I'm regularly sent audio books but I haven't added much to the Ears on Wheels list lately, and now I must review my audio-book-listening procedure, because of course I'm no longer spending half my life in the Fiesta.
You can see what a pleasurable time I had taking Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Patti Boyd and Clarissa Dickson Wright et al out with me for the day.Not all at once of course (and I didn't claim NHS passenger mileage either ) but the Fiesta was a very sociable place to be as I listened to the narratives of their lives inbetween visits and understood a great deal more about people who seem to have been public property for years. We think we know them, we even think we have a right to know them, but we don't and some have coped better with that fame and intrusion than others.
Now I'll own up, there has been one life I have been desperate to fall out of that jiffy bag.
The very minute I knew the book had been published I put in a plea and as the Donna Leon's and the Andy McNab's have flowed in regularly somehow I just knew last Saturday's parcel was the audio version of Dawn French's book, Dear Fatty.
Just four years my junior (that cheered me up and Madonna's not far behind me and Dawn) and somehow Dawn's career and comedy has tracked and tripped through the last twenty- five or so years of my life as something of a constant. As long as I've been a mother really and somehow those early days were a good if not essential time in my life to keep in close touch with my sense of humour if not my brain.
It happens, and doubtless for many other women too, I think there are funny women who you make sure you never miss, whatever they are doing; Jennifer Saunders, Victoria Wood, Julie Walters have never failed to make me laugh. Like favourite and respected authors, I can forgive all lesser moments in the face of all those supremely memorable ones.
Thinking Dawn and memorable what about that shadow dancing with Darcy Bussell in The Vicar of Dibley?
Then that memory of Victoria Wood's live sketch of the ante-natal class with the midwife demonstrating childbirth using a knitted uterus (woman gets to the birth moment, glances down in horror, design fault, no ribbing) still has me in stitches makes me smile.
Julie Walters in Acorn Antiques, how many countless times at work did one of us walk in stooped Mrs Overall-style over a tray of home-made sherry in mugs tea and macaroons and say ' here you are Miss Babs.'
I think, above all else, I relate to the idea that Dawn is very much her own person and she loves her man to bits, we saw a TV interview recently where Dawn said as much and said so very endearingly. To me, people's lives remain endlessly fascinating and I know Dawn's like most has been a life tinged with both great sadness and happiness so I'm interested to see how that narrative has created one of the nation's funniest, most self-deprecating yet most confident of women.So with a London-by-train trip yesterday, an overnight stay and a home-again-by-train trip today it will still be Ears on Wheels and it's time for Dear Fatty read by Lisa Tarbuck. Too much audiology training makes me nervous about iPods, I'll have the thing on at a whisper, but for the sake of Dawn I'll risk flattening my cilia and report back.
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