Joan Bakewell sees David Attenborough now and again. He has just one query for her: “Are you continue to working?” And, after all, she is. After we meet for lunch she is nearly to embark on her fifth sequence of Panorama Artist of the Yr for Sky – “Bake Off with oils” – that sees her “galloping across the nation” from Loch Fyne to Broadstairs. She places in 12-hour shifts starting at seven within the morning – “by 7pm they know I’m prepared for a drink”. She’s additionally within the Home of Lords two or three days per week, when it’s sitting, and she or he’s the president of Birkbeck, College of London. After which there are at all times new committees to chair, books to jot down. One of many causes that Bakewell has lengthy been such a seductive voice for the chances of ageing is that she has by no means proven the slightest curiosity in being previous it.
She breezes into her chosen restaurant, the Orrery on London’s Marylebone Excessive Road, already filled with discuss and smiles as she sits down, having accomplished a little bit of procuring downstairs within the Conran store. The Orrery has the decor of a Dignitas clinic, white and hushed, with good linen and sharp cutlery and pristine glassware, however Bakewell brings together with her a life-affirming consideration. She is, you instantly overlook, 89. She orders exactly – mozzarella to begin and salmon fillet, water – after which will get on with the true enterprise of lunch, dialog. Earlier than our starters arrive we now have mentioned the voodoo nature of Nadine Dorries (“she sticks pins into stuff she doesn’t like”), the management prospects of Andy Burnham (“very spectacular in individual”), meals fads (“I’m accomplished with sourdough, give me a pleasant sliced white loaf”), the similarities between Liverpool within the Sixties and Quattrocento Florence (“creativity turned infectious”), and the little pot of cod liver oil and malt that Bakewell at all times retains in a drawer to remind her of stolen spoonfuls of consolation throughout rationing.
The factor that retains her going, retains her happiest, she says “is that great phrase ‘freelance’. Once I joined the BBC within the Fifties, inside the second week they have been discussing my pension,” she recollects. She didn’t just like the sound of that. “I found that there was a factor known as a contract” – she invests the concept extra with itinerant knight of the realm than gig financial system – “and that’s what I needed to be. As a result of I needed to be in command of my very own life.”
That spirit – a dedication to not be her mom, who left college at 13 to take care of her seven siblings – has by no means left her. It’s the precept behind her most up-to-date guide, The Tick of Two Clocks, which examines her preparations for what she calls “deep previous age”. Hers, you shortly collect, are usually not the type of plans that may beset most of us. Since her emergence on TV within the Sixties Bakewell has appeared to exist on a aircraft a bit of above the mundane. Her ideas about not going mild into the lengthy good evening are not any exception. Her anxieties contain promoting her five-storey Georgian home in Primrose Hill in north London – purchased for a couple of thousand kilos, offered for a couple of million 50 years later – and shifting to a bit of enclave of Victorian artists’ studios across the nook. In doing so, she makes downsizing, prompted by a hip alternative, appear to be one other rarefied journey, enabled partly by her new neighbour, author Andrew O’Hagan, and partly by a crew of helpers, significantly a girl known as Fliff, who helps her declutter her lifetime of rooms filled with books and partitions filled with work.
You don’t begrudge her these elevated issues – she’s at all times been a trouper, in addition to a civilising pressure – however you do discover the phrases “charmed life” coming to thoughts a couple of instances. Recalling the transfer now over lunch, she refers on a few events to “my little disaster or breakdown”, which describes the hour or two wherein she needed to sit down and gather herself within the midst of packing containers when a soup tureen from a set of china inherited from her mom was smashed. The incident jogs my memory of a sentence that Nicci Gerrard as soon as wrote about Bakewell within the Observer, a couple of years after the total particulars of Bakewell’s lengthy affair with Harold Pinter got here to gentle: “Even when she was behaving badly, she was behaving effectively.”
