The Marmalade Diaries

April 4, 2022
In this heartwarming memoir, travel writer Aitken (The Gran Tour) describes spending a year in lockdown with an elderly stranger 50 years his senior. After the U.K.’s first wave of Covid-19 receded in the fall of 2020, Aitken moved into octogenarian Winnie Carter’s Victorian home in London, where he agreed to help around the house in exchange for reduced rent. When subsequent waves of Covid kept the two stuck indoors, the stage was set for a clash between Aitken’s easygoing manner and Winnie’s opinionated, exacting style. Aitken provides an irreverent day-by-day account of how, instead, the two forged an unlikely friendship as they bickered, watched Gardeners’ World on television, and slowly got to know each other—Winnie revealing her grief over the recent death of her husband and the stress of caring for her adult son, who had cerebral palsy and resided in an assisted living facility. The unlikely duo share a palpable chemistry, and Winnie is the kind of larger-than-life character that novelists will wish they had invented (“I thought he was just another pale lump,” she said about dining with Winston Churchill). Poignant and witty, this is a treat.