Tina Baker Books

  I’m a very lucky woman. Sometimes I wallow in self-pity and forget it, but mostly I know how lucky I am. I have work, a home, a loving relationship and cats who are loving when it’s feeding time. I’ve been sober for 14 years, although it’s been a close call in lockdown. We’re all lucky. If you’re reading this on a computer, living in a First World country, despite the hellish year many people have endured thanks to COVID, despite our personal tragedies, we are all blessed to have so much more than MOST people on this planet.        I’m a survivor and I’m lucky.          I’ve supported Action for Children – formerly the National Children’s Home – since I worked at TV-am. I was a researcher on an item talking about child abuse. Daft as it sounds, it hadn’t really sunk in until that point that I’d been abused as a kid – both physically and sexually by several people. Until that moment, talking privately to the charity’s spokesman after the show, I’d brushed it all under the subconscious

    I’d never heard of NaNoWriMo until I started spending more time on social media during the very brief periods of time between working from home and sobbing aerobically from home for the last nine months, which have felt like nine bloody years . To be honest, I’m very new to social media and have learned all sorts of things in the last year – from NaNoWriMo to Writers Lifts and Pile Ons!        If you too are new to all this, NaNoWriMo stands for the National Novel Writing Month and during November, the aim is to write every day a minimum of around 1,6000 words so by the end of the month you have 50,000 words towards a novel. I think it started in the States.         This is literally all the information I had, gleaned from one single Tweet I saw on November 1st, although I then became aware of writers (often young and bushy tailed) announcing their daily word totals. Being me (knackered, grey droopy tailed, bald patches), I didn’t announce anything. I didn’t read the rules (there

  The way I say ‘class’ tells you mine. I am a working class hero. The easiest answer to anyone who asks me why I often write about class is that it’s just who I am – my class is the heart of me. My background shaped my opinions and my nature. It’s what I sound like and look like and identify as.          But you could point out, ‘Yeah, but you now live in Crouch End down that there London. You left your hometown of Coalville (a now defunct pit town, rather than a metaphor like Coketown in Dickens’   Hard Times ) decades ago. You have a Smeg fridge.        I do. It still makes me laugh. I’m immature as well as common.        I was the first in my family to have a flash fridge, the first to have a washing machine, the first to go to University, the first to have a credit card, and the first to date a lord. (I felt like a different species. I couldn’t get my head round how someone didn’t have to have a job!)        Under the heading of why I write about class (and class features in my wr