The Lost Diaries
Craig Brown
The Lost Diaries is a wide-ranging anthology of the world's greatest diarists, each of them channelled onto paper through the considerable psychic force that is Craig Brown.Arranged on a day-to-day basis, spread throughout an entire year, these diary extracts form a patchwork quilt of observation, reflection, contemplation and, above all, self-promotion. As the months unfold, different diarists offer their insights on the events that pass: John Prescott on going to Royal Ascot, Nigella Lawson on preparing Christmas lunch, W.G. Sebald on enjoying an ice lolly by the beach, Karl Lagerfeld on the need for an umbrella in Spring.Among over 200 diarists featured are Martin Amis, Jordan, Germaine Greer, The Duchess of Devonshire, President Barack Obama, Philip Roth, HM the Queen, Heather Mills McCartney, Victoria Beckham, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sir Cecil Beaton, John Prescott, Mohamed Fayed, Harold Pinter, Yoko Ono, Barbara Cartland, Jilly Cooper, Christopher Ricks, Jeremy Clarkson, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, Keith Richards, Maya Angelou and Frank McCourt.CRAIG BROWN has been writing the Private Eye celebrity diary since 1989. He has also written parodies for many other publications, including The Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Times and The Guardian. The Lost Diaries is the first time all his greatest parodies have been gathered together in one book. Arranged day-by-day, full of invigorating and sometimes shocking juxtapositions, they constitute a treasure-trove, choc-a-bloc with all the fantasies and illusions of our times.
The Lost Diaries
Edited by
Craig Brown
‘The life of every man is a diary in which he meansto write one story, and writes another.’
J. M. BARRIE
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ucd939406-b686-5258-a976-70cceee10841)
Title Page (#u2f97bd3e-87f9-5c0d-9c03-3b31a5c09e63)
Epigraph (#ub51f95a5-e216-57e3-b642-759294e58e1a)
INTRODUCTION by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (#u394b2844-61a3-5cb4-8135-fa41d7cda9b2)
January (#u38c701db-fbb6-5ebc-8d28-0ebb4394f555)
February (#u3fdb4303-a4ca-5e2a-8198-3105bc4baee7)
March (#u52faaf07-4285-5878-86e0-afac1f2aa7ee)
April (#litres_trial_promo)
May (#litres_trial_promo)
June (#litres_trial_promo)
July (#litres_trial_promo)
August (#litres_trial_promo)
September (#litres_trial_promo)
October (#litres_trial_promo)
November (#litres_trial_promo)
December (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Also written or co-written by Craig Brown (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (#ulink_569572bb-527a-5a29-b17e-36a87700efcf)
It is a great honour for me to introduce this historic selection from the diaries of so many wonderful people.
Victoria Beckham, for instance, is one of The Spice Girls. The Spice Girls are five young ladies who sing as well as they dance.
When I met Victoria some years ago, she offered me gracious advice on how to broaden my appeal. I am most grateful for that, Victoria! She also told me how she had been in the forefront of the struggle for the Tibetan people. She even wore a T-shirt with a slogan printed in large orange letters which she assured me probably had something to do with Buddhism. For this I salute her!
On a personal note, I have also had the great honour of being presented to Mr Alan Yentob from the BBC. I was deeply touched when Alan asked me what I thought of the new Martin Amis, whether I had managed to catch up with the latest Gilbert and George exhibition at Tate Modern and if I had heard about the disappointing ratings for Melvyn Bragg’s most recent South Bank Show on Andrew Lloyd Webber.
To think that such an illustrious personage would value my own humble opinion!
Yes, I was ‘living the dream’!
Lady Heather Mills McCartney is another personal acquaintance. I am always delighted to hear her tell me how she was brought up by wolves and triumphed against adversity to reach Number 1 in the Hit Parade and win the Booker Prize three years in a row. I congratulate Heather, also, on her recent news that she is the ‘hot tip’ to be the next Governor of the Bank of England.
Well done, Heather! You set us all an excellent example!
From the world of politics, Edwina Currie is a woman who knows what it is to engage in struggle. The last time we met, Edwina told me about her valiant campaign to improve the condition of eggs in the United Kingdom. If she had agreed not to speak out for what she truly believed, she would, she confessed, be Prime Minister. But this was a lady who was not prepared to compromise! She had too much compassion in her heart! We salute her!
There are many other good friends of mine included in this magnificent volume! Sir V.S. Naipaul is a very very nice man. When I was introduced to him on my last visit to Buckingham Palace, London, I clutched him to my bosom and kissed him on both cheeks as a brother. I shall never forget the way Vidia was so overcome with emotion that he swept from the room, too ‘choked up’ to speak!
I am also most humbled by Lord John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain and now, he informs me, one of the leading world statesmen of our age, devoting himself to bringing peace to all mankind. When I met John and his lovely wife Tracey on a visit to Whitehall, London, I could see what a very close and loving couple they were! They bring me great joy!
And I honour, too, the British Royal Family. That most gracious lady, Her Majesty, must be so very proud that her children have all risen to the position of Princes and Dukes.
The Prince of Wales is a very wise man. He tells me he has introduced organic ginger biscuits to leading stores throughout the United Kingdom. These biscuits are available not just for the few, he says, but for the many. I support the Prince in his great quest to feed the people of the world!
So many splendid people, so many splendid achievements, and all chronicled in these personal diaries! Let us strive to follow their examples!
I do not like to single out any particular individual for praise, but we must surely all agree that there is one human being who has come to symbolise the spirit of Great Britain at its best. You will have guessed by now that I am speaking of the tireless philanthropist and human rights campaigner, Mr Max Clifford!
On my last visit to London, Max got in touch with me. He told me of how he had led the world campaign for a free Tibet. ‘Believe me, Dalai, if it wasn’t for The Seventies Revival Show starring the Bay City Rollers and Suzi Quatro touring live throughout Britain and Europe, you wouldn’t have half the profile you have today,’ he assured me. My heart overflowed with gratitude. He also offered to introduce me to the popular entertainer Mr Michael Barrymore, and through Michael I had the great honour to meet S Club 7, who have done so much to bring democracy, freedom and respect for human rights to all the people of the world.
And I haven’t even mentioned that great film director Mr Michael Winner! His films have brought joy and consolation to countless millions, his aides tell me. Well done, Michael!
There is so much wisdom in this collection – and much of it arises from the depths of human suffering. I was upset to read of the stress of Stella McCartney. With all my heart, I beg each of you to stop asking her what it was like growing up as her father’s daughter! The poor girl is hurting!
So many brilliant people, with so much to tell us about themselves!
I have spent many, many years teaching people about compassion and self-sacrifice. From reading these diaries I know, deep in my heart, that this is a lesson the world is crying out to learn!
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
August 2010
January (#ulink_792b0fa6-3da0-5cf1-883d-b6a50c30151b)
January 1st
These cornflakes are real and they are everywhere. And I tell you this, Michelle, I say.
The packet may have been shaken, but the flakes will recover.
So it is with profound gratitude and great humility that I accept my breakfast cornflakes.
Michelle asks, do I want the milk? And to that I say this.
Our milk will come. Our milk will flow, and it will flow true. Our milk will flow smooth, and it will flow well-chilled.
But our milk will not flow if it is not poured.
So let me promise you this, Michelle. That milk will not pour itself over your flakes or my flakes. That milk will not pour itself over the flakes of the poor or the flakes of the rich, the flakes of the needy or the flakes of those folks who spend their lives in comfort. No, Michelle. To be poured, and, if the need has it, repoured, the jug in which that milk dwells must first be lifted by ourselves.
So, says Michelle, pour the milk any way you want, but I beg you, Barack, please get a move on.
I promise you this, Michelle, and this I promise you, I reply. I will indeed get a move on with pouring that milk. On the move to pour that milk, I shall ponder day and night. And I shall not rest until the day comes when that milk has, in truth, finally been poured.
BARACK OBAMA
The State of Britain, Part One: Just back from a New Year’s Eve party. I don’t often go to parties, because I’m not that kind of person, I’m a playwright, with more serious concerns. But I went to this one. By bus, of course. I’m not the sort of person who takes taxis. So I hailed a double-decker in the King’s Road and told the driver to take me to Islington. He was then to wait for me outside the party for an hour or two and take me back. The instructions were quite clear. But of course this is Thatcher’s Britain, so when I left the party – a party I didn’t particularly enjoy, by the way, it was hardly serious at all and full of ‘amusing’ people – the bus was nowhere to be seen (typical) and I was forced to hail, against all my instincts, a black cab. Out of sympathy with the driver I sat with him in the front, observing, observing, observing, my mind racing back to one of those rare defining moments, disproportionately significant but peculiarly illuminating, that had occurred back at the party.
I had been standing in the corner of the room with the dirty paper cup I had specially brought with me, when a man had come over –a tall, flashy type, with an easy smile, wearing a fashionable ‘tie’. He said: ‘You look a bit lonely, may I introduce myself?’ He then introduced himself. I didn’t reply, preferring to observe, as most serious playwrights do. He then said – again that fake smile – ‘And who are you?’
I was outraged, utterly outraged. And flabbergasted. Shocked, too. Shocked, outraged and flabbergasted. Not for me, of course, but for my profession, and the whole of British Theatre, from the lowest understudy right up to the most brilliant and dangerous playwright (whether that is me or not is beside the point). Why was this man –this man in his fashionable tie, with his promiscuous smile and his over-attentive handshake – pretending not to know who the hell I was? This was a sign of our inexorable national decline, as significant and painful in its way as the Miners’ Strike or the Falklands Conflict.
The State of Britain, Part Two: As the hurt and the horror surged within me, I felt driven to speak. ‘I’m David Hare,’ I said.
‘David Hare!’ he repeated. ‘Goodness! I really enjoy all your plays –you’re one of the greatest living playwrights, in my opinion!’
Note that patronising, biased and artfully demeaning tone in a statement riddled with the foul odour of ruling-class condescension: ‘ONE OF the greatest LIVING playwrights, IN MY OPINION’. Only in Britain – tired, sick, dislocated, dying Britain – in the 1980s could it be considered ‘fashionable’ to denigrate a serious playwright in this way. When I got home, I immediately wrote a cool letter to the host of the party, questioning his ethics in inviting me to a function at which there were people who openly hated me, roundly condemning his loathsome hypocrisy in not warning me of his treachery. He eventually replied with some sort of apology. Which all goes to show that here in Thatcher’s Britain, the national pastime – the national characteristic – is to apologise, apologise, apologise. When will we as a nation have the courage to stand up for ourselves?
SIR DAVID HARE
It’s now the Seventies. The Sixties – they seem like years ago, right? Years and years and years and years ago. Like literally ten years or even longer, right? But I remember them like they were yesterday, which was a Thursday, or was it a Monday? Can’t remember. Tuesday – that’s it. Or Sunday. Yesterday? Don’t talk to me about yesterday – I’m not into the whole tomorrow thing.
KEITH RICHARDS
It is now 1960, the very first year in the extraordinary decade that will, I feel sure, come to be known as the 1960s. Overnight, society has shaken off the starchy sexual mores of the 1950s. Suddenly, young men and women are casting aside their inhibitions and tapping their toes to the urgent, febrile rhythms of Lonnie Donegan. Among enlightened couples, cheese fondue is all the rage.
All the old barriers have suddenly come down. I find to my alarm that even men of the very greatest distinction can’t keep their hands to themselves. Last night, I had to fend off the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. I was interviewing him about the trade deficit on live television for New Year Late Night Love-In when suddenly he cast aside his red box, pulled down his trousers and leapt on top of me.
As I struggled to retain hold of my clipboard, veteran broadcaster Cliff Michelmore attempted to rectify the situation. ‘Let’s move swiftly on to the balance of payments, Chancellor,’ he said. ‘Any hope of an upturn come the autumn?’ But before the Chancellor had a chance to reply, the incoming governor of the Bank of England had barged into the studio, wearing nothing but a posing pouch. If this is how the Sixties begin, how on earth will they end?
JOAN BAKEWELL
January 2nd
Today I cook pasta. Pasta plain. But good. For those who come after, these directions I leave:
PASTA PLAIN – BUT GOOD
Ingredients: Pasta. And Salt. And Water. And Fire.
Directions:
Place the pasta in the water and the salt in the water and the water in the pot and the pot on the fire.
In the pot? The fire in the pot?
No. The water in the pot. The pot on the fire.
The pasta in the water?
Yes in the water.
And the salt in the fire?
No. The salt in the water.
And the water on the fire?
No. The water in the pot and the pot on the fire. Not the water on the fire. For then the fire will die and dying be dead. Nor will the water boil and the pasta will drain dry and not cooked and hard to the teeth.
The salt falls nor does it cease to fall.
The water boils. So be it.
Cease from placing your hand in the boiling water. Place your hand in the boiling water and it will cause you pain.
Much pain?
Very much pain.
In the pot the bubbles bubble up and bubble some more. The bubbles are bubbly. Never more bubbly bubbles bubbling bubbliest. And having bubbled the bubbles still bubbly.
Or bubblier?
