Nina Stibbe grew up in Leicester and moved to London in the 1980s, spending two years as nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. Stibbe’s experiences became the basis for her semi-fictionalised memoir Love, Nina, named nonfiction book of the year at the National Book awards in 2014 and shortlisted for Waterstones’ book of the year. In 2016 it was adapted by Nick Hornby for a BBC TV series starring Helena Bonham-Carter. Stibbe’s novels Man At the Helm and Paradise Lodge were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. Her next book, An Almost Perfect Christmas, about festive cooking and customs, is out in November. She lives in Cornwall.
1 | Travel
The Pendennis Castle is one of four gleaming class 57 locomotives that stand on Paddington station’s platform one – beside the war memorial and Paddington Bear – waiting to haul the sleeper train down to Cornwall six nights a week. Board from 10.30pm and go to the bar for a drink or romance, or take a cocoa back to your berth and get into your pyjamas. The last doors clang shut and the whistle blows at a quarter to midnight – watch London slip by until the flange-squeal and rhythmic clackety-clack lull you to sleep. Breakfast will arrive before St Michael’s Mount comes into view and you roll into Penzance.
2 | Gallery
Visitors will be delighted to find the gallery reopened and captivated by That Continuous Thing, an exhibition exploring 100 years of ceramics in more than 140 works. Jesse Wine’s I’m just going to the shops, do you want anything? (2016) might put you in mind of a Morandi still life, or perhaps a bunch of semi-collapsed milk cartons for the recycling. My favourite – Anthea Hamilton’s cheery, glazed stoneware boots, including Wavy Slab Boot 1 – reminded me of Crystal Tipps and Alistair.
3 | Film
More impressive even than the brilliant cast or its beguiling CGI is that Okja – Bong Joon-Ho and co-scriptwriter Jon Ronson’s film about mass-produced meat – manages to be so utterly wonderful. One minute, young Mija plays happily in the South Korean countryside with Okja, her genetically engineered super-pig, the next, Okja has been snatched by the multinational conglomerate that bred her. Bong is clearly exploring the notion of animals being both our pets and our food. Mija gives chase, skidding down a dusty ravine, and a rescue mission ensues. The film is funny and thrilling, but later scenes – in the laboratory and slaughterhouse – are quite rightly brutal and harrowing. Bong seems to be asking us: “Can you live with this?”
4 | Music
My son Alf has a friend who is unknowingly in charge of my playlists and responsible for my watching a video of Benjamin Clementine performing Cornerstone. Clementine sings and talks, loosely hunched over his piano, and it’s as though he hasn’t intended to say so much and it has overwhelmed him. And it overwhelms you. Similarly, Adios is reminiscent of Nina Simone covering a happy old song and inadvertently telling of her woes. My commitment to music extends to putting my phone into an empty jug (for loudness), but in order to see this man I’m going to drive an eight-hour round trip and share a motel room on the M5.
5 | Television
I wasn’t sure I’d like a TV show about making a TV show about women’s wrestling in the 80s. There’s a lot of hairspray, high-cut leotards and racial stereotyping. And, to be honest, the funniest lines are the straight-up offensive ones delivered by old-school sexist director Sam Sylvia (aviators and coke in his tache), but there’s something subversive going on too. For instance, a “new mom” who actually has to haul a baby around, and another who has an abortion but doesn’t share with us her inner turmoil. The characters (women) begin to work together and bond and wrestle and it’s a joy to watch them just getting on with it all.
6 | Graphic novel
The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship
This first appeared in weekly comic The Phoenix, and is now a gorgeous book. Far out at sea, the Mary Alice – a ghost ship, lost in time – is crewed by sailors from various moments in history. Meanwhile, on dry land, there’s a tycoon hell-bent on world domination and the curious, brave Danielle Quayle Reid. Graphic novels can be visually exhausting, but not this one. Fred Fordham’s exquisite ligne claire drawings – reminiscent of Hergé – are beautifully in tune with Philip Pullman’s storytelling; spacious here, frantic there, and everything in between.
7 | Festival
I go for the beautiful setting, river dips, posh cakes and charming encounters, like in 2010 when Jarvis Cocker signed my friend’s tea towel, and 2015, when Neel Mukherjee bought my mother a pint of cider, and last year, when Olivia Laing swam past me in the river and then gave her book talk with wet hair. The Wardrobe Department is always a highlight too. This year I’m particularly excited to see Hollie McNish perform her extraordinary poetry. And, I’m doing my first life-drawing class (half expecting Eimear McBride to be at the next easel, asking to borrow my pencil sharpener).
