When I was a teenager, David Lodge, who died last week at the age of 89, meant more to me than any other writer. It wasn’t only that his novels were so wildly entertaining and funny. My parents had been born into the optimistic but class-ridden postwar world he caught with such precision, and for this reason I saw his tales of campus life as helpful guides to the more baffling aspects of adult behaviour.
There was no getting away from the fact that my father, a university lecturer, had an amazing amount in common with both conformist Philip Swallow and randy Morris Zapp, the two professors who enjoy a transatlantic exchange in Changing Places (the first of a trilogy set in Rummidge, a city modelled on Birmingham, where Lodge both lived and taught).
Once I’d somehow emerged into the adult world myself, Lodge was at the top of the list of people I longed to interview, and in 2008 I finally made this happen. But, having travelled to his bright, modern house in Edgbaston, fully prepared to die of mirth on his living room carpet, a surprise awaited me. In person, Lodge, though clever and sensitive and overall quite delightful, was very far from a laugh fest. He told me that when I described his life to him, so successful and replete, it sounded wonderful – and yet, he’d never been able fully to enjoy it himself.
Writers, of course, are often very little like their books – and what’s wrong with that? The imagination is all. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help myself.
At the end of our encounter, Mary, his wife of almost 50 years, returned home. She was a hoot, and in her presence Prof Lodge perked up exponentially. On the train home, I developed a theory that she had secretly helped him with his most comic books, a bit like – spoiler alert – the narrator of Meg Wolitzer’s feminist novel of literary life, The Wife.
Ladybird, ladybird
If I’m fascinated (in a twisted way) with the trailer for the forthcoming Netflix series With Love, Meghan, in which the Duchess of Sussex can be seen serving bruschetta that look like ladybirds, I’m completely obsessed with the Daily Mail’s tenaciously rapid response to its appearance.
No sooner had the clip been released than its correspondents had discovered that the house where everything happens is not Meghan’s, but that of a rich, “philanthropic” couple in their 70s; that the chopping boards we can see in the kitchen are made of black walnut, cost £60 and provide an “easy aesthetic vibe”; and that the pudding Meghan makes “appears to resemble Eton Mess”. It’s quite the achievement to make a melange of strawberries and cream sound sinister, even menacing, but somehow the Mail has done it.
Yellow warnings
By the time you read this, the country may be blanketed in snow – though in my mind, it’s been this way for days. Over Christmas, I read Andrew Miller’s perfect new novel, The Land in Winter, about two unhappy couples who find themselves marooned in the West Country during the famously fierce winter of 1962/63.
In the 21st century, we’re a little hysterical about weather – sometimes with good reason and sometimes not. Personally, I’m not in a panic about the prospect of blizzards; we’re a long way now from 1963, when people in Oxford could drive their cars to their neighbours across a frozen Thames.
No, what’s filling me with trepidation is the fact that, since 1 January, daffodils have been happily blooming in our garden. To pinch from TS Eliot, the soul’s sap quivers. Never has their mellow yellow seemed less cheery.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
