ALEXANDRA SHULMAN’S NOTEBOOK: Finding real pleasure in the quiet side of Marriage
The BBC’s four-part series Marriage has been widely admired for the way it portrays the mundanity of real life.
A TV drama without kitchen islands and ocean views, designer clothes and hot sex. Now there’s a thing.
The five-star acclaim is for the pitch-perfect portrayal of a ‘normal’ couple, depicted in all their dull, repetitive, Lakeland catalogue hall furniture and saggy jim-jam lives.
And what should we conclude?
That all of this is really rather lovely. Marriage between two good people both short on interesting observations and a little repressed is a safe place, a bulwark against the bad stuff that happens in life.
Contrast this fictional drama to the real-life drama playing out in Manchester Crown Court involving Ryan Giggs and his ex-girlfriend Kate Greville.
Apart from a rather amusing mention of the footballer’s obsession with how to correctly load a dishwasher, evidence of what most of us would regard as normal life is pretty scarce.
BBC1 drama Marriage starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker who play couple Ian and Emma
In tandem with the recent Wagatha Christie case during which the Vardys and Rooneys sparred through social media and with displays of designer handbags, the somewhat insalubrious behaviour of WAGs might seem like fiction to most of us.
But it is reality. Even if at times you feel that you couldn’t make it up.
Conversely, the bog-standard, mutually supportive existence of the characters played by Sean Bean and Nicola Walker in Marriage is entirely fictional and cleverly designed to push all our buttons.
Unlike the world of Premier League footballers, which seems so alien, we can identify with this timid couple.
There is a kind of smug pleasure in the idea that our lives are better and purer for being played out in a quiet world like theirs, where we can take refuge in something as commonplace as a cuddle. Even though, recognisable as it is, that is still fiction.
That Roman hooter makes Sean so sexy
WHILE Sean Bean’s usual attractiveness is quite well disguised in Marriage, I think I’ve identified an ingredient of male sex appeal – a beaky nose.
Bean has the desirable, straight Roman kind of hooter – as does the appealing Adrian Dunbar who, along with his nose, is surely one of the main reasons many of us love Line Of Duty.
You can’t ditch the live-in nanny, Kate
Nanny is a trigger word. So I begin this item with a health warning.
It is about nannies and specifically the Cambridges’ nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo who, when they move into their new home on the Windsor Park Estate, will no longer be living in with the family as she has for the past eight years.
The mere mention of nannies causes palpitations in some who think they epitomise privilege and the delegation of motherhood.
But I could never have brought up my son and edited Vogue without the amazing series of live-in nannies. And the key here is ‘live-in’.
The Cambridges’ nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo who will no longer be living with the family
Having a nanny live with you gives a vital security blanket when all safeguards let you down and suddenly you don’t have childcare.
It doesn’t mean they work 24/7 but, in extremis, they can rally round. Obviously William and Kate can afford to bring in extra help when needed and Carole Middleton is said to be on speed-dial to step in.
But, even so, losing your live-in when you have three young children and a busy life adds another element of stress to the endless logistics of childcare.
If the Royal couple had asked my advice – which oddly they haven’t – I would have said: ‘Whatever you do, don’t ditch the live-in nanny.’
Age is no barrier to picking a good read
Nicholas Pearson, the popular 57-year-old publishing director of Fourth Estate, had just secured a two-book deal with Craig Brown, the bestselling author and Daily Mail columnist, when he learnt he was being made redundant.
This is the latest in a series of self-sabotage moves by the industry. Nick, whose roster of chart-topping writers includes, along with Brown, Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen, was a victim of publishing’s obsessive desire to be seen to be engaging with youth (with the added bonus of saving on salaries).
The idea that you need to be young to sign up young writers or have an understanding of what younger readers want is dim-witted and patronising.
Young people I know enjoy reading exactly the same things as I. The fact that the hugely popular Sally Rooney (the kind of golden egg that all publishers yearn to discover) became a star was not because she was young. People of all ages read her novels.
A glance at the bestseller lists suggests that age isn’t a big deterrent of success.
They feature Richard Osman’s (age 51) retirement home detective stories, Miriam Margolyes’ (81) memoir, Bonnie Garmus’s (64) debut novel Lessons In Chemistry and the Rev Richard Coles’s (60) murder mystery.
In mint condition to fight the mozzies
I’ve spent my life plagued by being attractive to mosquitos. So it’s deeply frustrating to read that these nasty blighters have such sophisticated olfactory systems which mean it’s near impossible to avoid them tracking me down.
What hasn’t emerged though, in this recent Rockefeller University study on the subject, is why they home in on some people and not others.
If you are also allergic to their bites, it’s no fun being a mosquito’s love-object – not least because you have to dress in full Taliban-approved cover-up at night, rather than shimmy around in anything that reveals a scrap of skin.
I’ve tried pretty well everything to deter them but on our next holiday I’ll put my faith in peppermint oil which I gather mozzies hate, rather than that more common pungent citronella.
Tracks of my years I can’t bear to lose
Every day something else happens to draw attention to my age but last week’s 40th anniversary of CDs was particularly unsettling.
Surely it can’t be 40 years since I bought my first disc, and was the proud owner of a Sony Discman?
Now those discs are gathering dust on a shelf. They have joined the collection of vinyl albums lined up on the floor and which, although rarely played, I can’t bear to lose.
Items that were once so central to my existence are now turning into museum pieces of my life.
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