Love in old age

Queen Victoria so liked the Isle of Wight she built a royal residence here. Thousands of people got stoned here at music festivals in the late 1960s. And, in the very un-hippyish Covid summer of 2020, Hunter Davies and his girlfriend escaped locked-down North London for a week’s holiday on the Isle of Wight, fell in love with its sleepy charm – and ended up buying a Grade II-listed love nest in the elegant Victorian seaside resort of Ryde. Love in Old Age tells the story of their first twelve months on the island. It brings together the themes of love in old age; Covid lockdown; rural escape; the anxieties of house-buying; and the history and curiosities of England’s largest and second most populous island – all bound together by Hunter Davies’s inquisitiveness about people and places, and his irrepressible and ironic sense of humour.