Or bubblier.
Across the kitchen a board intended for chopping. Here. Take it. Chop.
What will I chop? There are no ingredients to chop.
Just chop. Don’t cease from chopping. To chop is to become a man.
After ten minutes. The pasta stiff and dry and upright no more. The pasta lank and wet and soft. In the eternal damp of water.
Pour water free like some ancient anointing. The pasta left alone in the pot. Alone and naked.
The salt. Where’s the salt?
The salt is gone. Lost to the water and gone forever.
I grieve for the salt.
It is the salt for which I grieve.
Tip the pasta out.
The pasta?
Yes. Tip it out. Onto.
A plate?
Yes. And stop.
Finishing your sentences?
Yes.
Why?
Because it is so.
Irritating?
CORMAC McCARTHY
Darling Debo,
Could you bear to cast your bejewell’d eye o’er this weary traveller’s joyous twitterings?
Day 1. Yanina, 8 March. We arrive in Prevaza from Yanina with Konitsa and Kalpaki before venturing forth to Kalpaki with Prevaza and Yanina. Umbrous olives procrastinate pleadingly over the weary waters in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which a repining river flows flowingly. O’erhead flies a squawking convoy of stuffed courgettes, flapping fearlessly towards a destination undefined. Ah, the joy of skipping on the petulant pine-needles and the verdant grass underfoot! Gentians cluster in every fissure, and clusters fissure in every gentian. Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly! One nearly swoons away with the magic of the language as a sunbaked Sarakatsan muleteer, Christos Karvounis, cackles cautiously, recalling rough-hewn rambles with…
…and when we wake up – joy upon joys! – we fulsomely find we have another thirty-nine delightful days to gorgeously go.
Bundles of love,
Paddy
PATRICK LEIGH-FERMOR, FROM A LETTER TO DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE
January 3rd
Nothing in your memory anywhere of anything so good. Now the pasta is eaten. Disappeared. The pasta disappeared as everything disappears. As the comma disappears and the semi-colon disappears and the inverted comma disappears and the apostrophe disappears and the adjectives and the pronouns all disappear.
Leaving just full stops and And.
And And?
And And.
And And.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Darling Twat,
Can’t wait to read your last scrumptious screed, possibly first thing next year, or, failing that, the year after, leisure permitting.
Greece – it was Greece, wasn’t it? – sounds desperately Greek, which is just as it should be. One would hate to hear that it had turned all French.
P.S. Why does everyone insist on being so beastly about poor Dr Crippen? He may have been a mite offhand with his wife, but, my word, he was an excellent doctor with a perfectly lovely smile, a dear old friend of Mecca.
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In tearing haste,
Debo
DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE, LETTER TO PATRICK LEIGH-FERMOR
January 4th
People have been kind enough to call me sharp. To be blunt, I am sharp. It was probably Rilke who first taught me that if ever a man is to be sharp, he needs also to be blunt. This was a revelation to me, partly because I already knew it. The sharp man must make pointed statements in rounded prose, remaining careful that the points emerge from his heart, and not from his head, or they will come out flat. Voltaire, too, taught me to square my feelings with my thoughts, particularly when talking among my circle.
CLIVE JAMES
T.S. Eliot died today, in 1965. His books only ever sold a few thousand copies. No one reads him now, and he is still dead. But is he still in print? I doubt it. Yet he enjoyed a modest reputation while he remained alive.
V.S. NAIPAUL
January 5th
I’m sat at an official banquet in the Guildhall or wherever. ‘Only trouble with prawn cocktails,’ I say to the Queen of the Neverlands as I lick my spoon, ‘is that they’re always too small, don’t you find?’
The lady mutters some double dutch in responsibility. As I’m reaching for the bread and butter, I notice there’s a heck of a lot of prawn cocktail left in her glass dish and she’s just pecking at it. ‘Tell you what – we’ll swap dishes – you take mine and I’ll take yours! That way we’ll both be happy! Vous compronay?’
With that, I reach for her prawn cocktail, retaining my own spoon. Sorry, but I don’t want to catch foreign germs.
‘Very tasty!’ I say, turning to the gentleman on my right, the President of Venice or Venezuela or whatever, and try to break the ice. ‘Not finishing your prawn cocktail, then, Pedro? Defeated you, has it?’
He looks blank, so to set him at his ease I reach over, shove my spoon in his prawn cocktail and help him out with it. And very tasty it is too, very tasty indeed.
‘Much-o grassy-arse, mon amigo!’ I say with a pleasant chuckle, very slow so’s he’ll be able to understand, then grab myself another couple of bread rolls before the waiter runs off with them. These official banquets can leave one feeling very peckish you know, so it’s lucky I’ve had a burger and beans before I came out, washed down with sherry trifle and cheddar cheese, all rounded off with a nice tin of condensed, all very pleasant. Yes, I do love my food.
Come the main course, the old tum is up to its tricks again, making me feel full when I’m not, but I don’t want to miss out on the meat – I’ve always loved my meat – so I seek to remedialise the situation. I look over the President’s shoulder for a toilet, very discreetly you understand, but there isn’t one within a hundred yards. I don’t want to disruptify the banquet, so while the President’s talking to the person on his right and the Queen’s talking to the person on her left, I reach for the old napkin.
There’s nothing you can teach me about napkin-folding. In seconds, I’ve folded my napkin into the shape of a bucket, and am just adding the finishing touches to the handle and preparing to do my business when Queen Snooty of the Neverlands turns round and asks me where exactly I live blah blah blah.
No way am I going to let chit-chat get in the way of me and my meat so I pass her the napkin-bucket and say to her, very polite, mind, ‘Hold this, Your Majesty, if you’d be so kind,’ then I poke my little finger down my throat and have a right good sick-up into it, all very discreet, mmm, that’s better, wipe the old mouth nice and clean then repossess my napkin-bucket and remark graciously, ‘You won’t be needing that no more, thank you kindly.’
I stuff the napkin in my right-hand jacket pocket and carry on with my supping. The meat is beautifully tender and the potatoes just right. The soufflé is overdone, but the portions are reasonable and service prompt.
After dinner, we’re ushered out into a great hall for liqueurs and coffee and Elizabeth Shaw mints, which I’ve frankly never liked, they’re too small, but luckily I’ve taken the trouble of hiding a tin of condensed milk behind a curtain on the way in so I make my excuses and polish it off in the vestibule.
So we’re all milling around in the hall with our coffees when Tony beckons me over saying, ‘John, there’s someone here I want you to meet!’ It’s Henry Kissinger, no less. I want to give the right impression, so I stick my right hand in my jacket pocket, all suave-like, as I make my approach.
‘Dr Kissinger,’ says Tony, ‘may I introduce my Deputy Prime Minister?’
‘Delighted to meet you, I’m sure,’ I say, all sophisticated. I pull my right hand out of my jacket pocket and give his a good strong shake.
‘Mein Gott!’ says Kissinger. We all glance down. There’s this gooey stuff, bitty and that, dripping off his hand. Tony throws me one of his looks, as if to say it’s all my fault! But as I told Pauline after, you can hardly call it my fault if they don’t provide accessible toilet facilities at these hoity-toity venues, it’s high time something was done about it, it’s always the working classes what get the blame and the chinless public school brigade who are let off scot-free, so those of us who, for reasons of pressure and stress at work, sometimes putting in sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours a day, find it necessary to sick up our food, should be given every facility for so doing.
I attempt to make light of the goo with our distinguished guest. ‘Wipe it off, Henry! What do you think sleeves are for?!’ I jest. But he doesn’t see the funny side. Very German!
All in all, a very pleasant evening.
JOHN PRESCOTT
January 6th
It is the sixth & I am in one of those lassitudes and ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. Hemingway came to lunch & we had a great row about life & letters &c. I said, do you want this quarrel to go on. I would like it to stop now; but if you wish it to go on, then I shall be left with no option but to challenge you to an arm-wrestle & then we shall see who wins. Whereupon, Hemingway turned sheet-white & stroked his mangy flea-ridden drink-sodden beard & ummed & ahed & said he did not wish to go on with our argument, but it was jolly well all my fault that it had started in the first place.
I was tempted to bite my tongue but, my word, I was not prepared to back down to this impossible hairy foul-mouthed baboon. Very well, then, Ernie I said – I know how he hates to be called Ernie – roll up your sleeve & place your right elbow on this table & be a man for once.
Our right hands locked like bruised whippets & by the time I had counted down 1 & 2 & 3 & Ready & Steady & Go I could glimpse feverish globules of glinting sweat already flooding down his creasy brow like slugs. Hemingway pushed & pushed & pushed; my goodness how he pushed, his face beetroot purple with the pushing & the panting & the shoving & the grunting. A revolting performance. After a while of this disgusting vulgar odious show, I could not bear to view his visage any longer & so I sought to offer some succour to my poor miserable overwrought eyes by picking up a book of Augustinian verse in my left hand & reading its contents for merciful distraction & all the while Hemingway continued with his grotesque exhibition.
Did I feel an element of pity for him: is that why I brought our arm-wrestle to a close? Perhaps: or perhaps not. Perhaps I could no longer stomach the continuation of those swinelike grunts & pants hammering on my eardrums. The time had come. I moved my right hand forward and down in one beautiful arc and within less than a second the man of straw was defeated.
Now will you admit that the semi-colon is the superior of the full stop? I said. Yes, said Hemingway. Then say it! said I. The semi-colon is the superior of the full stop, he said. Now blow your man’s nose & wipe away those ugly tears, I said, thrusting my handkerchief at this hirsute & now broken stick. In all honesty, I cannot recollect arm-wrestling with such easeful triumph since last I took on Edith Sitwell.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
January 7th
Another average day. First, I grunge the sicky-wicky, then I scowze out the scab-tube, then I skunk down the flunk-pustule, and that just about takes me up to lunch. For lunch, I have a light shit-snack of cannelloni with tomato sauce like the castrated cocks of two hundred dwarves dowsed in their own blood, then it’s back to irking the scuzz-wock. Then I’ll screw-whack the scrag-head and soil the downside of the whinge-pussy before getting in a bit of shagbagging the apothegm before a dinner of Supa-scrag-fleck-on-toast. After dinner, it’s down to the spick-arse to sconse some clap-wax off a Pluto-gasket, and then it’s into my jim-jams and nighty-night with heads down for beddy-byes.
MARTIN AMIS
Day 18,263. The housemates are celebrating their half-century in the Big Brother house. 11.15 a.m. Mikey and Richard have wrapped up well and are in the garden. Glyn is having a bit of a cough. His back’s been playing up again. Imogen and Lea are making their way on their zimmer frames to the living area. Satnav and Cornflake, who only joined the house thirty-two years ago, are in the kitchen, getting their bearings. Nikki is in the diary room. She’s left her teeth somewhere but she can’t remember where.
NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.
BB: Today, Nikki, you have been in the Big Brother house for fifty years. You are now seventy three years of age. Nikki – how do you feel?
NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.
BB: Thank you, Nikki. You may now leave the diary room.
NIKKI: Big Brother? One more thing.
BB: Yes, Nikki?
NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.
BB: Thank you, Nikki.
January 8th
A delightful evening of much jollity! Mummy and Daddy to dinner. Over truly splendid creamy meringues prepared by our truly splendid housekeeper Dalisay, Harold tells them with his usual brilliant eloquence of the terrible things that are going on in Serbia – and all thanks, he explains, to those positively brutal and monstrous Americans! Over coffee, Harold treats us all to a truly splendid reading of ‘Up Your Fucking Arse’, his truly splendid denunciation of the Bush regime. Mummy and Daddy both have their eyes closed in immense concentration. Awfully touching!
LADY ANTONIA FRASER
January 9th
I flick the light switch and the light goes on. Whatever happened to faulty electrical fittings? In the old days, two or three youngsters would be electrocuted every day through haphazard wirings. But no more. Things do not always change for the better, I fear.
ROGER SCRUTON
January 10th
The river flows, and it keeps flowin’. And having flown, it flows again. There’s no rhyme or reason, my friend, that’s just the way rivers flow. What is in the river is not river but water, but it’s not just the water that flows, but the river too.
BOB DYLAN
Yet another programme on the television about the so-called Queen but it doesn’t answer the question: who the heck is the REAL Elizabeth Windsor? A lot of people think that just because she’s commander-in-chief of the British armed forces, she’s out there with her machine-gun and her stash of grenades, leading her troops into battle against her subject peoples on a day-to-day basis. Not so. Aged eighty years old, she hasn’t so much as raised a fist and given an assailant a bloody nose or kicked an opponent in the balls with her dainty size-four feet for quite a few years now.
