The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple

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Ben responded to an advert to house share with an older lady and found and ended up being chosen to move in with her, just before lockdown! Out of the most inauspicious of soils – and from the author of The Gran Tour – comes a book about grief, family, friendship, loneliness, life, love, lockdown and marmalade. It’s also a look at lockdown and the effect it had on people’s lives, a journal of domesticity and the small things we came to rely on when the big things (friends, family, social lives, travel, culture) were taken away by Covid.

Their wit shines through, as when they read a news story about a clandestine breast reduction and Winnie thinks it sounds ‘like a fancy French dish that’s been translated poorly’. It is funny and moving and will certainly encourage me to be more patient when my father repeats his stories over and over. But there are other things that Aitken wants to change after observing, in both Winnie and himself, an inability to articulate feelings “especially towards, and regarding your family, and friends”. She has a complete disregard for best before dates on food, a blase attitude to timekeeping and a wicked way with words.Moved in to assist an elderly dame after the death of her husband, our author diaries nearly day by day their months together.

The idea of the two of them living under quarantine was both charming and a bit painful (because of the awkwardness, the sometimes hurt feelings, the sometimes aggravation, and the way life's unfortunate events sometimes intrude). Ultimately Winnie has a very quick wit and really steals the show from Ben but the ‘odd couple’ appeal and interactions between them are a bit of soul food for the pandemic age.This is really a story of the current age, we’ve all been through the same period(s) of lockdowns and restrictions and have our own tales to tell but The Marmalade Diaries presents quite a heartwarming story of a rather eccentric odd couple.

No spoilers, but he doesn’t live with her any more, though at the time of writing he was still living in her house. Thrifty, opinionated, cantankerous, and grief-stricken, she relies on Ben to keep things going (especially the fires that heat the house) and her entertained. Die erste und einzige Story, die mir Lust gemacht hat etwas aus der Pandemiezeit zu lesen… eine alte Dame die nicht allein sein möchte ( und um ihren kürzlich verstorbenen Ehemann trauert ) und ein junger Schriftsteller, der eine Bleibe braucht und ihr im Haushalt zur Hand geht. Ben, in his 30s, goes to live with 85 year old Winnie - he needs a cheap room and her family don’t want her living by herself. It was hilarious some of the tales Ben tells, and some of the things they got up to during the lockdown.Charting both their time together, and the details of Winnie's life that are shared with Ben in fragments, The Marmalade Diaries, from the author of The Gran Tour, is a very human exploration of home, of the passage time, of the growing relationship between an odd couple, told with warmth, wit and candour. What neither of us needed was a strict and protracted national lockdown to commence ten days after moving in. This is a truly wonderful story, entertaining all the way through and at times I could recognise anything from a little to a lot of myself in each of them.