Are You Sitting Comfortably? November Read
Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe
Well, it’s officially that time of year when the call of the armchair with a little glass of something is the only way to spend an evening. What better way to cheer up those rainy dark evenings than a side-splitting diary from one of the most sharp, wise comic voices in the bookish world.
It’s twenty years since author Nina Stibbe left London and ten years since the publication of her beloved and prizewinning, Love, Nina, which chronicled the laugh-out-loud trials and tribulations of being a live-in nanny in 1980s London. So, dear Are You Sitting Comfortably friends, I couldn’t be more over the moon that the brilliantly funny Nina Stibbe is back with a diary of her return to London in her sixty-first year.
Went to London, Took the Dog sees Nina back in town with her dog, Peggy. Together they take up lodging in the house of writer Deborah (Debby) Moggach in Camden for ‘a year-long sabbatical’. It’s a break from married life back in Cornwall, or even perhaps a fresh start altogether. Debby doesn’t have many demands – only to water the garden, watch for toads, and defrost the odd pie – so Nina is free to explore the city she once called home. Between scrutinising her son’s online dating developments, navigating the politics of the local pool, and taking detergent advice at the laundrette, this diary of a sixty-year-old runaway reunites us with the inimitable voice of Love, Nina, as the writer becomes, as she puts it, ‘a proper adult’ at last.
Nina Stibbe is the author of six books. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award at the 2014 National Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year. The book was adapted by Nick Hornby for BBC Television. She is the author of four novels, all of which have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Her third novel Reasons to be Cheerful (2019) is the only novel to date to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award for comic fiction. Her latest novel, One Day I Shall Astonish The World, was published in April 2022.
Rebecca and I can’t wait to welcome Nina to November’s Are You Sitting Comfortably Live on November 14th.
We are not being sponsored this month for Are You Sitting Comfortably as Rebecca and I both being dog owners wanted to bring the plight of 10 week old puppy Cetina to your attention. Cetina was found abandoned by the side of a road near a river with her two sisters (Cetina is a river in Croatia).
You may ask why champion this pup when there are so many but if we all try and help
A friend of the lovely Niki Downs found the three puppies by the side of the road and simply couldn’t walk on by. She took them home, has looked after them, got them rabies jabs, chipped them and organised EU passports.
They are thought to be 10 weeks old and traditional Croatian Sheepdogs but mixed with either terrier of silk coat Collie. If a home is found for Cetina then she will be in the UK on the 25th November. But time is running out for her, her two sisters have both been adopted by dog lovers in the UK but she needs to find a home by the end of the week.
If you feel you could open your home to her then please do get in touch with either me or with Niki Downs on Instagram.
I hope that we can bring you good news about Cetina at the beginning of our Live next Tuesday with Nina Stibbe at 7pm.