Instead, she sits all alone in a basement of Buckingham Castle with the curtains drawn watching repeats of EastEnders on her ten-inch black-and-white television while scooping tinned spaghetti hoops into her mouth with her gloved hands. She could watch absolutely anything she chose – she’s even got a remote control, for crying out loud – including programmes about culture and politics. But no, she does not choose. Instead, she just sits there, watching whatever she wants. Just like my mother in her aged care facility. These old people truly make my blood boil. The Queen could have taken an Aborigine male to her marriage bed and thus presented a beacon of hope to all the oppressed people of the world, but did she do it? Did she heck. An Aborigine husband would have signalled that whatever her toffee-nosed advisers might tell her, dammit, she was on the side of the poor and the craply-treated. And the young couple could have gone on a true Royal walkabout, living off grubs and nettles and tracing the songlines of the Home Counties for a period of seven years before returning barefoot to the so-called civilisation that is commonly known – don’t make me laugh! – as London Town. But she just didn’t make the effort. Ha! Don’t talk to Lilibet about effort. Sorry, guys –it’s a word that doesn’t feature in her vocabulary.
GERMAINE GREER
January 11th
1979 is not getting off to a good start. News of PM’s proposed state of emergency v. depressing. In the morning, I begin to prepare an advisory paper setting out a far-reaching plan for the future well-being of the UK but suddenly it’s midday and time for lunch, so I scribble ‘WHY NOT SELL OFF NORTH SEA OIL’ in big letters and hand it to the PM, making it to the Gay Hussar just in time for lovely chilled wild cherry soup followed by veal goulash with lovely Shirley Williams.
Shirley desperately concerned about child poverty up North. I say how desperately concerned I am about it as well, and tell her that I think Jim is probably desperately concerned too. Tell her the best way to tackle it is to redefine it, thus bringing 95 per cent of all people into category of ‘better off.’ It’s the least we can do to give them a leg-up. Pudding a lovely walnut cheese pancake with extra cream. Shirley suggests I might like to take over the Chairmanship of British Leyland. Back to No. 10 just in time to hear news of economic collapse, then off to Covent Garden for lovely Tosca.
BERNARD DONOUGHUE
Using my special friends-and-family key, I let myself into Buckingham Palace and put my head round the Queen’s sitting-room door.
Elizabeth tells me she’s been hurting dreadfully and has lost her sense of identity. ‘I’m, like, who am I?’ she says. She always turns to me for comfort. She finds me very down to earth. ‘You’re a very caring person, Heather,’ she says. ‘Probably too caring for your own good. When my time comes, I hope they’ll make you Queen. It’s what Diana would have wanted, and to replace me they’ll need someone well known throughout the world for her tireless charity work.’
I’m like, ‘I couldn’t be Queen, that’s not my style, I’m not up to it.’ But she gets me sat down and says, ‘You’ve spent your whole life caring for others, Heather. And it’s time you got them to care for you. You’d fit this throne real beautiful – and what’s more, for all the love you’ve got inside you, you deserve it, love.’
HEATHER MILLS McCARTNEY
January 12th
News comes through of the death of General Galtieri. A lot of unhelpful things are being said of him. But at least he had the guts to stand up to her, which is more than one can say for the Bakers and Gummers and Hurds of this world.
And one should never forget that Galtieri was a superb connoisseur of porcelain. He was kind enough to give me a delightful Wedgwood tea service when I was over on a visit. We exchanged Christmas cards ever after.
SIR EDWARD HEATH
January 13th
What are you that makes me feel thus? Are you thus what makes me feel that? Feel me thus that you makes what are?
You are my winged Pegasus, my hirsute daffodil, my sea urchin of song, my orang-utan pirouetting on a high wire, my banana unpeeled, my mango spurting vertiginous aspidistras over the umbrous concavities of Sappho’s juts and nooks. You affect me as a young gazelle affects the mountain over which it lollops, dollops and, er, sollops –oh, bollops.
I close my beautiful brown deep brown soft brown eyes. My lips like smoked salmon wrapped in cream cheese parcels with a sprig of fennel, moist, urgent, costly but on special offer, meet your lips, as fresh and nutritious as the morning’s cod.
My tongue laps your lips; your lips are lapped, and, lapping lips lip lappingly like lollipops over lipped laps slapped slippingly. Your mouth opens and closes, blowing and sucking, sucking and blowing as my hands wreathe your gills in luscious circles of contentment.
Your gills? Wreathe your gills? I open my eyes. My God! It is not you at all but the goldfish I am kissing. That which I am kissing is the goldfish!
JEANETTE WINTERSON
January 14th
It happened again this morning. I had just finished tape-recording myself for the archives, swallowing my third mug of tea and finishing off a banana fruit when the newspapers – many of them still delivered by workers to the private homes of millionaires, even in this day and age! – were delivered to my home. What, I wondered, are the latest press comments about me and the democratic policies I have been fighting for tooth and nail these past fifty years? I read every page of the Daily Express, including sports and arts, into the tape-recorder, but, on my playback, failed to hear a single mention of myself and my policies.
It’s their new strategy, y’see. Having in the past sought to undermine democracy by lampooning me, they now try to achieve the same result by ignoring me, making me out to be some sort of ‘fringe’ character!
Poured m’self another cup of tea. The tape-recorder picked up all the glugs, so it obviously doesn’t need new batteries quite yet.
TONY BENN
(#litres_trial_promo)
To Chatsworth. Poky.
WOODROW WYATT
January 15th
Repetition is the memory of repetition. And repetition is the memory of repetition.
ADAM PHILLIPS
January 16th
BBC announcers insist on using the expression ‘This is the news.’ One hears it every night, without fail. Yet news is plural. They should say, ‘These are the news,’ and, half an hour later, ‘Those were the news.’ They never will, of course, because the BBC is a socialist institution, within which correct English is regarded as the enemy of the state. Have we ever had a more horrid public culture?
CHARLES MOORE
I maintain (though she might, in truth, query this) that it was I who usefully introduced my Aunt Phyl to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton in 1973. Or was it 1974? Conceivably (and here I am, metaphorically speaking, sticking my neck out) it was 1972, or even 1971, though if it was 1971, then it might not have been the castellated hostelry that we ate in, as a useful visit to my local library yesterday afternoon between 3.30 p.m. and 4.23 p.m. confirmed me in my suspicion that the hostelry in question was in fact closed for the greater part of 1971, owing to a refurbishment programme. In that case, and if it really was 1971, which, frankly, seems increasingly unlikely given the other dates available, then it is within the realms of possibility that we ate at another hostelry entirely, possibly one overlooking the North Sea, and, if so, it is equally possible that we feasted not on scampi and chips but on shepherd’s pie. Did we also consume a side order of vegetables? Memory is, I have found, a fickle servant, so I am unable to recall whether, on this occasion, we indulged in a side order of vegetables, if we were there at all. It is, I fear, another blank, another lost or discarded piece in the jigsaw of my past.
MARGARET DRABBLE
January 17th
They tell me that in some shops they have started selling loaves of bread that are what they call ‘ready-and-sliced’. I fervently hope this is one trend that doesn’t ‘catch on’. And is there really any need for this new-fangled idea of soup in tins? Broth tastes so much better bubbling away in a great big open pot, stirred by a chef who really knows his stuff and served at one’s table in the open air by a marvellous old character somewhere on a wonderful Highland moor. By denying our children such pleasures, I fear we are in profound danger of cutting them off from reality.
HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
January 18th
Throughout this year, I shall be following the famous not to say distinguished rock singer Michael George for a three-part documentary series. Today, we recorded the first in a series of interviews, as well as my introduction. There’s a very great deal of excitement about this extraordinary project:
MELVYN: Michael George
(#litres_trial_promo) shot to fame as a leading member of the trio Whim!. As a signwriter, sorry, songwriter, he has achieved international success by writing acclaimed songs such as um er by writing several um famous songs. Michael George is now internationally acknowledged as a erm as a leading erm singer, indeed as one of the most singery and singerest singers erm of his generation. On the eve of his first world tour since his last, Michael George gave us this exclusive insight into the way he erm…
GEORGE: Super to see you, Melvyn! How you doin’? Ooh, you smell nice! Mmmm…doesn’t he smell nice, boys?
MELVYN: Can we start with the early days, Michael? You began life as a foetus and then you were a baby for – what? one or two years – and then, am I right in thinking, proceeded to become a child, in your case a boy?
GEORGE: Yeah, it was really eating me up, all I wanted was my dignity and my self-determination and the whole process of like being a child made me understand something about how this government really manipulates us into believing – sorry, Melvyn, can we stop for a sec? You know what? I’m feeling a bit sweaty. Do I look sweaty to you, Melvyn? Now, be honest!
MELVYN: Zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzz. (Wakes with a start.) Where am I? Who are you? Where were we?! Yes! Go on!
GEORGE: D’you know, Melvyn, I’m feeling a bit sweaty?
MELVYN: Um. No. Remind me. How does it go?
MELVYN BRAGG
January 19th
Swiftian? Come off it. That’s what I thought when I read this week’s obituaries, dripping with a sweaty mixture of vintage port, caviar and Marmite sandwiches, of Auberon Waugh.
I remember it well, the smug old world of El Vino in Fleet Street. Right-wing journalists would mix with left-wing journalists, both drowning their differences in champagne (so much more fizzy than common-or-garden white wine, dontcha know, old chap). It was all just a game – and instead of smashing each other’s faces with their fists, and demanding urgent, much needed social reforms, they preferred to discuss their differences over what they would no doubt call a drinkie-poo. They spent hours ‘debating’, ‘exchanging opinions’, ‘seeing the other point of view’, and so on, in a typical recreation of the toffee-nosed public schools which had, years before, puked them out in their stiff collars, sporting blazers, corduroy shorts and school neckties imprinted with a hundred little swastikas.
To that hoity-toity coterie, all that matters is a joke or two. And it doesn’t matter if the rest of us can’t for the life of us understand it. ‘Knock, Knock,’ they say, and when their victim replies: ‘Who’s there?’ they mention a perfectly ordinary Christian name, rendering us, their victims, speechless. ‘There’s an Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman,’ they say.
‘And we are all part of the EEC,’ I correct them.
So what’s so funny about ‘jokes’? Don’t ask me. I’m not someone who likes to ‘laugh’ – especially not at a time when so many ordinary Britons are living below the poverty line in inner cities deprived of inward investment by the self-serving machinations of big business. Laughter is to be distrusted and abhorred, whether it comes from the right or the so-called left. Funny? So funny I forgot to laugh.
Don’t imagine the breed is dying out. Far from it. Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, is a writer of just this ‘humorous’ stamp, with mannerisms to match. Charming? If you say so. But how can you describe someone as ‘charming’ who subscribes to a belief in the free-market economy?
The last time I saw him, Johnson asked me to write an article for the Spectator, damn him.
I refused point blank. I told him that throughout my career I have only written for people who share my views. I’m certainly not going to start arguing with people who’ll disagree with me for political reasons of their own.
POLLY TOYNBEE
January 20th
Alfred Wainwright died today, in 1991. He wasted a lifetime on walking, but still never managed to get beyond the Lake District.
V.S. NAIPAUL
Whatever happened to fun? In the heady, far-off days of my youth, we certainly knew how to have fun! My grandmother, Edith, the seventh Marchioness of Londonderry, taught me how! She had always been intent on injecting gaiety into life!
Her charmed circle would gossip like mad, play silly games, flirt with each other, tell outrageous jokes, widdle down the stairwell, and drink copious quantities of the delicious pre-war Londonderry champagne!
She even enjoyed a close friendship with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald! ‘He was an old-fashioned socialist,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘He loved beautiful things, gorgeous pageantry, fine silverware, dressing up in resplendent uniforms, being waited on hand and foot, and taking the cream of the British aristocracy up the botty!’
Throughout my life, we couldn’t have had half so much fun without our full complement of servants, all of them the most tremendous characters!
The marvellous thing was how much they respected us! I’ll never forget what the inimitable Mr Chambers, Daddy’s bathroom butler, said after vigorously wiping Daddy’s behind after he had experienced a particularly severe dose of diarrhoea! He said, ‘It’s come up beautiful, sir – and may I add what a pleasure and a privilege it has been for me to attend to you today!’
Sadly, Mr Chambers shot himself the next day. It could have been the most frightful blow, but thankfully the vacancy was soon filled!
LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH
Cut a hole in a bedsheet. Put your head through it. Step into a washing machine. Ask your friend to switch it on. Watch the world spin round and round. Step out of the machine. Your bedsheet will still have a hole. Ask your maid to repair it. You are an artist. Yoko loves you.
YOKO ONO
January 21st
A great night out for Tony. A great night out for New Labour. And a great night out for Britain. Yup, it was the 1997 Brit Awards, that literally incredible celebration of the new explosion of British youth and talent. ‘I live in a house in a very big house in the countraaaay,’ sang Blur, and you felt your whole body rising up, and not just because it was nearly time to go.
All of us in New Labour felt it would be fantastic to forge an association with youth and optimism, so Donald Dewar was put in charge of booking a table way back in October. The eight of us – Gordon Brown, wearing his old flared jeans, the lovely Ken and Barbara Follett, Tony, me, Jack Straw (looking very casual in a cravat over a beige polo-neck), Margaret Beckett (ex-Steeleye Span, of course) and John Prescott (squeezed into his velvet loon pants) were lucky enough to share a table with the super young lads from Oasis.
