Having seen a preview of the new TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivalson 18 October on Disney+), all I can tell you is that it came as a huge relief to me. Its producers have not, thank goodness, felt the need to re-educate the lustful denizens of the rural county of Rutshire – not even that entitled cad, Rupert Campbell-Black – and the result is a feast for sore eyes. Across eight extremely buoyant episodes, exuberant bums abound.
I won’t claim that Cooper’s work is art – though there is, of course, an art to it. But I’m deeply attached to her. Her romances about posh girls in Fulham, a place of which I then knew nothing, got me through A-levels, and ever since I’ve thought of her as a kind of guardian angel. In 2006, I interviewed her at home in Gloucestershire four days before I was to be married (reader, I had to file the piece before I went on honeymoon). When I confessed this to dear, kind Jilly, she was horrified. Why, she wanted to know, was I not lying at home with cucumber slices on my eyes?
On the day before the wedding – still no veg on any part of my body – I was typing, frantically, and the door bell rang. Outside was a man with a bottle of champagne in his arms. It came courtesy of Cooper, with her congratulations and an exhortation that I get help for my workaholism.
Celebrating organs
To London’s South Bank to watch the groovy young organist James McVinnie wig out (technical term) on the Royal Festival Hall’s enormous organ, an instrument that was 70 this year. The programme included work by Byrd and Liszt as well as a performance of Riff-Raff by the British composer Giles Swayne, who was in the audience and looking rather dashing in a black turtleneck.
Riff-Raff had its premiere in 1983, and listening to it is incredibly exciting: a kind of prog-rock experience. Among its influences are the music of Senegal, Philip Glass-style minimalism and boogie-woogie, and even a non-expert like me understands that it demands a lot from the organist. As McVinnie played its famously wild pedal solo, my friend Tom whispered that his legs, flying from left to right and back again, looked a bit like Kermit’s when he sang (It’s Not Easy) Bein’ Green on The Muppet Show.
Miranda July fever
Prada is running an ad campaign in which a model with a luxe handbag is photographed engaged on a call to what is described as “the Miranda July hotline”. If this service really exists, I fear I may soon have to dial it myself. It took me ages to finish July’s novel All Fours, in which a middle-aged woman embarks on a crazed odyssey of experimental sex and interior decoration, largely because I couldn’t bear to read it in public (when a young guy on a train saw it in my bag and winked at me, my entire body turned crimson). Even now I’ve finally made it to the end, I remain in the grip of an obsession. I could talk about it for ever.
Not that I’m the only one. A minor character in the book makes a particularly, er, indelible impression on the reader, and my closest friend, whose identity I’m going to protect here, has naughtily taken to texting her name to me at random moments during the day. “Audra…, Audra…, Audra…,” whispers my phone, the screen of which is now cracked, my having dropped it on a pavement in a moment of high peri-menopausal perturbation.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
