Went to London, Took the Dog, Nina Stibbe

Love, Nina, has become one of my favourite books and I’ve read everything Stibbe has written since and (mostly) enjoyed it. This book is quite different. Aged twenty, Nina left Leicestershire for London to become a nanny for MK as Sam Frears’ carer. Forty years later, she leaves her home in Cornwall for what she is telling herself is ‘a year’s sabbatical in London’. Is it? Or is she leaving her husband? Arrived in London, she rents a room in Deborah Moggach’s house (handy). Why would a woman of sixty decide to try living like a twenty-year-old again, when she has a perfectly good home of her own? London, she finds, is littered with fast food debris. London is very expensive. This is hot news!

Since this is a diary, she records everything and I mean, everything. She goes out for a coffee, writes it down. Meets up with son/daughter/MK/Sam Frears/ old friends/ her sister, writes it down. She takes the dog for a walk, goes for a swim, reads something in a newspaper or on Twitter and so on. None of these events is remotely interesting or amusing. I suppose the moral is that you can’t pull off the same trick twice. The whole experience is so inexplicable and, I’m sorry to say, boring that I couldn’t finish the book. I did skim to the end to find that London doesn’t love her any more and she can’t afford to live there alone, although it’s great for her children for a few years. She goes back to Cornwall. The title, of course, has echoes of Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took my Dog; the difference is that Atkinson’s book is brilliant and this one isn’t. Shame.

I read this thanks to NetGalley and it’s out on 2nd November.