Interiors wisdom, Jilly Cooper, the English and sex, a skin perfecter
bonking, mostly
I’ve been reading Ben Pentreath’s handsome and massive new book, An English Vision, which is very good, even if it has a few too many very grand, very formal houses in it for my tastes. But the ones that are less grand are heaven, and his words and ideas are really interesting because he is full of opinions, even when he’s trying to be diplomatic.
One of my favourite things in the book are this picture and caption:
Exactly.
(Ben Pentreath is an architectural and interior designer. He creates new towns for the King, he did up the Princess of Wales’ house in Norfolk, and he is the co-founder of Pentreath & Hall, shop of joy).
The Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s era-defining Rivals starts on Friday (I wish they’d done Riders first). Here’s the trailer:
Everyone who’s seen it says it’s heaven, maybe camper and sillier than the novel it’s based on but still in keeping with its spirit, which is to say the spirit of the great and inimitable Jilly Cooper.
She is so clever. I think people sometimes forget that she invented a whole new genre, especially with these two particular novels - all the paciness of US sex-and-shopping novels, but relocated to upper-middle class England, with Agas and dogs and beautiful, lyrical writing about the countryside as well as forensically well-observed social detail and gripping plots about - always - class and sex.
She is a wonderful writer, witty, sly, hilarious and erudite. Here’s a deeply satisfying 4,000 word essay about her greatness from The London Review of Books, in which the author, Ian Patterson, correctly identifies that really what she does so beautifully is write about pleasure. And here is Jilly herself writing about Rivals in this month’s Vogue.
I was just undoing the veg patch and thinking about bonking, which is what sexual intercourse was called in the Eighties, when Rivals is set, and I was thinking, not for the first time, how incredibly British it was to make sex, which is quite a grown-up pastime, sound like a guinea pig falling over. (Although I question whether guinea pigs can fall over, given that they are essentially a head with paws. I like them a lot - so endearing - but it’s a strange arrangement).