At dinner, we were keen to find out what the youth of Britain really thinks about the major issues confronting this country. Over soup, Margaret, sitting next to Noel Gallagher, suggested we might harness the great energy of Britpop to help solve some of the problems facing us. Noel brought the natural verve of youth to his reply. ‘Piss off, toothy,’ he said, reaching for another can of lager.
‘Thanks, Noel. I certainly think that response gives us much to build on,’ enthused Tony. ‘Any other suggestions, lads?’
At that moment, the Oasis drummer removed Jack Straw’s specs and began to wiggle them round in the air with all the super high spirits of the young. Jack made it clear he was enjoying the joke tremendously by laughing for five to six seconds before saying, ‘Joke over, lads – joke over.’ But by this time the drummer had given them to the rhythm guitarist, who was now wearing them on his bottom.
It was left to John Prescott to break the ice. ‘Are New Labour’s plans for the renationalisation of our railways exciting much interest among the young?’ he asked.
‘Speak up, fatty!’ replied Liam Gallagher, and we all laughed appreciatively at his rough-and-ready Scouse wit while he amiably sprayed us all with a frothed-up can of Special Brew.
Tony has always been a terrific fan of pop music, and for much of the first session – by the exciting new band Blur – I noted he had his top set of teeth pressed over his bottom lip while his hands played along on his dummy guitar. Meanwhile, Jack Straw was busily trying to retrieve his spectacles, which by now had been passed by the rhythm guitarist of Oasis to the bass guitarist of Garbage, who had employed his lighter to bend them into some sort of abstract ‘mound’, reflecting the spiritual aspirations of the young.
‘I live in a house, in a very big house, in the countraaaay,’ sang Blur. I noticed that Margaret, having removed her straw hat with its lovely green ribbon, had got out her pocket calculator to work out how the aforementioned very big house in the country would be affected from a tax point of view under New Labour, if it was owner-occupied with a 50 per cent endowment mortgage, repayable over twenty-five years. ‘Best not tell him,’ she whispered to me, ‘but he’ll be 7 per cent worse off under New Labour.’
Next came Tony’s big moment. He was presenting the Lifetime Achievement award to David Bowie, a personal favourite. Tony was wearing his loose-cut Armani dark suit with a floral tie, but beneath it – and this is what viewers couldn’t see – he was kitted out in a multicoloured Aladdin Sane bodystocking, ready to meet his hero.
‘It’s been a great year of energy, youth, vitality, and great, great music,’ began Tony, ‘and believe me, we in New Labour draw terrific inspiration from your tremendous efforts.’ Sadly, the rest of his speech was drowned out for me by the organist from Screwball vomiting over Ken Follett’s double-breasted Armani suit.
PETER MANDELSON
January 22nd
To Buckingham Palace, to attend an investiture. Prince Philip greets me with his usual affectionate male banter. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he jests. ‘I thought I told them to keep you away!’
I roar with infectious laughter as he turns on his heel – but with perfect timing I catch him just as he reaches the door. ‘You are an irrepressible old character, sir!’ I congratulate him. ‘A national treasure, forsooth!’
At this point, the Prince raises a good-natured fist and socks me in the mouth.
‘Marvellous, sir!’ I enthuse, picking up my front teeth from the beautifully polished floor. ‘Have you ever heard my immortal anecdote about my meeting with Henry Cooper? Oh, but you MUST!’
GYLES BRANDRETH
January 23rd
Last night at dinner, I was placed next to the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
The dinner consisted of a fine venison stew accompanied by potatoes dauphinoise. Adolf Hitler has a well-known temper, but I did not see it. Our talk revolved around a new musical in the West End, which he had not seen. Nor had I. I told him that I had been reliably informed by Sacheverell that it is quite marvellous, with colourful costumes, extravagant settings and a number of good tunes. He promised he will try to catch it if ever he manages to reach Britain. I noticed that he uses his napkin quite sparingly: unusual, I thought, for an Austrian.
CLARISSA EDEN
So Pete’s moved out he’s like so moved out at the end of the day he’s moved out tell me about it but I’m in a good place and my boobs are in a good place they’re really focused they’ve so talked it over, they work as a team say what you like they got respect for each other, I say to them let’s get round a table and talk it over if Pete doesn’t like them goin’ clubbin’ and havin’ a bit of fun well then that’s up to Pete at the end of the day it’s the children they’re concerned about their concern is for the children 110 per cent tell me about it so if they want to go out and have a bit of fun then I’ve got to be honest with you I’m not going to stop them.
KATIE PRICE
January 24th, 1925
My Dear Lady Cunard,
Thank you so much for that lovely stay last weekend. We both enjoyed ourselves very much. It was really very kind of you to have us.
I do hope my little ‘diversion’ on Saturday evening wasn’t too awfully inconvenient for you, and that your servants have managed to get most of the mud out of the carpets! From something you said –or was it just a look? – I came away thinking that I may, in your eyes, have done something ‘wrong’. If so, I can only apologise, but what is a man if he cannot seize the moment to strip off all his loathsome lily-livered clothes and wrestle his fellow man naked, strong, tumultuous, full of the very urge of life that lies within them, and all in a deep, soft, dirty – real dirty – and splodgesome sea of mud.
You may argue – in your typically grey, bourgeois, corrupt, stinking, decaying way – that I had no ‘right’ to order your gardeners to load ten, eleven, twelve wheelbarrows high with sludge from the ditches, wheel them into the blue drawing room and offload them in the area in front of the blazing fire. And you may also argue –loudmouthed bitch – that I could at least have rolled up your priceless carpet – symbol of all that is petty and extravagant and worthless in this age – and placed it to one side.
Away with your arguments! An end to your grey, sniffy, hoity-toity objections! When I rolled with your stable lad in the mud, as we pummelled each other with our fists and each felt the brute within and the mud without, I at last felt free and open and alive and triumphant and, yes, pure! How dare you suggest that mud-wrestling between two men should be confined to the outdoors, should be shunted away into the barns and the brooks, should be well away from all the upholstery and fine furnishings. There is nothing dirty in mud! This pervasive and wretched belief in household cleanliness is the sign of a decrepit age! There is no good carpet, no good sofa, that has not been splattered with the mud thrown off as two or more bold and muscle-bound men come a-grappling! Your priggish mud-hatred fills my blood with contempt.
Finally, once again, many thanks for the most marvellous stay. You made us feel so ‘at home’. We both came home greatly refreshed, and full of wonderful memories of a really terrific weekend.
Yours ever,
David
D.H. LAWRENCE,LETTER TO LADY CUNARD
I spoke to TB and started drafting resignation letters. I felt desperately sorry for Peter Mandelson. He had clearly been crying, and needed my support.
I went over to him, said this is all absolutely dreadful but we just have to get through it. I put one arm around his shoulder, and with the other I eased the knife, as gently as I could, between his shoul-derblades. By this time, he was writhing in pain, but I assured him that I would be strong for him, and do everything physically possible to ease his passing.
He kept saying why, why, why, but I reassured him that it just had to be done. As the tears cascaded down his cheeks, I sat alongside him and comforted him and read him his farewell resignation letter, and I gripped his shoulder and told him he had to be strong and then I gave it one last thrust. ‘You don’t deserve this, Peter, you really don’t, you’re one of the greatest ministers this country ever had,’ I said.
Bumped into JP on the way home, and he congratulated me on a very smooth operation. We agreed that Mandelson’s no better than a cartload of bollocks and we’re 100 per cent better off without him.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
January 25th
To Cuba. Introduced to President Castro. No oil painting. Very full of himself. Absurd bushy beard, army ‘fatigues’, regional accent (Welsh?). Inquire whether he is a Derbyshire Castro. ‘I myself am a regular at Chatsworth,’ I add, helpfully. He fails to take the bait. Instead, he drones on about the Missile Crisis. Missile Crisis this, Missile Crisis that. Typically lower class, living from crisis to crisis. So dreadfully panicky.
JAMES LEES-MILNE
PHILIP PULLMAN: I don’t like the word ‘God’, never have done, never will do. It’s meaningless, for the simple reason that God doesn’t exist.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, Philip, that’s a fascinating point. I think you’ve hit on something very very profound there, indeed something very meaningful, in a spiritual way.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Christianity is on a hiding to nothing, because Jesus was not the son of God.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That’s marvellously bold, Philip, and I salute you for it! It takes a creative artist of your tremendous powers of observation to say something so challenging and stimulating for the rest of us! But would you mind awfully if I took you up on something you said just now about Jesus?
PHILIP PULLMAN: As you know, I’m a very busy man, but not too busy to spare you a moment or two, Rowan. Fire away!
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: You said something to the effect that Jesus was not the son of God, and also that – do please correct me if I’m wrong! –Christianity is on ‘a hiding to nothing…’
PHILIP PULLMAN: Absolutely.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, that’s a wonderful phrase, tremendously powerful. ‘A hiding to nothing’. You at your impressive best! For me, it’s a phrase that carries real emotional power. And of course, in a very real sense, the Christian pursuit of God – or whatever we want to call him! –is indeed a pursuit of nothing, in the sense that the divinity, or what-have-you, is immaterial and not of this earth. So the expression ‘a hiding to nothing’ very much sums up what the Christian Church should be aiming for. I think we’re entirely at one on that, I must say.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Rowan, in my new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which you have so kindly agreed to help me publicise –
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Oh, it was the very least I could do…
PHILIP PULLMAN:…Very kind, nevertheless. In my new book, I attempt to show organised religion as a source of falsehood and wickedness. As a theologian, would you go along with this?
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, of course, it’s a fascinating topic for conjecture, tremendously rich and intriguing, but, no, as the leader of an organised religion, on the whole I’m not sure I entirely buy into that. Frankly, I can see problems with it. Put it this way, Philip: it gives me pause.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Really, Rowan – it’s so easy to be dismissive!
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I hope I wasn’t dismissive. Perhaps I was, and if so, I can only apologise.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Apology accepted. So I think we can both agree that the established Church is a source of falsehood and wickedness. We have plenty of common ground.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, though it’s a profoundly interesting point, perhaps I wouldn’t want to go quite as far as…
PHILIP PULLMAN: So we’re entirely at one on that.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I’ve always considered ‘at one’ an extraordinarily helpful phrase, and I must say it thrills me deeply to hear you use it, Philip. It reinforces my sense that, for all our surface differences, the two of us are really thinking along the same lines. Very much so.
PHILIP PULLMAN: And another point I make in my book is that any head of an organised religion is likely to torture and kill anyone who disagrees with him.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That’s a very striking point, Philip, though we may have one or two minor points of difference on the detail – for instance, as Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never seriously consider torturing or killing anyone just because they disagree with me, whatever we may mean by ‘disagree’! But I think we are united in our search for human value, and that’s the most important thing.
PHILIP PULLMAN: You say you won’t torture or kill those of us who have the temerity to disagree with you! Well, if I’ve extracted that promise from you today, Rowan, then our discussion won’t have been a complete waste of time! Now, I’ve got to rush to another speaking engagement, so I must go. Some of us have work to do! If you could just carry my bags to the taxi, Rowan, there’s a good fellow.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I’m frankly overwhelmed that a great author such as yourself thinks of me as a good fellow, Philip!
PHILIP PULLMAN: That’s very literal of you, Rowan. Hurry up, now! Chip-chop!
PHILIP PULLMAN IN CONVERSATION WITHDR ROWAN WILLIAMS
January 26th
Have found a way of knotting my necktie using an extraordinary little gadget on my Swiss Army penknife. Its recommended use in the accompanying pamphlet is for taking the stones out of horses’ hooves, but they keep these other uses quiet, don’t they, just in case the ordinary decent people get to hear of them. Whereas tying my necktie used to take, ooh, a minute, with this handy gadget it can now take over fifteen minutes. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Of course, the minute word gets out about it, it’ll be dynamite, there’ll be the most massive international cover-up involving all the powers the state has at its disposal. But that’s what you’d expect of the feudal hierarchy under which we are forced to live, isn’t it? Either that, or they make one out to be potty!
Unpeel a banana fruit and eat it, first throwing away the mushy white bit inside.
TONY BENN
I’m mad for the economic downturn! Mad for it! Mass unemployment is so sexy, hm? When the economic graph swoops down like that, like a curve from Fragonard, I think it is so gorgeous, so trendy! My new evening-wear range for Chanel is a wonderful homage to that curve, with all my clothes with downturns off the shoulders in dark, dark greys and delicious blacks.
KARL LAGERFELD
January 27th
On this day many, many years ago, I was introduced to Mr Gandhi at a party of Diana Cooper’s.
I was perfectly frank. I informed him there was nothing very clever about parading around in a loincloth drinking one’s own urine and generally acting the giddy goat.
As a result, he fell head over heels in love with me.
Men love to be told the truth, even when painful.
BARBARA CARTLAND
January 28th
I learn from the wireless that the American space ‘shuttle’ (horrid word) Challenger has exploded seconds after lift-off. Serves them jolly well right. When will these tenth-raters learn to place me in charge of their operations? Instead, they leave it to nincompoops and incompetents. Of course, these sissies at Mission Control are interested only in themselves. Their instinct is to engineer matters in such a way that their achievements catch up – surpass, perchance! – my own. What nonsense! Do they not realise that I am widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the vast majority of subjects? In a huff, they conceitedly disregard me and ‘blast off’ without so much as a by-your-leave. And look what happens! Will they never learn?
A.L. ROWSE
It’s only this that motivates me to write about my father at all: this vexed question of masculinity, of what it is to be a man. An unutterably grey nimbus of brutality surrounded my parents. They fought to the death, brandishing decency, the nuclear weapon of the suburban bourgeoisie. On the crap terrace of our suburban semi, my mother would coldheartedly ask my father how his day had been. Shielding the blow, he would reply, viciously, that it had been fine – and with a final savage swipe he would then tell her to put her legs up, before threatening her with a ‘nice’ cup of tea. The two of them were a schizophrenic hermaphrodite, their marriage a screaming Procrustes, always stretched to breaking point – and beyond. I once overheard my mother say, ‘How about a nice biscuit then, dear?’ It was a dubiously interrogatory phrase designed to force upon the prostrate victim an all-out assault, or attack, that could be met only with the tiny porous shit-brown shield of the absent HobNob. When my father replied, ‘Mmm…lovely,’ I knew then that he had allowed his manhood to wither into a nothingness as weary, diminished and yet somehow sublimely totemic as a small mollusc stamped upon by an elephant before being subdivided with a pair of compasses by an aberrant alge-braitician who is nursing a rare neurotic compulsive disorder that forces him to make things very small, or minuscule.
WILL SELF
January 29th
The Prime Minister of Korea is an exceptionally cultured man, a brilliant and congenial scholar and devoted public servant. We were indeed honoured to be able to entertain him to a finger buffet of a selection of finest cuts of British Spam at our Embassy, which has now been moved from the old mansion house to the more convenient and easy-to-clean lean-to just six miles further along the same road. He assured us that he found our new bring-a-bottle policy highly sensible, and was obviously delighted to meet Major Ronald Ferguson, who had agreed to come along to lend the necessary glamour and dignity to the event. The trade agreement went through very smoothly, with Korea agreeing to export millions of pounds of their manufactured goods to us and we, in turn, agreeing not to send any more of our awful stuff to them. Handshakes all round, leaving just enough time to prepare for a reasonably good dinner.
SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON
Deep into my research for my mega-film The Young Victoria. Not many people these days have ever heard of Queen Victoria – and I’m determined to remedy that! I want the world to become aware of one marvellous little lady who went by the name of Queen Victoria – or Her Maj, as she preferred to be known!!!
So who exactly was the young Victoria? My intensive research tells me that not only did she climb her way up the greasy pole to become Queen of All England, but she was also far from the dowdy old boot-faced frump of popular imagination. The young Victoria was in fact a beautiful person with flowers in her hair, porcelain shoulders, great legs and truly galumptious boobs, a fun-loving chick who liked nothing better than hooting with laughter whilst flirting unashamedly with all the dishiest blokes in the room! She was one helluva young lady who adored going down to the local town square to literally stuff herself with barbecued bratwurst in a bun – and lots more ketchup for me, please, Albert!
SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
January 30th
My antecedents, seasoned aristocrats all, were the founders of what we are now pleased to describe, in our impishly ironic way, as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
My great-grandfather, Senator Bore Vidal of New York, the owner of 200,000 acres of prime farming land east of Buffalo, married my great-grandmother Edwina Crashing, the daughter of Amelia Crashing, whose father was one of the Wilds of Montana, giving birth to my grandfather, Senator Wild Crashing Bore, who in turn married Miss Gore Blimey from one of the most influential aristocratic families in London’s gorgeously affluent Hackney East.
From their union sprang, with, I regret to say, more promptitude than pulchritude, the Hon. Mrs Bore V. Dull of Oklahoma, who then gave birth to a famously talented son, Gore V. Dull, later to become better known as Gore Vidal, now widely respected as the nation’s foremost novelist, social commentator and historian.
On my father’s side, I am related to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, neither of them inconsiderable figures in the political arena, though one must learn, I suppose, to overlook their deficiencies in the facial hair department. On the military side, my distinguished great-great-grandfather General Gore L. Vidal was at Custer’s side at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Many believe it to have been General Gore’s personal message of encouragement to the troops (‘TO THE FIRST MAN WHO GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE, A FREE SHAMPOO AND SET’) that swung the balance in that least dainty of skirmishes. In turn, General Gore’s great-nephew, Sassoon Vidal, the founder of the first literary salon, emerged as the major poet of the First World War, no anthology complete without his moving lines: ‘The shells burst all about us/Spraying mud o’er our uniforms/Clean on this bleak morn.’
My English critics have attempted to ignore the illustrious and influential pedigree from which I so deftly sprang. But then no one of any breeding cares any more about that inconsiderable little offshore isle, sinking beneath the weight of its own – how shall I put it? – snobbery.
GORE VIDAL
What is it about books that makes them so truly great to read? I think it’s the way the words are printed on every page, the right way up and in just the right order.
This means you can start reading on the first page and then continue reading through the middle pages all the way to the last.
Here are some of my absolute favourite books to read.
War by Leo Tolstoy. A great read.
(And why not buy the two-volume edition which includes Peace by the same great author?)
Middlemarch by George Eliot. Another great read. Hundreds of pages of great words and punctuation, and all beautifully laid out.
Shakespeare by Shakespeare. He has so many great lines. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ ‘I am the Walrus.’ ‘My heart will go on.’
They’re part of the language.
Next week, I’m planning to learn how to peel an orange with a world expert fruit psychologist.
GWYNETH PALTROW
January 31st
JM
(#litres_trial_promo) comes round. For half an hour, he holds my hand and whispers sweet nothings in my ear. ‘Essentially,’ he coos, ‘these proposals for renewing the essential health of our domestic economy are the same as those I previously mentioned…’
I am overcome with desire. He is so sure of himself, so knowledgeable. I want to know more. ‘Go on, go on!’ I beg him.
‘…and they represent,’ he continues, a little breathlessly, ‘a significant initiative in the formation of an important and imaginative element in our strategy to improve the supply performance of the economy…’
I am overwhelmed. At this point, he digs deep into his trousers and pulls out his pocket calculator. I’ve never seen one like it. ‘Now, if we are talking about 31/4 per cent annual growth over a five-year fixed period, then that comes to…’ he says, becoming very, very tactile, tapping all the right buttons with the dexterity of an expert.
After he has come out with a final figure, I dash to the BBC to record an interview on Pebble Mill at One. I dress as a crème caramel to launch our End That Fatty Diet initiative.
EDWINA CURRIE
Good morning, it’s 5.15 a.m. and I have just scratched my right elbow as it was itching a bit. I sit at my desk, wondering what to write. I reflect that there is no reason at all not to start with my usual salute. So I write, Good morning, it’s 5.15 a.m.
What next? I am in no mind to leave it there.
Fortuitously, I feel an itch on my right elbow. I scratch it. This gives me something potentially interesting to record, so I decide to insert the additional information that I have just scratched my right elbow as it was itching a bit.
A vista opens. I can now write about my decision to write about the fact that I scratched my right elbow, together with the reasons behind this impulsive action. So I put on record that a fresh vista has opened out, as I am now able to write about my decision to write about the fact that I scratched my right elbow, and the reasons behind that impulsive action.
NICHOLSON BAKER
February (#ulink_373ee91a-7954-5d1a-9099-d70405be8cc0)
February 1st
February is the month I devote to rearranging the cushions on the sofa in my dressing room, and I do so without any help whatsoever from our staff. As you might imagine, it is quite a job, there being no fewer than four cushions, each of a different colour. Thus one might choose to arrange the navy blue on one side, the pink on the other, with pale yellow and Lincoln green somewhere in the middle, only to find that, on second thoughts, it actually looks better to have the pink somewhere in the middle, with the pale yellow to the left, the navy blue to the right, leaving room for the Lincoln green to remain in the middle, only this time next to the pink and not to the pale yellow, unless of course it is between the pink and the pale yellow.
Whenever I have met them, I have found the British public extraordinarily ignorant of the demands and pressures with which we in the so-called ‘upper classes’ (how I hate all this ‘class’ nonsense!) are confronted day by day. I sometimes think that the ‘ordinary’ people, for all their immense pluck, fail to appreciate the many onerous tasks that befall the Stately Home owner, and I welcome this opportunity to ‘put them in the picture’. Rearranging the cushions on the sofa in my dressing room is one such task, and the time and planning involved are not to be underestimated. First, I have one of our staff nip out to the local shops to buy me a range of excellent new French devices known as ‘crayons’, which are what we used to know as pencils, but with brightly coloured leads. I then spend a week or so measuring out on a piece of paper and colouring in four squares – pink, pale yellow, Lincoln green and navy blue – and a further week cutting them out. This leaves me just a fortnight to juggle these four coloured squares around this way and that, until I am perfectly satisfied that I have ‘come up’ with the best new arrangement. It all makes for a highly enjoyable topic of dinner conversation too, and come February our guests delight in spending an hour and a half or so over the soup arguing the pros and cons of, say, having the pink on the left or the pale yellow on the right, and thoroughly productive it is too.
ANDREW, DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE
February 2nd
What a decade the Sixties is turning out to be. It was tonight, in that steamy liberated atmosphere of sexual awakening, that I first set eyes on Harold Pinter. We were at a party. It was, as I recall, a fondue party. None of the usual rules applied. Knives, forks, spoons: who needed them? Cutlery was dismissed as conventional, and even serviettes had been discarded. Instead, we would – wildly, madly, crazily – dip pieces of bread just any-old-how into a hot cheesy sauce. Then we would toss them into our mouths as ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ played suggestively in the background. The effect was electrifying.
Pinter and I went outside together. I said nothing. He said nothing. I said nothing back. He added nothing. Nothing would come between us. Pinter was already known for his pauses, but in those extraordinary moments he managed to stretch it from a slight pause to a mild hesitation and then, before we both knew it, to a full-blown silence.
Pinter was to become known as the master of the pause. He certainly couldn’t keep his pause off me.
JOAN BAKEWELL
As I was being shaved yesterday morning, I found myself reflecting that no English monarch since the death of Edward III can be put quite in the first class, though Queen Elizabeth I was undoubtedly sound, and Queen Victoria was nearly Beta Plus.
And what of God? Though His mind is too eclectic to be considered truly first-rate, He may still be justly credited with one or two good ideas, the Rees-Mogg family being just one example. We stretch back twelve centuries to Ras Mag, the distinguished President of the Ancient Pict Chamber of Commerce, and a notably successful Vice-Chairman of the Woad Preservation Society. To Rees-Moggs, Windsor Castle is a comparatively modern, somewhat – dare I say it – nouveau riche building, as are its present tenants. But I still incline to the point of view that it should be rebuilt. Life itself is not unlike Windsor Castle: sturdy yet fragile, admitting visitors yet essentially private, permanent yet strangely temporary.
WILLIAM REES-MOGG
February 3rd
This morning, I moved to pour myself a cup of tea. As I sat stirring that cup, or, rather, the hard, strong tea within it, my elbow moved back and for’d, back and for’d in a movement that danced to a mysterious rhythm. I was nearing the end of my stirring, and weary, when as fate would have it my elbow inadvertently nudged the vase on the corner table. In consequence, the vase fell off the table, and the dampened daffodils within it were hurled onto the floor, causing our maid, previously young and carefree, to slip as she passed by. She fell headlong onto my prone body, so that a passer-by, unaware of the incidents that had preceded this tragic scene, might have surmised with good reason that she was nailed to me, like Jesus Christ on the cross.
Alas, that is not what the second Mrs Hardy surmised as she entered the room a few brief seconds later. Instead, she threw up her hands and hurled cruel epithets of abuse at myself and also at the maid, who had, when the caterwauling came to a stop, aged most visibly, her hair now wispy and grey, with furrows deep in her face like time-honour’d sheep-tracks over old familiar hills.
This afternoon, a fresh cup of tea was brought to me, this time by a fresh maid with an uncomely gait and the severest of squints. The second Mrs Hardy looked on with an air that betrayed contentment. I am left in a state of unknowing as to where our first maid has gone. I suspect it is somewhere far away and forsaken, and that our paths are never more to cross.
Why me?
THOMAS HARDY
February 4th
To an exhibition of driftwood jewellery at the Commonwealth Institute. I am waiting for Her Majesty in the company of Denis MacShane, MP, a junior Foreign Office Minister. He is still recovering from the excitement of playing host to Her Majesty three weeks ago.
‘Have you noticed how she wears her hats so well?’ he observes, respectfully. ‘Always firmly on the head. And she’s brilliant with gloves, too. She knows where to put every single finger, one in each slot. I’ve never seen her get it wrong.’
She arrives in lilac coat and matching hat. She approaches a figure holding a labrador on a lead.
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘A dog.’
‘She gets it right every time,’ the Lord Lieutenant of the county whispers to me. ‘Marvellous with animals.’
