In the autumn of 1635, a man arrived in London. In itself, this was not an unusual event: London was a thriving metropolis, and the seventeenth century was a time of rapid urban growth. People from across the country (and world) arrived in the capital every day. But Thomas Parr was no ordinary man. He had recently celebrated his 152nd birthday.
I had never been above a TV dinner, nor indeed television itself, though friends and colleagues from the literary and academic worlds seemed to watch it only at a remove, with the same kind of snobbish irony, perhaps, that gives us terms like ‘Daddy’s famous stir fry’. In intellectual circles, it can seem as though the only acceptable roles for television are self-conscious flights of regressive stress release or insincere mental flexing. Either you must act confessional about your shit-munching suckerdom for Succession, or you must make like Alan Bennett, semi-seriously professing Love Island’s genealogical relation to the Bloomsbury group. But television, to my mind, was neither a source of shame at this time nor of vigorous mental exercise. It was just entertainment, for which there is always a place.
That place, for me, was the sofa, on which, come the evening, I would have exhausted the day’s more obligatory distractions – slow book research and robotic thesis writing, punctuated by trips to the toilet and bouts of deep breathing through challenging pelvic events. My nightly TV watching began to assume a role like that of dinner itself – something you are going to do, whether or not the content is good.
Consider yourself kissed — and hugged and understood — by Jessica Stanley's smart, oh-so-relatable tale of a woman who seems to have assembled all the pieces of a happy life but feels like she's lost herself in the process.
What sets Consider Yourself Kissed apart from other novels about overwhelmed mothers who feel stretched to the limit and are disappointed by their partner's level of engagement is the way it braids its utterly sympathetic heroine's domestic drama with the concurrent rollercoaster of British politics and cataclysmic global events. In other words, it's a reminder that our life and our times are intrinsically connected.
There’s just one problem. Superyachts are a terrible asset class in that they lose value faster than you can say bonfire of the vanities. “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs,” argued the Financial Times, “only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.” But then again, as Veblen understood, maybe that’s part of the point?