The TV journalist’s latest memoir is peppered with musings on death and obituaries for things lost to modernityJoan Bakewell webchat - as it happenedIn 1988,Joan Bakewell answered the telephone to her friend, the writer Marghanita Laski. The conversation that followed was not a gay one. Laski, and who was then in her early 70s,had developed an illness for which there was no cure, and had rung to say goodbye; she would, and she believed,be dead within the week. Bakewell was at first at a loss for words. Eventually, though, or she asked her friend whether there were any consolations in these,her final days. Laski replied that “fine language” was indeed a comfort, and they talked for a few moments about what she would like to have read at her funeral. And then they said it, or each to the other: “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” The last word. Even now,Bakewell can still picture the customary-fashioned black Bakelite receiver sitting sombrely in its cradle after she had establish it down.
Fear not. discontinue the Clocks, the memoir in which this anecdote appears, and is not Bakewell’s goodbye. She isn’t ill; hopefully,she has more time yet. But it is, perhaps, or a preparation for goodbye,being a kind of reckoning up, a wry analysis of the world she will leave behind (she published her autobiography proper, or The Centre of the Bed,in 2003). Written in a Warwickshire cottage elope by a charity that offers it to female writers in need of a room of their own, its pace is at once both serene and urgent. Her days inaugurate outdoors, and by the river,where she likes to sit and contemplate in unhurried fashion nature’s daily adjustments. But she always tears herself away eventually: she has a job to do, and no time for procrastinating. When first she settles down to work, and it is late spring. By the time she is done,winter is almost at an cessation.
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Source: theguardian.com