Days Like These: Scenes from an Ordinary Life

by Rebecca Tyrrel

If Jane Austen and Jack Benny collborated on a book together this is what they would`ve come up with.` - Nigella Lawson Bright, funny and utterly compelling, Rebecca Tyrrel`s voice is both refreshingly honest and deliciously self-deprecating. Taken from her popular column in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, this series of previously published pieces interlinked with small introductions to give the book a narrative structure is at once funny, acerbic and infuriating. Filled with a cast of characters and themes such as the author`s husband Matthew Norman`s medical neuroses; her son Louis`s obsession with trains; her own imaginary shrink, George Sanders, who lives in the garden shed; Tim, the car dealer; and the `we have no friends` syndrome, this is a novel that will make readers laugh out loud with a sense of self-recognition. Fans of the column will love to revisit, and new readers will delight in it. The perfect present for those who need to be introduced to daily life in a neurotic West London household.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1861

Reviews

[Louise Culmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining collection of articles written by rebecca tyrrel about her life with her eccentric husband Matthew and their son Louis who was, at the time the book was published, a passionate Dr Who fan. various friends and relations appear in the columns, the most entertaining being Hilda, an old lady who believed that her old boyfriend Tony was concealed somewhere in the Tyrrels home. the colums in this book begin in February 1998 and end in September 2002. i think the actual column continued for a year or so after the book ends, and I would have liked an updated version with the final year's worth of columns, but it never appeared and is probably not going to now. I would like to know whether Louis is still a dr Who fan, and whether Rebecca and Matthew are in their retirement home yet (ms Tyrrel always claimed they were planning to enter one at the earliest possible age).

[mellyana · Rating 3 out of 5]

a collection of short stories, well, column on tyrell's. i have it beside my bed, to read it once in a while. it's hardcover, therefore not too handy to bring it everywhere.

it really on a lot of things around tyrell life. her husband, her son, her domestic problems, like the title says: Scenes From an Ordinary Life

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

I lover reading Rebecca Tyrrel's newspaper column. Still love her writing, but I had to dip into it in snippets or it all became a bit too much.