GYLES BRANDRETH
February 5th
JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! You look fablus! Cwoor! You look gwate! Just gwate! Darn she look fablus, laze and gennulmun? Fand-astic! Wooh! I twuly can’t bleev you’re here with me today! Unbleevbul! Fancy a quickie? Fand-asdic! And you’ve also done all of us in this little countwy of ours the gwate honour of atchly coming to live amongst us!
MADONNA: Yes.
JONATHAN ROSS: Unbleevbaw. We all thank you fwom the bottom of our hearts for coming to live here. Jes thing of that laze and gennulmun –Madonna atchly living in England! Canyer bleev it? So er I guess you um must like it here?
MADONNA: Yes. Quite.
JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! Gwate! Thank you so much for answerwing that question! Hilawious! So now Madonna’s gonna tweat us to a toadly genius new song! Let’s hear it for Madonna, laze and gennulmun!
MADONNA:
Ah trahda stayur head, trahda stayon tarp
Trahda playapart, but somehow ahfugart
Ahdlark to spress my stream parnda view
Ahm not chrisjun nodda jew
Ooohweeoooweeoooh
This is American Lahf
JONATHAN ROSS: FABLUS! GWATE! FAND-ASDIC! Now, lez facey, you are the singaw biggest star in the histwy of the whirl of wall time ever. Thas quite an achievemun!
MADONNA: Wodever.
JONATHAN ROSS: Gwate! It must be litwully amazing being you! Tell us what you do on a nawmaw day?!
MADONNA: This and that.
JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! Gwate weply! Tellyawha, if I was Madonna, I’d get out of bed, stwip naked and just look at myself in the miwwor for hours on end!!! I mean, you’ve got the most FAND-ASDIC physique, you weally have! Gwate bweasts! Cwooor! If I were you, I’d just go STARKERS and look at them in the miwwor all day long – then I’d turn wownd and take a gander at that incwedibull bum! Is that what you do on a normal day, then? Is it?
MADONNA: No.
JONATHAN ROSS: Gwate! Um. So, Madonna, tell us about a day when you do somethin you weally want to do. Like, what would you do on a day when you do somethin you weally want to do – like, a day when you could do anything, so you decide to do not just anything but, like, somethin you weally want to do, f’rinstance?
MADONNA: Hmmm. A day when I do something I really wanna do. Hmmm.
JONATHAN ROSS: Yeah. I mean, like a day when you just wake up and you think, hey, I’m Madonna, I can do wodever I wanna do and what I wanna do today is to do, like, wodever I wanna do. Like, if I were you, I’d fondaw my bweasts all day, thas what I’d do! I mean, lez face it, you got twuly gwate tits, you weally have!
MADONNA: My husband and I might go to the movies. We read books. Go to a pub.
JONATHAN ROSS: Amazin! Laze and gennulmun, Madonna goes into our English pubs! Thank you so much, Madonna – you’re a world superstar, but you are happy to go into an English pub! Thaz fand-asdic!
MADONNA: My husband and I go down to the Old Bull and Bush with Burlington Bertie to spend our bobs and quids on a pint of ale and eat fish and chips with brown sauce served by Pearly Kings and Queens. Chim chiminee, chim chiminee, chim-chim-cherooo. And then my husband and I jump aboard a double-decker bus and rabbit in cockney rhyming slang with Mrs Tiggywinkle and the cheery local bobbies.
JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! And do you let them feel your bweasts at all?
MADONNA: No.
JONATHAN ROSS: Shame! Ha ha ha! Let’s have another bwilliand classic song. Les heawifaw Madonna, laze and gennulmun!
MADONNA:
Doan tellmedur staaarp
Tell the rain nodder draaarp
Tell the win nodder blow
Cos you said so
Tell meeee larvissun drew
Is jist somethin thad we do-oo-oo.
JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! Fab-lus! We are so deeply honoured to have you among us! Now, not only do you have the most fand-asdic physique – wiwya just look at that arse, laze and gennulmun – but you are a positive GENIUS at we-invention. Like, one moment you are, like wolling naked on the sand in just a wimple, then you toadly we-invent yourself and for the next album you’ve toadly we-invented yourself and this time you’re wolling naked on the sand – in a cowboy hat! Bwilliand!
MADONNA: I don’t stick to the programme. I reinvent myself.
(#litres_trial_promo) I, like, play with the whole concept of adopting different personas as a means of, like, playing with the whole concept of different personas. By, like, reinventing myself. As a whole concept. Like, I wanted to wake people up to the whole notion that people get hurt in wars. By appearing naked in a gas mask I wanted to say, like, people wake up, war is such a negative concept.
JONATHAN ROSS: But then you withdwew the vidjo.
MADONNA: Sure. I withdrew the video because by then the war had started, and I wanted people to, like, get behind the whole concept of war, and wake them up to the more positive notion that war could actually stop more people getting hurt.
JONATHAN ROSS: Smashin’! Fand-asdic! Tellyawhat, that Guy Witchie’s a lucky bloke! Fwankly, I wouldn’t mind givin’ you one in my dwessing woom later! Less heary for Madonna, laze and gennulmun – and the gwatest tits in the histwy of poplar music!
February 6th
Today, I almost lost count of the minutes I spent researching the story of Queen Victoria. I sat in the hushed atmosphere of the Royal Library for what seemed like an hour. A few minutes later I left with an overwhelming sense that the story of the young Victoria would make a wonderful film – a film she would undoubtedly have made herself if only she’d had the contacts.
The more I researched her, the more I became aware that poor Victoria had never once appeared on television or radio, had never agreed to guest on a chat show, and had never even attended a Royal film premiere! It’s so easy to take these things for granted, but I wanted to truly understand what it felt like to be deprived of these necessities.
SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
I have two tape-recorders, one newer and more capable, the other older and more experienced. For security reasons, I never leave them in a room together, but I have often wondered how they have behaved when they are alone. So simply by way of experiment, I place the two of them together in my office having first – quite unknown to them –placed a third tape-recorder in an upper drawer of my desk with the ‘Record’ button pressed on.
The results are fascinating. For three hours, not a single murmur! Or were they tipped off by the third tape-recorder, as a result of some sort of nod-and-wink from the powers that be? I’ll investigate further next week. A fourth tape-recorder may well be needed.
TONY BENN
February 7th
Poor, dear Hughie Trevor-Roper. I really couldn’t feel more desperately sorry for him. One always held his scholarship in such high regard. But now his reputation has been smashed to smithereens by his over-hasty authentication of the so-called ‘Hitler Diaries’. Oh, deary, deary me! It makes one want to weep!
On the other hand, what good would weeping do for poor, absurd, fallen Hughie? None whatsoever. Far better for him that we should all laugh out loud, and join in all the fun at witnessing a once-revered colleague falling flat on his silly face. It’s what he would have wanted.
When the mirth has begun to subside, I pick up my pen and write a letter to poor old ruined Hughie, offering him whatever help I can give. ‘I see that my local “branch” of Victoria Wine is advertising for a junior sales assistant, no experience necessary,’ I venture. ‘Do let me know whether this might be up your street – a friend in need, etc, etc.’
And with this, I help myself to another consoling glass of first-rate champagne. Infinitely agreeable.
A.L. ROWSE
February 8th
It had been a hugely successful tour. Once again, the Canadians had shown that they loved Queen Elizabeth and she had shown she loved Canada.
‘I have never known anyone who could wave half as brilliantly as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother,’ recalls a close aide. ‘She had this extraordinary ability to hold her right hand up in the air and then –and this is where the real skill comes in – to move it, with amazing delicacy, very gently from side to side. And she really could do that for literally minutes at a time. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.’
Another onlooker found himself entranced by her singular ability to combine this skill with another. ‘I remember looking at her in her carriage. She was already performing that outstanding wave – it literally radiated sunbeams from its epicentre – when it suddenly struck me that she was also doing something else, equally remarkable. Yes, she was waving – but at one and the same time she was also smiling!’
And by all accounts, that smile was the most perfect smile the world had ever seen. ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ one courtier confided to his diary, ‘but it has something to do with her mouth. Somehow she manages to raise both ends at the same time. As if by magic, she creates a smile, and she then holds that smile for several seconds and turns her head, so that everyone can see it. I have never seen such selflessness and generosity. The effect is transcendent. In the shadow of that gracious smile, I have witnessed entire nations moved to tears of consummate joy, peace and understanding.’
By the time Queen Elizabeth arrived back from her tour of Canada, the Vietnam war had been brought to an end, world trade was prospering once more, thousands of patients had been cured of their illnesses, and Britain was enjoying a glorious heatwave.
Once again, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had smiled her way into the hearts of the people. ‘It’s so very thrilling,’ she confessed in a letter to Queen Mary. ‘The little Canadians simply ADORE me!!!!’
WILLIAM SHAWCROSS
(#litres_trial_promo)
Day 18,295 in the Big Brother house. 11.27 a.m.: Aisleyne and Imogen are in the kitchen.
AISLEYNE: How long we been in here then?
IMOGEN: Where?
AISLEYNE: Here?
IMOGEN: Here?
AISLEYNE: Yeah. Here.
IMOGEN: Fifty years, babes.
AISLEYNE: Fifty fuckin’ years?
IMOGEN: Yeah.
AISLEYNE: Oh. Right. I gotta do something about these hair extensions.
February 9th
My father always said that one can never do without common sense in matters great as well as small. He never let anyone in his shop who had not first handed over their shoelaces to my mother at the door. In this way he sought to put an end to petty pilfering. ‘No one can run far without their shoelaces,’ he once said as an elderly lady crashed to the floor, a bag of stolen flour bursting beneath her arm. My father was a man of firm principles and firmer forefinger. Aged ten, I asked him why, when serving the smoked ham, he made a point of placing his right forefinger on the scales. He explained it was to give the customers better all-round service, by helping them pay that little bit extra for quality produce. ‘A finger on the scales is a penny in the till,’ he explained, and it is advice that I have treasured ever since.
MARGARET THATCHER
An actor must be a gazelle at a waterhole, a cabin bursting into flame, a bottle thrown into the ocean, a distant planet newly discovered by an astronomer whose wife has just left him for a younger guy who’s into baseball.
And sometimes, just sometimes, all four at once.
BRAD PITT
February 10th
Odessa. I visit the Odessa Steps: lots and lots of steps, all named after Odessa. Odessa is one of the very few cities I can think of which begin with an ‘O’ – unless you count Orpington! Actually, it’s rather like Orpington in a way: there are lots of buildings, and quite a few people, plus cars and so on. As cities go, Odessa is literally indescribable.
Before I came here, I had no idea how big Russia is. It really is very, very big indeed. The people here are very friendly. Today, after quite a comfortable night, it has been my privilege to meet a marvellous old character, a gentleman who speaks near-perfect English, dresses very smartly in suit and tie, has heard of the Pythons (always a help!) and is anxious to cooperate in any way he can. ‘We must get him on film – he’s a marvellous old character,’ I say to my producer.
‘He’s our assistant director,’ explains my producer.
Later, I rehearse the next day’s script. ‘I must say this view is simply stunning,’ I say over and over again. Tomorrow, we will find a view to go with it.
MICHAEL PALIN
February 11th
Dreadfully distressed at this morning’s news of the death of HRH Princess Margaret. She may have been the teensiest bit COMMON, bless her, but my goodness she had RAZZLE DAZZLE. In so many ways, Margaret personified the sheer devil-may-care spirit of the Sixties. I shall never forget a spectacular luncheon party she threw on the Isle of Mustique in August, 1969. Everyone who was anyone in the Sixties was there. Tripping around the exquisitely-mown lawn on my allotted golf-buggy before the serving of the Pina Coladas, I remember overtaking Gerry and the Pacemakers, all crammed into one little buggy, and Sir Gerald Nabarro, Frank Ifield and Freddy ‘Parrot-Face’ Davis having a whale of a time in another.
Luncheon was a delightful affair. One now forgets what the Princess was wearing, but I myself was wearing a crushed-velvet suit in the most beautiful deep purple, with a Burlington Bertie smock to match. Prompted by sheer JOIE DE VIVRE into perfectly SHAMEFUL indiscretions, I hugely amused the Princess with my running commentary on all the latest goings-on among the senior heads of department at the British Museum. The Princess sat fixed to her seat, her head cocked to one side, her eyes tight-shut, so as to soak it all in. It is greatly to her credit that she would surround herself with people far more intelligent than herself.
After a sumptuous luncheon, a vast cake was wheeled out by the most magnificent pair of coloured gentlemen. And then – PURE THEATRE! – Kathy Kirby and Norman Wisdom leapt out and proceeded to polka the afternoon away to the music of Burl Ives. MAGIC!
Margaret – who I will always remember as one of the most intensely musical figures of that era – clapped quite brilliantly in time, getting every other clap almost exactly right.
SIR ROY STRONG
I had an idea for these gloves today, and I was like, wow. I really want to be really, really creative and like really push ideas to their furthest creation. My fashion philosophy can be summed up as like, I want to take reality to the furthest reality, as part of the creative process. Because it’s only by really pulling ideas into their furthest creative reality that you can find where you’re gonna like push them.
