It rained for 48 hours straight in New York this week and, stuck inside with two kids and no childcare, we watched the movie Paddington approximately 108 times. There is nothing I can’t tell you about this film, from the fact that the first exterior shot of Paddington station is, clearly, Marylebone, to the insanity of its timeline. (Briefly: the film is set in present-day London, but Paddington’s aunt and uncle were discovered in Peru by an Edwardian explorer, whose 10-year-old daughter grows up to be Paddington’s arch-enemy. By rights, she should be about 117, but is instead played by Nicole Kidman as a sexy evil lady of not even 50.)

Why does no one have mobile phones? Why does the Trellick Tower loom so large in the landscape? Why do I want Hugh Bonneville to adopt me and let me live either in his attic in Windsor Gardens, or anywhere in Downton Abbey? Mrs Brown is played by Sally Hawkins, who is my age, and Bonneville is 13 years older, but why do I still identify with the children in these movies and never the parents?

At A-level, we were made to read King Lear on a continuous loop for two years until the two funniest lines became: “out, vile jelly!” and “Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” I can say with some confidence that the two funniest lines in Paddington are, “Your call is moderately important to us” and “It’s more a set of guidelines than a binding ethos”, although when Julie Walters says to Kidman, “Oh, shut your cake hole,” I laugh out loud every time.

This may be a sign of nervous exhaustion. Doris Lessing, in the kind of statement novelists make and that is taken by non-novelists as proof that they ought to get out more, once said she believed she might stare at a wall for years and never exhaust its possibilities. Now I understand what she was saying, for I feel the same way about Paddington.

Yesterday my dad came by for an hour and watched the first half of the film with us. “That’s Marylebone, not Paddington,” he said, and it felt like the start of a new shared religion.

A novel approach to fashion

In the New York Times this week the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voiced her ambivalence about appearing in the current ad campaign for Boots No 7, and talked about fashion in a way that reminded me there is almost nothing you can say on this subject that doesn’t damn you in someone else’s eyes.

Even Adichie, who is excellent, was mildly annoying. “I very quickly realised that if you want to be seen as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror.” (Really? Still?) She made the case that fashion, the provenance of women, is belittled in a way that sport, the provenance of men, is not, which is I think true, although as a point, it is overshadowed by the fact that what happens to women who fail to meet standards imposed by the fashion industry is not analogous to what happens to men who don’t like sport.

Anyway, it was fun to see the novelist-as-model and she was honest about why she did it. “I thought it might be fun, and then they will give me free makeup. And I’m always up for free things.”

Stains: massive

I’m sensitive on the subject of fashion this week. Looking up from the TV, I glanced in a mirror and saw I was actually listing to one side. This is what happens when the babysitter goes on holiday: hair unwashed for three days, unspecified stains – probably yoghurt from this morning, but it could be macaroni cheese from three days ago – on my jogging bottoms, and my heart sinking at the thought of a meeting next week, for which I will at the very least have to get in the shower. As it carried on raining, I pushed the double buggy up and down the lobby of my building until the mail woman looked at me and said: “It must be hard.”

“Is it the stains?” I said. She looked horrified. “No, no, you look great,” she said, and backed away slowly as if retreating from a grizzly bear.