Jonathan Coe – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and pastimes that make them who they are.

Jonathan Coe is a writer and novelist. He has written thirteen novels, two children’s books and three works of non-fiction. His work has won awards including the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (What A Carve Up!), the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger (The House of Sleep), the Everyman Wodehouse Prize (The Rotters’ Club) and the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. His 2018 novel, Middle England, won the Costa Novel Award in 2019 and met critical acclaim for its exploration of the events before, during, and after the Brexit referendum. His latest novel, Mr Wilder and Me, is available from the 1st July.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Travelling

By travelling I don’t mean backpacking in Nepal or trekking to Katmandu: I’m a cautious, even cowardly traveller. I’m talking about the routine, almost local kind of foreign travel that we haven’t been able to do for months now. I have friends in Italy and France and I miss seeing them. I miss hearing foreign languages spoken and paying for things in Euros. I miss driving on the right hand side of the road and having a sandwich and a coffee at Heathrow Terminal 5 prior to boarding a flight. A year ago, it all seemed so easy and natural and affordable. Will we be able to learn those habits again?

Ableton Live

Ableton Live is a DAW or Digital Audio Workstation, a piece of software that allows you to record audio and integrate it with digital music, all without leaving your laptop. I’ve been using it to make music for about ten years. The music I make is tuneful and repetitive: I’m sure serious musicians would regard it much as serious artists would regard a child’s drawing in crayon, but it keeps me happy and occupied when I’m not writing. I’ve put some of the tunes up on Bandcamp, and sometimes as many as three or four people listen to them in a week. 

Talking Pictures TV

Stuck at home in lockdown, what a lifesaver this channel has been. Like many people of my age, I have fond memories of TV in the 1960s and 1970s, when one of the main pleasures of the three-channel culture was switching on and finding yourself confronted by a random film – often British, often in black-and-white, often from the 1940s or 50s – and being drawn into something you might never have chosen to watch yourself. This was how I discovered Powell and Pressburger and the Boulting Brothers, how John Gregson and Cecil Parker came to feel like family friends. This superbly-curated channel recreates the experience. It’s perfect comfort viewing – as well as being a valuable, sometimes salutary glimpse into British social history.

Santa Clarita Diet

This 30-part sitcom starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant has become my latest addiction. It’s about an ordinary American wife who also happens to be a flesh-eating zombie and it’s frequently gross but there’s also a strange and lovely tenderness about it. Happiness writes white, as they say, and it’s very hard to create a show that celebrates monogamous marital love and the nuclear family without descending into sickly sentimentality. This show has found a way of doing it. It’s consistently brilliantly funny, and each episode will leave you with a warm glow as well as containing at least one scene that makes you want to throw up. 

England

As a lefty Remoaner who often complains about the direction things have taken here since 2016, it’s sometimes suggested to me on social media that I consider relocating to a country whose values I might find more accommodating. (Though it’s rarely phrased as politely as that.) Well, actually, I don’t want to. I love England just as I love my family – in other words, for all its faults. I love the landscape and the architecture. I love its people’s inventiveness and irreverence. I love its music – from Vaughan Williams to Laura Mvula – and its literature – from Jane Austen to Niven Govinden – and I don’t see why these things should become the property of the more strident nationalists and flag-shaggers who’ve become so vocal in our politics and media of late.