I wanted these to be very, very stylish, very, very classic and very, very contemporary. That was my whole philosophy of them, my whole glove philosophy. But first I had all these different like THINGS to work out, cos I have always paid very, very close attention to detail, cos basically I’m a very-close-attention-to-detail kind of person, that’s just the way I am. So first – how many fingers on each glove? I thought about this and like really studied the whole human thing, and eventually I thought like – wow! – yup, it’s got to be four fingers and a thumb. And not just four fingers and a thumb on one glove, but four fingers and a thumb on both gloves. And that’s not because I’ve got anything against thumbs. I was always brought up to really appreciate thumbs, and I’m dead against people who are, like, against thumbs. No – it’s because if you look at the average human hand and count the fingers and thumbs, like I have, you’ll find it’s got four fingers and just one thumb, and that’s what I wanted to, like, mirror, in my own gloves.
So I rang up my glovemaker and I’m like, a pair of gloves, four fingers and a thumb each, and I want it very, very stylish, very, very classic and very, very contemporary. And she transformed my own distinctive vision into reality. And that was like really really weird.
STELLA MCCARTNEY
February 12th
There are always new characters to meet. This evening, I was placed next to Igor Stravinsky, the well-known composer. He is neither very tall nor very short, but if he had been it wouldn’t have mattered as for most of the time we were both sitting down.
He held forth on the subject of music, to the exclusion of all else. After a good few minutes of this, I sought to change the subject.
‘Would you agree with me that this lamb is a little overdone?’ I inquired. I cannot remember his reply, so it can’t have been interesting. He had no real conversation.
CLARISSA EDEN
The Hitch and I were in a burpfarty willybumcrack dive off the Porto-bello Road and drinking like men – one half of Skol leapfrogged swiftly by another, two packs of salt and vinegar, heavy on the salt, don’t hold back on the vinegar, mush, then another half of Skol, this time with a slash of lime, followed by a Pepsi, all black, no ice – when I rasped that fuckitman, I preferred early Conrad to later James and middle Nabokov to either of them. The Hitch immediately puked into the pocket of a passing paediatrician and snorted vomitoriously that middle James could beat early James and late Nabokov hands down, ansdarn.
‘Come outside and say that.’ The words shinned out of my mouth like a nuclear siren signalling the decimation of a world boorishly encyclopaedic in its slavish variety. On the ashpuke streets wheezing with urine-drenched tramps, the Hitch and I squared up to one another, eyes unblinking, like men. I flexed my arms; the Hitch flexed his. GO! Hands working faster than the speed of travelling luminous energy, we began to trade smacks, all the while singing, ‘A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see and all that he could see see see was the bot –’
By this time, we were biffing our way through it full pelt. But I got to the end – ‘bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea’ – before him, and the Hitch collapsed fighting for breath like a man fighting for breath, his defeat ameliorated by his knowledge that with his hands and his rhyme he had just participated in the tumescent whirligig of literary history in the late twentieth century.
MARTIN AMIS
February 13th
Anji Hunter was helpful. She said Campbell and Mandelson once had a shaky relationship, but it’s much improved. ‘These days, when Alas-tair pours the tea for Peter, it’s into a cup,’ she says.
LANCE PRICE
The second week of February is now virtually over, and I still haven’t found time to assist poor Andrew with the uphill struggle he is having over the rearrangement of his cushions, so utterly hectic has my own life been, what with the frightful bother of trying to impose some semblance of order on my scarf drawer. ‘Scarf’ – that’s an interesting word, and of course ‘cushion’ is another, and we discussed how interesting they were over dinner the night before last. Norman St John of Fawnsley pointed out that there is no other word in the English language spelt c-u-s-h-i-o-n, in that order, and when I pointed out that it is also the only word in English spelt exactly in that way meaning something you can sit on, darling Roy Strong got tremendously over-excited, clapping his hands together, and was kind enough to tell me how clever I was!! The two of them were such utter poppets that after they had finished their main courses I told them they could get off their knees for pudding and sit with us around the grown-ups’ table.
DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE
February 14th
If I am a master of the easy paradox, it is essentially because no paradox is easy to master. My prose style is the style of a pro(se). The clever effect is achieved by reversing the first half of a sentence so that the reversal achieves an effect of cleverness. This has gained me an international reputation for being smart, though I am not one to smart at the international reputation I have gained.
CLIVE JAMES
I told the Queen Mother how pretty she was looking and she said, ‘I always try to put on something special in jewellery for you, Woodrow, because I know how much you like it.’ At this point, I said, ‘You are a poppet, Ma’am,’ and placed my right hand on her upper back. I then began to rub it up and down in a soothing and strangely sensual manner. I may say she has the most sublime back of any of the Royal Family, up to and including Princess Michael. It was all I could do to restrain myself from sitting astride her on that sofa and licking it discreetly with my tongue.
Our talk turned to Nelson Mandela. She asked me if the rumours were true that he was black. I told her that, yes, they were. ‘So does he play the trumpet?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid not, Ma’am,’ I replied.
‘What a wicked waste,’ she said, adding that Louis Armstrong had played the trumpet quite beautifully, and that he had never felt the need to waste time struggling against apartheid.
‘It’s just like the miners,’ she added. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are to be able to spend their lives in a mine. Think how cosy it must be down there! Such fun! I do love black!’
She is one of the most politically astute women I have ever met. ‘Might it not be a rather marvellous idea,’ she said, signalling to her footman to unwrap me a Bittermint, ‘were the good old Royal Air Force to bomb Liverpool? It would be like the war all over again, with everyone singing songs and pulling together. Such larks!’
I will suggest it to Margaret in the morning.
(#litres_trial_promo)
WOODROW WYATT
February 15th
Watched something on TV about Florence Nightingale, poor love. I was a nurse in the Crimea, and believe me, it’s no easy job walking around with your lamp, tending to all those brave soldiers with blood spurting out of them, hearing their last words, wrapping them up in bandages and that. So why are the media always going at poor Florence? She’s just doing her bit, for God’s sake, but they can’t understand that, can they, so they try and make out she’s only in it for the publicity. I don’t tell people this, but when I came back from the Crimea, I founded Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Kiddies, but I don’t go on about it, it’s a secret.
HEATHER MILLS MCCARTNEY
Gerry Adams is common, with that simply ghastly beard of his. But Ian Paisley is a poppet. One longs to put him in one’s pocket and take him home, then have him bellow sweet nothings in one’s ear! Heaven! I wonder if a very, very bold check tweed Biligorri two-piece might suit him? I saw Paisley (such a pretty name) last night on Newsnight arguing the toss with Jemima Paxman. Halfway through the interview, he turned to the camera and winked at me.
And him a Reverend!
Saucy boy.
NICHOLAS HASLAM
February 16th
Joni Mitchell song on the radio. ‘I’ve looked at life from both sides now but clouds got in my way’? What’s she on about? Why let a cloud get in your bloody way? It’s only made of fluff or whatever. Just tell it to fuck the fuck off, that’s what I say.
JANET STREET-PORTER
February 17th
For lunch, I eat some rice. Why am I the only person in the world who eats rice?
GERMAINE GREER
February 18th
Concomitantly, silence is, as I have pointed out in pioneering books and seminars, invariably quarried and pillaged by lesser minds (usually without acknowledgement and certainly without apology), golden.
Cities, towns, conurbations, large groups of buildings placed near or proximate to one another to form a definable whole, are both the conduits and the receptacles for noise, sound, clamour (klamari in Swahili, calamari in Italian, though I prefer the cannelloni). At regular time period intervals, I retreat to the French hillsides with my distinguished yet unspoken wife, to breathe in the silence, unloud and noiseless, that was once partaken by the by no means lesser minds of Flaubert and Racine.
Maritally, we sit in a fieldy meadow in an incipiently quiet time/space continuum observing the hush (huss in Somali) stretching far beneath us, down to the herd, team, group of cows below. ‘Ah, silence!’ I exclaim exclamatorily in simple wonderment. ‘Silence – the silence that is with us now – a silence golden as James’s Bowl, as Apuleius’ Ass, as Frazer’s Bough, that silence blessed by my original study, now translated into fifteen languages, taken up yet still not acknowledged by those whose academic reputations fall sadly short of my own. Ah, silence! A void, a circumstantial gap, a vivid diaspora, the sound, rare and provocative, created when one’s talk ceases. Silence, both metaphysical and actual, both concomitant and –’
‘Moo!’ enunciates a cow, bovine and cowlike, and the other cows follow suitly, ‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’
My antennae, exceedingly alert, like a lieder by Schubert or a poem by Pound, inform me that this cuddish interruption is part of a Friesian conspiracy intent on placing in jeopardy my seminar on the nature of la silencia. These animals possess all the professional jealousy and unctuous mooishness of the Oxford-educated. They have been put up to their loutish intervention by those in the English faculty less honoured than myself.
‘Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!’ I interpolate.
‘Moo! Moo! Moo!’ they respond.
I seize the opportunity to point out to my unspoken wife that in the Oubanji language there are fifteen words meaning ‘moo’, only one of them in common use by cows. But she cannot hear me. She has her earplugs in (arapluggi in Cameroon), as she has done since 1974, still perversely intent upon listening to the mute, smothering silence that lies somewhere beyond words.
GEORGE STEINER
Michelangelo died today, in 1564. I used to think he was a great artist. But then I looked again at his work. To my horror, it showed no skill or originality whatsoever. I was so embarrassed on his account. The failure is extraordinary. It is not so surprising that since his death his reputation has been in free-fall.
V.S. NAIPAUL
February 19th, 1943
TO WINSTON CHURCHILL
Darling Winnie,
Just the briefest of scribbles to congratulate you on a superb tour of the front, so heroic and sweet and STIRRING. As always, you had our boys in the palm of your hand, and, I may add, looked quite gorgeous in your little khaki two-piece! Bravo! Forgive me, Winnie, but might I add the smallest of suggestions? It occurred to me that, after delivering an encouraging word to the troops, and just before conducting your inspection, you could do some marvellous ‘stage business’ with your handkerchief – perhaps dropping it casually on the ground before retrieving it with a flourish, or waving it to-and-fro with an air of infinite melancholy, or perhaps, with a few deft flicks of the wrist, folding it in such a manner as to create a snow-white swan. It is a little trick I have employed with notable success in my hugely successful run of Tap-Dancing to Victory, currently at the Albery. I am delighted to pass it on.
Ever Yours,
Johnny
JOHN GIELGUD
February 20th, 1943
TO NOËL COWARD
Darling Nolly,
There is no doubting Winston’s brilliance, though I do wish he wouldn’t slur his words so, and he is a trifle…BULLISH for my tastes. And MUST he wear that ghastly khaki two-piece? What DOES he think he looks like, the poor old pet?
His performance is undoubtedly strong – none of us would deny him that – but it seems to me he could make much more of his hankie, and rather less of that simply dreadful cigar.
Your own,
Johnny
JOHN GIELGUD
February 21st
Writers are territorial, and they resent intruders. My sister Susan (who prefers not to be reminded that her first name is Susan, though Susan it is, and who prefers to struggle along under the pen-name of A.S. Byatt rather than Susan, even though those of us in her family know all too well that the tell-tale ‘S’ definitely stands for Susan) said in an interview somewhere (I didn’t read it myself, not having time to waste) that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular tea set that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. I had some sympathy with Sue, who felt I had appropriated something that was not mine, even though, as my lawyer pointed out, it was, strictly speaking, not exclusively hers either, and if she had really wanted to write about that tea set then why hadn’t she done so when she had the opportunity, and not wait until she knew that I had done so before opening her big fat mouth and complaining that I had got there first?
I used the tea set in my novel The Chest of Drawers,
(#litres_trial_promo) but employed the power of my imagination to change it from a tea set to a coffee set, in an attempt, sadly misguided, to prevent an indignant outburst from Sue. Incidentally, the ‘chest of drawers’ in the title was originally not a chest of drawers at all but a small occasional table, of the type common in the East Midlands immediately after the 2nd World War; I changed it from a small occasional table to a chest of drawers for reasons that I no longer remember, but which (knowing her!) may have had something to do with not wishing to upset my big sister Sue. For the purposes of fiction, in this particular novel I used my imagination to transform Sue into a cut-price washing machine with an unreliable timing mechanism which the heroine, Meg, eventually throws away, for reasons I now forget.
MARGARET DRABBLE
February 22nd
One reason that people used to vote Tory was that Tory MPs always wore lovely tweed suits. And they respected them for it. But nowadays they see them in off-the-peg grey or black suits, many of them two-piece and without watch-chains, and consequently they have no one to look up to. And we wonder why so many unmarried teenagers have triplets and nose-rings!
CHARLES MOORE
PM very buoyant. ‘The funny thing is that we are going to win the ’79 election by over 100 seats,’ he says. He adds that ‘ordinary people have no time for Mrs Thatcher. She just doesn’t understand them like we do. The last thing they want is to own their own homes, they much prefer them to be owned by us.’ He tells Cabinet that once the North Sea oil revenue starts coming in, we’ll be able to bury all those dead bodies everyone’s going on about.
