Claudia Winkleman's a swell dame.
She's smart, funny, self deprecating and just all round awesome. But did you also know that as well as being a
marvellous presenter she used to write a weekly column for The Independent? What, you didn't. Well then pull up a chair and let me prattle
on about it.
It's for things like this that I love the internet. I never came across Claudia's column Take It From Me whilst it was being published, it's only in the years afterwards
when trawling the webnets looking for extremely useful stuff (read:
procrastinating) that I came across the articles.
Claudia wrote the column between 2006 and 2008 and it's a mixture of
personal and topical so you can have a good old laugh at how we were back in
the mid-late 00s. There's the obligatory
explaining what Facebook is and why it's so good column, there's the one where
Claudia talks about how crocs are stupid and if it was all about comfort we'd
be walking round wearing adult babygros (haha, as if. Oh wait....) and there are the columns about
things which are more general and less rooted in the time they were written
in. All you really need to know, though,
is that the columns are a right old hoot, they're hilarious. It's hard to write funny but Claude pulls it
off with aplomb.
The articles are so good that I have been tempted to print them out so that
I can read them away from a computer screen but I'm lazy, printing 70ish
columns is a little bit of a hassle and ink is pretty darn expensive (we
obviously need to breed more octopuses).
Instead I just remember their existence every year and spend hours
clicking through the links and re-reading them.
The Independent are missing a trick not publishing the articles
as a book as, despite the fact they're 5-7 years old, I'm sure people would
gobble them up.
If only Claudia was still writing columns.
I would buy a paper just to read her 700 or so words. I know that she's a busy lady with all her
presenting gigs and being a mum of three but there's just no one else who writes
like her. If you've never read any of
her articles then you've got a delicious treat instore and if anyone's got some
other great columnists to recommend then I'm all ears, eyes, knees and
toes.
Read all of Claudia's Take It From Me columns at The Independent
Follow her on Twitter
Listen to her Radio 2 Arts Show
Image via Sjoerd ten Kate on Flickr
Visit sjoerdtenkate.com
No comments:
Post a Comment