THE TICK OF TWO CLOCKS

A TALE OF MOVING ON JOAN BAKEWELL

Virago, 192pp, £16.99 National treasure Joan Bakewell, in her eighties, decides to prepare for the ending of her days by moving from the Primrose Hill townhouse she has lived in for 50 years to something more manageable containing a bedsit for the carer she will inevitably need. This, then, wrote Rachel Cooke in the

Observer, is the ‘story of the move, and of how its downsizing author comes to slough off – sometimes painfully – the many things she will no longer have room for’.

Born in 1933, Bakewell is of that gilded generation who ‘had the luck to buy property when she did and watch its value soar underneath her’, wrote Sarah Ditum in the Times – a point not lost on Roger Lewis, in the

Telegraph. ‘Bully for you, dear,’ he responded to her statement that ‘We oldies with our own homes are lucky indeed.’ ‘Equivalent youngsters today,’ Lewis went on, ‘will find her life reprehensively perfect’ and the ‘capital gain’ from the sale of her house nothing short of ‘obscene’. Not for her, ‘a charity almshouse or maximum-security twilight home smelling of cabbage’, he sniffed.

Cooke, too, admitted she was ‘stabbed again and again with envy at [Bakewell’s] good fortune’. Even the move itself ‘turns out to be as seamless as flashy hosiery’. ‘To be clear, I don’t begrudge her anything,’ Cooke insisted, while Ditum thought her ‘creative solution’ to old age ‘gracefully described’ and an ‘inspiration’. Even Lewis, possibly in a fit of remorse, conceded the book was ‘an eloquent poetry of departures… fun and brightness concealing, perhaps, her life’s darker corners’.