Portobello Book Blog

Some of you may already know the dangers of reading the monthly post from Jill’s Book Cafe detailing lots of Kindle bargains! She brings together a very tempting selection each month. This month I was very restrained and only bought a couple. One of them was Sara Cox’s memoir Till The Cows Come Home which is still, at the time of writing, only 99p for Kindle. I spent last weekend reading it and thought I’d share a short review as well as highlighting the offer.

Sara comes from a large blended, somewhat complicated family of five children – she is the youngest. Her first few years were spent on the family farm in Lancashire which is still owned and farmed by her dad. Even after her parents split up, she spent a lot of time at the farm and obviously has a lot of affection for it.

The book is a memoir of her younger years and is a fond look back at her childhood and teenage years and up until her first presenting job in television. There’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary happens when she’s a young girl, other than most of us don’t live on a farm of course, but it’s all told with great affection. Growing up in the 70s and 80s myself, the book brought back a lot of memories from the time of the kind of food we ate, the clothes we wore, the tv we watched and the music we listened to.

I listen to Sara Cox’s Drivetime show on Radio 2 most evenings and she comes across as a bubbly and friendly person who is genuinely interested in the things her listeners phone or text in to tell her. I could hear her voice in my head as I was reading. Till the Cows Come Home is warm, funny and easy to read and her obvious love for both her parents and the rest of her family comes through clearly. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you like the sound of it, you can order a copy here, but do check to see if the Kindle deal is still on. The book is available in all formats and is published by Coronet Books, an imprint of Hodder.

From the back of the book

A funny and heart-warming love letter to childhood, family and growing up.

Till the Cows Come Home is DJ and TV presenter Sara Cox’s wonderfully written, funny coming of age memoir of growing up in 1980s Lancashire.

The youngest of five siblings, Sara grew up on her father’s cattle farm surrounded by dogs, cows, horses, fields and lots of ‘cack’. The lanky kid sister – half girl, half forehead – a nuisance to the older kids, the farm was her very own dangerous adventure playground, ‘a Bolton version of Narnia’.

Her writing conjures up a time of wagon rides and haymaking and agricultural shows, alongside chain smoking pensioners, cabaret nights at the Conservative club and benign parenting. Sara’s love of family, of the animals and the people around them shines through on every page. Unforgettable characters are lovingly and expertly drawn bringing to life a time and place.

Sara later divided her childhood days between the beloved farm and the pub she lived above with her mother, these early experiences of freedom and adventure came to be the perfect training ground for later life.

This funny, big-hearted and often moving telling of Sara Cox’s semi rural upbringing is not what you’d expect from the original ladette, and one of radio’s most enduring and well loved presenters.

About the Author

Sara is known and loved to millions of Radio 2 listeners, variously hosting Sounds Of The 80s, regularly standing in for The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, and steering the helm of her own nightly Radio 2 show. She cut her teeth on Radio 1 and presented The Breakfast Show for 4 years, reaching 8 million listeners.

Sara’s TV career began with the notorious The Girlie Show, and she went on to present numerous shows for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

Her most recent TV work includes The Great Pottery Throwdown (BBC2), Back In Time For Tea (BBC2), and BBC2’s dating series Love In The Countryside.

She is a regular co-presenter of Radio 4’s Loose Ends, and has written columns for the Mirror and Guardian.

In January 2019 Sara became the Radio 2 Drivetime presenter.