On my radar: David Nicholls’s cultural highlights

David Nicholls was born in 1966 and raised in Hampshire. He studied English and drama at Bristol and trained as an actor in New York, spending his twenties playing small stage roles before turning to writing. He adapted his mega-best selling novel One Day for film in 2011 and wrote an episode of the 2024 Netflix series. Other TV credits include Rescue Me and Patrick Melrose. His sixth book You Are Here – “a great comic novel” according to the Observer – is about two divorcees brought together on a hike across northern England. It’s out now in paperback.

Black Country, New Road

It’s quite a challenge to describe the sound of this, my favourite band. It’s a heady mix of folk, musical theatre, art-pop, prog, experimental rock, even klezmer, and so probably not for everyone. Their latest album, Forever Howlong is a little more accessible and melodic than the wild, noisy experimentation of the first two, but I love them all. Emotional, eccentric, theatrical, it’s the nearest I get to the pleasure I felt listening to those Kate Bush albums as a teenager.

XGimi Horizon projector

A cinema will always be the best place to watch a film, but I am attached to our home projector. There’s a kind of ceremony in setting it up, darkening the room and pulling down the screen, and we watch far more attentively, with no checking phones. We devise seasons of a film-maker, genre, actor – Fellini or Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s not the same thing as a trip to the movies, but it’s the next best thing.

Northumbrian coast

My first long, solo hike was along the Northumberland coast path and I’ve loved that landscape ever since: immense beaches, castles silhouetted against huge skies, the estuaries at Alnmouth and Berwick. Relatively uncrowded and not too demanding, there are wonderful places to eat and stay along the way, especially for kipper-lovers. Best of all, I love the Pilgrim’s Way crossing to Holy Island, a barefoot sprint across mud-flats, pausing only to nervously check and recheck the tide tables.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li’s memoir is a response to the loss of her two sons by suicide. It is, as you’d expect, moving and sometimes harrowing but it’s also thoughtful, generous and wise, challenging some of the familiar notions of grief, the notion that it’s something to escape, that it somehow wears off. It also makes an eloquent case for the value of thought, friendship, language and especially literature. One of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (dir: Sinéad O’Shea, 2024)

Fiction or documentary, it’s fantastically hard to make compelling drama out of a writer’s life; all that typing and staring out of the window. But this is a hugely enjoyable account of an extraordinary life, full of wonderful footage of O’Brien taking on the talkshow hosts and provoking the conservative voices of the time. Her courage, integrity, humour and glamour all shine through and there’s a wonderful laugh-out-loud moment involving LSD and Sean Connery.

Moro

Of all the great survivors on the London restaurant scene - the River Café, Andrew Edmunds, St John, the Eagle - this is my favourite. The room is lively, comfortable and informal, the food unpretentious and the staff always charming. The chilled almond soup, the roast pork, the yoghurt cake, the red wine – it’s always delicious. On a summer’s night, with the bars of Exmouth Market buzzing outside, it’s a wonderful place to be.

Photographs by Getty Images