Tina Baker Books

I’ve never grown up. I have never put away childish things. I am deeply immature. These are things I celebrate. They allow me to play. They allow me to be creative.   And I have never needed that silliness more than I do now. I have aged at least a decade since   You Know What*   confined my life to a shadow of its former self. The irony was that this was the year when I’d promised myself that I’d   get back out there   after several years forsaking a social life in order to do my Creative Writing MA and work to support that —writing and teaching my fitness classes and 'beasting' my personal training clients who had day jobs. I’m no spring chicken. I also have chronic asthma, so, even though I’m much fitter than many my age, I’ve been told by my GP to be very cautious and advised by the government to shield. So, I rarely leave the flat. When I go for a walk, the number of people I see on London streets ignoring the rules freaks me out and makes my chest tighten ...

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.     ...

WHY ALL MY NOVELS FEATURE A CHARACTER TO BE PLAYED BY TOM HARDY I spend more time with fictional people than I do real ones. Given some of the people I’ve come across, this is not entirely a bad thing.               Even when not writing I have relationships with both imaginary people and people I feel I know because I’ve seen them on the telly. They pop up in my dreams. Tom Hardy pops up often, OBVS.               If I ever met these people in real life it would be really embarrassing – like calling a teacher mum.               I fantasise about my books getting TV or film deals and then I would meet Mr Hardy and we would discuss his motivation (mine would be obvious) and we would become BEST FRIENDS.               Which brings me to the magical powe...

      WHY I’M NOT WRITING WHAT I THOUGHT I’D BE WRITING     Anyone who knows me probably knows I’ve always wanted to write a novel. They might have guessed – based on my TV appearances and drinking days (the good time had by all!) that I might write something jolly. I thought I’d write something jolly. Perhaps, I hoped, I could be the next Caitlin Moran or Marian Keyes (even though they’re both younger than me; mind you, these days, everyone’s younger than me.) To my surprise, when not writing for a TVTimes deadline, I am truly horrible as a writer. Perhaps it was watching too many soaps. Perhaps, after being relentlessly perky on TV-am and GMTV for so many years, the dark hollow centre of my psyche had to crawl out of its hidey hole. What I write shocks me. I don’t set out to be so vile, it just spills out onto the page. I never knew I had it in me. I poke and prod at the worst nightmares and impulses and dark sexual feelings and vengeful thoughts. It’s so bad,...