The Diary of Two Nobodies

A year in the life of Gogglebox's Giles and Mary, as Giles is swamped by Mary's hoarding, Mary is a pawn in the Easel Wars, Giles frames Mary in a dishwasher showdown and Mary struggles with vexatious laundry.

What heaven. I'm going to read it again. Hilarious and true and a tiny bit moving.

Everybody is a somebody. 
 
Giles is a countryman who relishes solitude. His wife Mary thrives in company and enjoys frequent escapes to London. 
 
After thirty years in a marriage of opposites, Giles and Mary have adapted to a life of domestic misunderstandings within comical misadventures. 
 
In The Diary of Two Nobodies, you will have the unique opportunity to discover, first hand, what occurs when a man who sees himself as a cross between Mr Bean and Basil Fawlty shares his life with a woman who identifies closely with the Queen. 
 
Featuring original illustrations by the artist Giles, himself.

Giles Wood

Mary Killen

A story of peaks and troughs

The Nutty Idyll 
 
Former townies Giles and Mary swapped city life for rural Wiltshire over thirty years ago, and they've each embraced it in their own very different ways. 
 
Mary has happily traded sophisticated London salons for monthly lectures at the Farmers' Club, competitive school quizzes, church interactions and local Auction House sales. While Giles has immersed himself in the catastrophic consequences of conventional farming, his organic no-dig veg-patch, the increasingly disproportionate response by local landlords to harmless trespassers and the strange death of the village house martins. 
 
For recent city escapees and indigenous country folk alike, Giles and Mary sift through the unhelpful dreamy myths and offer a practical reality, with robust back and forth on every aspect of life in rural outposts, including but not limited to planning wars, class wars, dog thefts, tree-felling fights, misunderstandings between incomers and natives and the role of the Heron Appreciation Society. 
 
The much-loved Wiltshire couple share their combined, hard-earned lessons, so we can learn the secret skills of grumbling and bumbling our way towards a new contented country life.

Giles Wood

Books by Giles Wood

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter