A happy Hunter once more

At 85, widowed Hunter Davies is writing new books and finding young love. By Valerie Grove

- Valerie Grove

‘When I turned 80, I started boasting about it. If I get to 90, I will be unbearable,’ Hunter Davies declares happily.

He is 85 on 7th January – so he is halfway to being unbearable. He is practicing saying, ‘D’you know how old I am?’ to all and sundry – and he’s bound to tell his readers about it.

He is after all the inventor of solipsistic journalism. He invented ‘A Life in the Day’ on the last page of the Sunday Times Magazine. Another of his ideas – ‘Me and My Honeymoon’ in the Look! pages in 1969 – was the inspiration for Private Eye’s ‘Me and My Spoon’.

Hunter says, ‘Even as a little boy in Scotland, I was the same. I would stand at the front gate, aged four, and, when people came by, I would tell them who I was, and what was going on in the house. “My mummy and daddy are cooking chips!” And this has not stopped.’

His parents, Scottish despite the Welsh name, both left school at 13. His dad was an RAF clerk, and in 1940 five-year-old Hunter and his family were uprooted from Scotland to Carlisle.

The childish compulsion to share his life has persisted through his journalism: whether it’s buying a tent on eBay or being rushed to hospital (‘Oh goody – 2,000 words for the Mail’). Or frying his wife’s placenta when their second child was born. It tasted awful, he wrote in the Sunday Times.