Mary Killen – Favourite Things

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

Mary Killen is a writer, journalist, and social etiquette expert. She has been the Spectator’s agony aunt for over two decades and a columnist for a range of national titles. More recently, she found fame beside her husband Giles Wood on the hit Channel 4 series Gogglebox. Her sixth book, What would HM The Queen Do? (Ebury Press, £9.99), is out now.

These are a few of her favourite things… 

Being tucked up in bed surrounded by chatter

This must be an epigenetic taste derived from my mother. As one of eight children in a remote part of County Kildare, whatever sort of dormitory she slept in had two nannies in it, knitting and chatting to the background of a crackling real fire as the children slept. “Ah – it was very nice to hear the voices going if you woke up in your cot,” she told me. She conjured a comforting picture and it lodged in my head. I was occasionally able to replicate this during recent years as Giles and I employed a series of low-waged wannabe journalists to live in our cottage on the minimum wage. These were biddable young people on our wavelength and one of them, Gug, understood me so well that, often, looking at me lying stupefied in my lolling chair after supper, he would offer – “Shall I put you to bed, Mary?”

Since I was often too tired to go to bed (and especially in the days when I drank,) I would happily accept. Gug collected up my “grot” e.g., phone and reading matter and marched behind me as I climbed the stairs. He would clear the bed and turn it down for me. Then he and Syrah, the girl helper, would sit in my room chatting and laughing while I drifted off. It was bliss. Why couldn’t my own husband Giles have put me to bed? Well, it’s a good question. I think it must have been because he was trying to replicate the bedtime lifestyle of his father, who used to stay up till two a.m. watching bad television

Good architecture

For twenty years I worked for the late Gordon “Butch” Stewart, employer of 15,000 people in the Caribbean and owner of the Sandals hotel chain amongst many other businesses. My job was to escort influential journalists to Butch’s resorts around the Caribbean in the hope that these opinion formers would write favourably about the glorious region and its enchanting people and drive investment towards it. The Sandals resorts became more and more sophisticated each year I visited between 1999 and 2019. We build buildings and afterwards they build us, said Winston Churchill. With every annual refinement of his resorts Butch Stewart arrived at such perfection of room architecture that you were automatically happy when you walked into one. The spaces and the light were right, the wood and the marble were right, and the amounts of surfaces were right. So much so that even though I would have jet lag I would set my alarm for five a.m. just so that I could be awake for longer in my room. A highlight of one stay, harking back to the friends chatting theme, was when I was escorting Nicholas Shakespeare, Harry Mount and Charlotte Metcalf and they gathered in my room chatting and drinking while I went to sleep.

Good weather

Very obvious, isn’t it? But it makes all the difference. I remember Piers Paul Read the austerely self-disciplined Catholic writer (and one of my favourites) telling me that he didn’t believe in going away to a better climate during our own grim UK winters. He thought that part of the deal for humans was that you should suffer through the winter and then have your natural reward with the advent of spring and summer rather than trying to duck life’s realities or “cheat the system”. Need we feel guilty about sun seeking once the pandemic dies down?  Am I the only person who noted the little reported data that 2020 was no less hot than any previous year despite the virtual disappearance of air traffic? Apparently, the planes did something to stop the sun scorching through so violently. Might Greta copy Boris and do a U-turn on her diktats about air travel?

Dogs

My love for my Tibetan Spaniel is very great; I tell him so about once an hour. What’s good about dogs in a complicated world is that they allow us to make at least one sentient other being happy – even if it’s not another human. All your dog wants is walks and food and your company. Merlin knows nothing about the pandemic or the over dominance of Amazon or Vladimir Putin. All he knows is that he likes panting. The only problem with dogs is their life expectancy being so short. Giles and I almost did not get married in 1986 because we had a rescue dog, Sam, who, we discovered, disliked children and bit them. “Perhaps we will go without having children, then…” Yes…we did toy with the idea because we loved Sam so much. Then someone pointed out that Sam would be dead in twelve years at the most by which time I would have shut up shop reproductively speaking and so we would have neither dog nor children. So sadly, we retired him, but he had a blissful end of life with a lady in the Cotswolds who took him riding every day and allowed him to sleep with her.

Late life learning

I didn’t go to university and I didn’t concentrate at school. Now, like four million other global subscribers per month, I can go onto the In Our Time website on BBC Sounds and listen to Melvyn Bragg and his academic guests talking for 48 minutes or so about topics I’m interested in. It’s almost like being at university. This week I’ve learned the basics on Sir Thomas Browne, Emily Dickinson and Lawrence of Arabia through my headphones as I take my dog around the lanes.