In 1992, Ben Watt, a member of the band Everything But The Girl, contracted a rare life-threatening illness that baffled doctors and required months of hospital treatment and operations. This is the story of his fight for survival and the effect it had on him and those nearest him.]]> Sun, 09 Mar 1997 11:02:19 +0200 https://anthologies.library.land/ben-watt/121456-romany_and_tom.html https://anthologies.library.land/ben-watt/121456-romany_and_tom.html
Ben Watt's father was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician—a politicized left-wing bandleader and composer—whose heyday in the late 1950s took him into the glittering heart of London's West End. His mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, was a Shakespearean actress who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz feature writer and columnist in the '60s and '70s. They were both divorced and from very different backgrounds, and they came together at a fateful New Year's Day party in 1957 like colliding trains.Romany and Tom is Ben Watt's honest, sometimes painful, and often funny portrait of his parents' exceptional lives and marriage, depicted in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents in their old age. Spanning several decades—and drawing on a...]]> Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:18:13 +0200