Tim ate Soya marinated salmon, cucumber, avocado and wasabi purée; jerusalem artichoke risotto, parmesan £33 for 2 programs
They shared Elderflower and strawberry pannacotta, champagne jelly
Joan and Tim each drank Water. {Photograph}: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
Her present has at all times been to seek out some common knowledge in these private experiences. Regardless of the property windfall on the coronary heart of it – “I’m effectively conscious how grossly unfair it’s” – her guide has fascinating issues to say about loneliness and neighborhood. Having grown up “aspiring decrease center class” in Cheshire – her father was an engineer, her mom a bitterly unfulfilled housewife – Baroness Bakewell of Stockport was liberated – intellectually, socially, sexually – by the intimacies of Cambridge faculties. She makes use of that precept to debate the perfect retirement circumstance – “I’m very in favour of small items, constructed round squares, with bushes and little pathways” – of which, as newly put in ambassador of the Almshouse Affiliation, she has develop into a champion.
Covid gave readability to that perfect. Bakewell has been married twice – “17 and 25 years apiece” – and has two youngsters and 6 grandchildren, however for the previous 22 years she has lived alone (she known as her autobiography The Centre of the Mattress, one of many extra unexpected outcomes of a pleasure-loving life). She had not lengthy moved home when lockdown struck and she or he was, in opposition to all appearances, deemed “susceptible”. O’Hagan and her different neighbours got here to her rescue. “Andy mentioned, ‘We’ll prepare dinner someday and convey a meal over. And also you prepare dinner the following day and convey the meal over to us.’” That alternate of scorching dishes on the backyard gate received her via.
In attribute model she couldn’t be confined a second longer than crucial. Simply as quickly as restrictions ended she and a buddy took the ferry to Calais and drove alongside the north coast of France staying at B&Bs, consuming at little cafes. “We have been simply so determined to interrupt out,” she says. Since then, there have been journeys together with her daughter, an artwork historian, to the galleries of Bologna and to Ghent to see the Van Eyck altarpiece. Her huge concern in isolation was that she was shedding the articulacy in her voice, as a result of she was not talking a lot to anybody. Her very Bakewell-esque treatment was to study and recite Shakespeare sonnets every morning.
“Simply within the final 12 months or two, I really feel I’ve misplaced a few of my really feel for the language,” she says. “I usually learn an article and I’ve to search for one or two issues, new stylish phrases.” It’s been two years since she completed The Tick of Two Clocks and she or he’s itching to jot down one thing else, to assist her make clear what she thinks concerning the “grim, after Brexit” world. “I can’t write within the afternoon. However within the mornings, nothing nicer. Making your plans, drawing up a couple of paragraphs, checking out your concepts, after which going forward … that’s my concept of bliss.”
She appears so current and curious concerning the information that her long gone hardly will get a glance in as she clears her plates. I’ve written down a few sentences in my pocket book from Pinter’s love letters that she just lately donated to the Bodleian library: “Joan. First time I’ve ever written your title. Joan. Joan. Joan. Joan. Might refill the pages with it,” and “Your eyes … All you do. Secret woman. I can’t converse, solely look,” however it’s she who brings up the affair that lasted for seven years and was the topic of Pinter’s play Betrayal. We’re, in the direction of the tip of lunch, speaking about one of the best of instances, when Bakewell was internet hosting Late Night time Line-Up in her mini-skirt within the Sixties, speaking music with Barbra Streisand and artwork with Marcel Duchamp. Pinter, she says, was as charismatic as any of them.
“When he was in full move it was like being close to a furnace, he was so vivid and clever, so humorous.”
There’s a sense, I recommend, studying memoir The Centre of the Mattress, that nothing fairly matched the vividness of that relationship subsequently. Is that the way it felt?
“Probably not,” she says. “I don’t suppose for a second that life has received duller as I’ve received older. Much less thrilling maybe. However I discover all of it absorbing in a distinct type of manner.”
How far forward does she look?
“Effectively,” she says, smiling on the absurdity of it, “I’m fairly considering attending to 100 only for the sheer quantity.” You don’t doubt that if she makes it, there’s a position ready because the genuine voice of the brand new centenarians.
The Tick of Two Clocks is revealed in paperback on 11 August (Virago, £10.99). To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices could apply
