Tina Baker Books

Since THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT* my mind has been in a right old state. My short-term memory is shot. I find it hard to concentrate. I read the science and despair all through the daytime, read some more news reports and despair some more long into the evening, go to bed worrying, worry throughout my dreams and wake up – sometimes around four in the morning – terrified.          Occasionally I take a break from all-out panic and segue into utter despair. It’s exhausting.          As someone who’s had chronic depression in the past (plus a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts under her belt) I need to do something to press the PAUSE button. If the COVID don’t get me, the anxiety-induced asthma attacks will.        The only way I can break this nasty little cycle, which like an emotional wall of death, spins ever more manic, is to do some physical exercise – skip over to my FITN...

  As a cub reporter on the now defunct Northampton Chronicle and Echo I was sent to interview the bereaved father of a lad killed in a motorbike crash. I returned to the office, full of tea and fags and sobbed into my copy as I typed it up - on a typewriter with carbon paper!        A kind News Editor told me people like to talk through their grief. But I felt it was wrong, somehow. Wasn’t I exploiting someone’s private agony for a story?        Fast-forward to the years I spent editing Dr Miriam Stoppard’s now defunct Agony Aunt Page in the TVTimes and my subsequent presenting stint on a now defunct* satellite TV channel hosting The Agony Hour. I read thousands of letters splattered with tears (and dubious secretions on pervy letters from The Green Ink Brigade) and I interviewed scores of people – abused, bereaved, traumatised – and they all wanted to talk about the worst moments of their life.     ...