it was always me who got sent to knock on her door and ask when she was getting married). I’d pour myself a glass of Chardonnay, make a piece of toast (I didn’t possess a cooker) and if it wasn’t Sade playing on my ropey old cassette recorder it’d be Human League or Paul Weller. One of Peter Gabriel's guitarists lived in the flat below so I had to play my music extra loud to drown his out. 

I’d completely forgotten about Sade until I spotted a story this week saying that she’s trumped the amazing Adele in Billboard’s 2012 list of high-earning musicians. Now 53, Sade apparently earned a staggering £10.5m last year after her first North American tour for a decade and the release of an album called The Ultimate Collection. She was the sixth top earner (Taylor Swift came top and Adele tenth) – proof that even if you haven’t had a number one record for a while you can still be a superstar.

Primary school children ask the trickiest questions

My sophisticated student daughter hates to admit it but she liked everything about her North Yorkshire primary school, from the home corner and golden time to skipping in the playground and dressing up as her favourite book character.

I loved taking her into the classroom every morning (she banned me from venturing past the school gate once she reached the heady heights of year 2), having a chat with her teacher and admiring the works of art festooning the walls.

But now, 15 years later, I’m visiting primary schools again – sometimes to interview heads and teachers, but often to talk about writing books. I’ve visited loads in the last 12 months and the sessions are always lively, fun and utterly unpredictable. You can prepare your talk as precisely as a military campaign but you always get a couple of questions that completely floor you.

I recently pitched up at a local primary school clutching a copy of my novel, The Rise and Shine Saturday Show, and several of my favourite children’s books (Madeline, The Swish of the Curtain and Clarice Bean.) After half an hour of talking to the four to seven year olds (and them talking to me about their Batman and Barbie books), the eight to 11 year olds were led into the school hall by their teachers.

I told them a bit about my newspaper days, read the opening chapter of my book and then turned things over to them. Scores of small hands shot up. That was great – you don’t want a hall full of bored, silent children. Their questions were searching and incisive, ranging from where writers get their ideas from to what were my favourite children’s books. That was easy – I thrust my battered copies of Madeline and The Swish of the Curtain in the air.

But then like a bunch of seasoned newspaper hacks, the children began lobbing in a few trickier questions. Did I spend more time writing than looking after my children? How many books will I write in my lifetime? And finally they cut to the chase with a belter – how much do I earn? Cue a long silence. For once in my life, I was completely stuck for words.

The Little Paris Kitchen - book and TV series

My favourite piece from yesterday’s Sunday Times was an interview with new cookery sensation Rachel Khoo in Style magazine.

Rachel is the hotly-tipped young chef whose gorgeous-looking cookery book, The Little Paris Kitchen, hits the bookshops this week. Not only that, from March 19 we’ll be able to see her in a six-part BBC2 series of the same name.

But the reason the feature caught my eye in the first place was that Khoo’s career took off after she moved to Paris from Croydon six years ago to work as an au pair. When the art and design graduate arrived in Paris she couldn’t speak a word of French and didn’t have any culinary expertise. Now look at her. She used her earnings from her au pair job to pay for her cordon bleu training and at 31 is an established food stylist, writer and cook. From her tiny Parisian kitchen she whisks up delicious delicacies like potato and pear gallette with Roquefort and cassoulet soup with duck and Toulouse sausage dumplings.

It can’t have been easy starting a career from scratch in an unfamiliar city, and she admits that it was “difficult and lonely” for the first two years. I can well imagine. I was an au pair in Paris for a few months when I was 18 and even though the family I worked for was lovely, it was tough. I remember wandering around Ile de la Cité and Notre Dame on my day off, not knowing a soul and having to fend off leery old men who said they wanted to paint my picture. Hmmm. A likely story.

Now I’m worrying about my daughter, who’s studying French at university and will be off to live in Paris soon. But if I got by with my hopeless French and Rachel Khoo made such a stunning success of her move, then I’m sure she’ll have an amazing time. And return with impeccable French too…

What are eyebrows for?

“I’m just off to have my eyebrows shaped,” I told my teenage son.

He looked up momentarily from his Xbox game, an astonished look on his face. “You’re having your eyebrows shaved?” he said. “Isn’t that what happens when people get drunk at parties?”

Well not at the parties I go to, it doesn’t. But when I quizzed my son he told me about a friend of his who’d fallen asleep at an all-night do and woke up a few hours later to discover some mean person had shaved his eyebrows off. The effect was so dire that the poor boy resorted to drawing them back on in black felt-tip pen, which of course looked a million times worse.

Anyway, that unfortunate incident got us to discussing a thorny issue. What exactly are eyebrows for? Whether they’re bushy (à la Denis Healy) or sleek (à la Madonna) they’re pretty odd things really. Whatever beauty writers say about them framing your face I’m not at all convinced.

My son quickly got on the case and came up with the following answer. Apparently eyebrows are there to keep water, sweat, dirt and debris (yuk!) out of our eyes. So when we sweat or get caught in a downpour the arch shape of our eyebrows cleverly diverts the rain to the sides of our faces. How smart is that?

My son is the finest finder-outer I know. He troubleshoots my regular computer crises, suggests new music I might like (Lulu and the Lampshades for one) and can give an hour-long lecture about the origins of Aerogel.

Even more useful, his IT know-how is second to none.  When I got a new computer recently I didn’t have to lift a finger. He and my daughter unpacked the box, set it up in ten minutes flat and then typed out an idiot’s guide for their techno-dinosaur mum to follow. The way things are going they’ll be running the entire household single-handed in no time at all.

PS. After my recent post about London's Big Egg Hunt I've just spotted my second giant egg. Only 198 to go!