Denis Healey pipes up that the corpses have only got themselves to blame. ‘Bloody layabouts,’ he says.
Tony Benn puts forward a major new plan he has drawn up to allow corpses to form a union of their own – ‘Something along the lines of The Union of the Recently Departed and Technically Deceased, or RDTD for short,’ he says. Cabinet agree that if we allowed them to feel a vital part of the wider Labour movement then when it came to making a fuss they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
The lovely Shirley Williams suggests that if the corpses are going to remain unburied, then it might be nice to decorate them, or wrap them in bright colours, so that ordinary, decent passers-by could feel better about themselves. The PM points out that Peter Jay thinks that corpses are good as a hedge against inflation. ‘And let’s face it, Peter’s dreadfully clever, they tell me he knows all about money.’
Lovely dinner at Mon Plaisir with Harold Lever who advises me to invest in the development of technology to turn unburied corpses into fuel. Finish with a lovely crème brûlée over which he kindly suggests that I might care to be the next but one Governor of the Bank of England (‘It would be very you, Bernard’), and taxi home by midnight.
BERNARD DONOUGHUE
February 23rd
Well, the Oscars are over for another year. Thousands of friends and well-wishers insist I was the belle of the ball on Oscar night, but I’d also like to pay tribute to the real efforts made by good friends Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie. They did their best, and that’s good enough for me. We can’t all be winners, girls!
Not many people know this – it’s not something I go on about – but the Academy were pressing me to accept a Lifetime Special Achievement Oscar for all the amazing work I’ve done in the fields of cinema and music and the arts and worldwide peace and that. But I’m like, ‘I was busy with my charity work, guys – and anyway my good friends lovely ladies Kate Winslet and Penelope Cruz need their egos massaged a bit more than I do!’
Close friends and total strangers have been coming up to me in the street ever since. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t win an Oscar, Heather!’ they all say. But my lips are sealed. When I saw my good friend the Pope for lunch today, I’m like, ‘You know what, Ben? Some things are best kept to yourself.’
HEATHER MILLS MCCARTNEY
February 24th
Dear Diary, It is February the 24th 1974 and I am seriously smitten. Martin Amis (or, as he styles himself, Martin: Amis) is everything I have ever wished for: moody, ironic, dishy, and, in his own characteristically brilliant words, ‘f—ing clever’.
He is, again in his own words, a ‘word-magician in velve’ (a reference to his beloved velvet jacket, or ‘jacky-jack’ as he sometimes calls it). He has admitted me into his magical circle of brilliant intellectuals like legendary écriviste Anthony Holden, the funny, flirtatious Clive James (whose TV criticism is an art form in itself) and that doyen of wicked wordplay, Robert Robinson. Sometimes Cyril Fletcher, the éminence grise of television’s fabled That’s Life, graces us with his presence, and, urging us all to ‘Pin back your lug ’oles,’ brings the table to its feet with one of his immortal ‘Odd Odes’.
Martin is working at the TLS, and sometimes sends me love letters he has written on TLS notepaper. ‘I love you Martin’ he once wrote. I remember mentioning that he must have left out a dash between the ‘you’ and the ‘Martin’, but he denied it. Is he in love with someone else?
JULIE KAVANAGH
I’m warming my slippers in front of the log fire when I turn to my wife. ‘There’s a funny sort of ringing in my ears,’ I complain.
‘It’s the telephone, Dukey,’ she explains.
She passes me the receiver. Someone is talking on the other end.
It’s the Home Secretary. Douglas Hurd is my godson, and still runs the occasional errand for me.
‘Oh, Dukey, how would you like to be in charge of the BBC?’ he asks.
‘BBC?’ I say. ‘…Remind me.’
‘Broadcasting. Radio, telly, that sort of hoodjamaflip.’
‘To be perfectly frank, Douglas,’ I say, ‘I’ve got no use for a telly. I mean, where would one put it?’
‘But you don’t have to buy a television, Dukey – you just have to be in charge of it.’
‘You’ve convinced me,’ I say, and go to sleep.
MARMADUKE HUSSEY
February 25th
I’ll never forget something the great Laurens van der Post
(#litres_trial_promo) once told me. Things, he said, are as they are. Yet being what they are, they are also somehow different. And if things were not as they are, they could not continue to be what they both have been and will be. And consequently, they – the things in question – will always be not only what they might have been and what they are, but also what they will be. It is these simple truths that we are, I fear, in danger of losing.
HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES
February 26th
I am halfway through Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I throw it away in disgust. Thomas Hardy had no right – no right whatsoever – to write a book about me without my express permission. His presumption in this matter represents a total invasion of my rights to privacy. May I also point out that, like many a hack before him, he has got a startling number of the facts wrong.
FACT: I was born in Australia, not Wessex.
FACT: I was christened Germaine, not Tess, a name I have long despised. Has the guy never considered checking his facts?
FACT: I was never impregnated by a guy called Alec.
FACT: I have never – I repeat NEVER – been arrested and hanged.
GERMAINE GREER
February 27th
I peel the onion of my memory, first one layer, then another, and then assuredly another, when suddenly buried deep in it I espy the glint of something unexpected, namely something I had not expected to espy therein.
At first I can make out the shape distantly only, but then I realise that it is – oh yes! oh no! oh yes! oh no! – a hat, quite military, initialled with two distinctive letters, both the same. The first is S and so is the second. SS.
My goodness, the hat in question is undeniably an SS helmet, and at that moment I recall with a start that I was, unbeknownst to me, a member of the SS, an organisation that had done uncalled-for things but so very many years ago that it is most extremely hard to remember without forgetting.
GÜNTER GRASS
Picasso’s attitude to boiled sweets has been the subject of much debate. His preference, some say, was for Barley Sugar, whilst others maintain he preferred the old-fashioned ‘gob-stopper’.
One or two, including the meretricious Clive Bell, have even suggested he enjoyed Liquorice All-Sorts. Such a claim flies in the face of reason, since experts have proved that the Liquorice All-Sort has never counted as a boiled sweet. For one thing, it is far too chewy, but these stupid people – among them the pushy Clive Bell, who had no knowledge of boiled sweets whatsoever – couldn’t be expected to know that.
Did Picasso ever include a boiled sweet in a painting? Received wisdom suggests that his Weeping Woman II (1936) is seeking comfort from a throat lozenge. Others point to the figure on the right in his Bathers Outside a Beach Cabana (1929) and say that her transparent sense of Weltschmerz is caused by the bubble-gum that may have enlodged itself in her tresses. And then there will always be those who maintain that the gentleman’s erect member painted as a circle in Seated Male Nude (1927) is in fact a Polo Mint.
JOHN RICHARDSON
(#litres_trial_promo)
News comes through of the death of Harold Acton. For me, no man was less like the area of London associated with his name. To be linked with that most unprepossessing part of West London must have been a matter of perpetual ignominy for poor, dear Harold.
DIANA MOSLEY
Today was the day of my funeral, which was so great. I came in a hearse ($154) in this beautiful open coffin in a black cashmere suit ($374) and sunglasses ($56) and the church was full of people like Diane von Furstenberg and Liza and Calvin Klein and Yoko and Bianca and Robert Mapplethorpe and just about everybody, they all showed up and everyone was saying how great I was looking and how I’ve never looked better which was really great, and my blood pressure’s right down which is great. Liza’s put on weight though, and I spotted Calvin’s got a pimple on his nose and everyone could tell he was embarrassed about it. Afterwards, I was buried in Pittsburgh, so totally depressing.
ANDY WARHOL
February 28th
One of the key things I’ve uncovered during my research is that Victoria became Queen of England at a very young age – and managed to remain Queen all the time until she died! And as a Duchess myself, I feel I have a duty to let the rest of the world into this truly extraordinary secret which has been kept undercover for a century, which is nearly a thousand years.
Instead of a childhood filled with the bestest kind of great big huggy-hugs, the young Victoria had to cope with a starchy, no-can-do, hands-off atmosphere of stuffy, po-faced courtiers telling her do this, don’t do that: no, you can’t get your rocks off with all the hunkiest blokes on the disco floor of Kensington Palace; no, you can’t have a bit of fun going skinny-dipping in the Balmoral pond when there’s a hoity-toity, tutty-tutty garden party in progress; no, you can’t let it all out with a jolly good scream in the middle of a formal dinner party for the President of Snooty-Land, even if you are feeling stressed-up.
But Victoria wasn’t the kind of girl to let a rulebook stand in her way. ‘No way, José!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m out to have fun!’ One of my totally favorito scenes in my screenplay is when the young Victoria gets a fit of the absolute gigglies when her chewing-gum shoots out of her mouth while she’s talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a very senior vicar at that time! And the next minute, she’s standing up to the German Prime Minister Adolf Hitler, telling him straight up that no way is he going to invade England, not while she’s Queen. It’s that kind of period detail – fun and laughter, yes, but also quite a few tears – that’ll make the whole film such an emotional roller-coaster!
SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
Henry James died today, in 1916. He was the worst writer in the world. He never went out. He never rolled up his sleeves and put his arm up the backside of a cow. He never slapped a woman about the face to teach her a lesson. He never lived. It is an absence which shows in his ‘novels’.
V.S. NAIPAUL
March (#ulink_3bac504a-8a01-579e-ab58-6a632b6804e5)
March 1st
Harold a little peeved over dinner at L’Artiste Assoiffé when the under-waiter fails to congratulate him on the truly splendid production of The Caretaker that is presently running to ‘packed houses’ (theatrical speak for ‘full up’!) at the Shaw Theatre. I don’t think anyone else around the table notices, but I can always tell when Harold is a bit ‘put out’ because he tends to smash the plates with his fists.
But otherwise an evening of great jollity, with the best intervention coming from David Hare who expatiated on how we must all strive to help liberate the ‘working class’. (How I hate that term – it implies that some of us aren’t workers, even though we may work fearfully hard on a biography of Marie Antoinette for absolutely years and years!!) When the aforementioned waiter comes over and asks whether everything was all right for us, Harold interjects – brilliantly – that it’s a damn fool question.
We end by ordering a bottle of Château d’Yquem on behalf of the sugar-plantation workers of East Timor.
LADY ANTONIA FRASER
Buy new fuckin house for a load of bread, but at least it has a brilliant swimmin pool for the car.
KEITH RICHARDS
March 2nd
Lady Diana Cooper was a lifelong beauty, famous for wearing impossibly large hats. I once asked her why she wore such big hats. Her reply was delightful.
In response to another question I put to her some years later, she told me that the answer was yes – but only in some respects!
I now forget what the question was. Dickie Mountbatten may have been in the room at the time. Dickie was very proud of his suede riding boots, and rightly so.
CLARISSA EDEN
March 3rd
The full history of Picasso and his vexed relations with boiled sweets must, alas, wait for a future volume, Picasso: The Too Good to Hurry Years. For the moment, let it suffice to say that he was rarely, if ever, observed sucking on a boiled sweet whilst painting, and since, when offered a Lemon Sherbet by the rich, spoiled homosexual narcissist Jean Cocteau, whose family money, incidentally, came from dry-cleaning, of all things, and whose coarse, unsophisticated father sported a singularly ill-fitting toupée, Picasso declined, saying thank you, but he had just had luncheon. Three days later he painted Woman in an Armchair, now hanging in the Musée Picasso, and some have detected a suggestion of Lemon Sherbet in the distinct yellow oval just above the woman’s right eyebrow.
JOHN RICHARDSON
March 4th
The sight of a fresh spring daffodil bursting forth into the dappled sunlight fills me with disgust and despair. What sort of a world have we created for ourselves that allows these yellowy, sickly, foul-smelling, so-called ‘flowers’ to shove their misshapen and elongated necks through the Lord’s earth and then lets their vomit-coloured petals infringe the sanctity of our own old and very dear English countryside? What have we as a nation in, I fear, a deep and irreversible decline, busily wallowing in our post-colonial cowardice, puffing our chest up and then wheezing like some bronchial old colonel, what have we as a nation come to when we allow these daffodils, these malevolent globules of terminal jaundice, all yellow, yellow, yellow, to poke their noses through our ground and into our private lives?
DENNIS POTTER
Find corpse of chick in swimmin pool. Downer. Sell house.
KEITH RICHARDS
March 5th
The anniversary: of the death of Iosif Stalin. Beast and Monster. Mass-murderer. What do we need to call him? What is it necessary to call him? Stalin is too simple: too simperbubble. In considering our selection of an appropriate word, I must first contend that the simple word ‘Stalin’ does nothing to convey the guy’s sheer horrid horridity. Let’s think again: let’s reinvent the language to form a noose around his head.
Mister Walrus Whiskers. That just about does the trick. I can candidly argue that, following a great deal of research, I know he wouldn’t want to be called Mr W-W: not one little bit. Or what about ‘Starling’? No way, José Feliciano. It sounds too like a bird: and a bird he was most certainly not.
The guy hated flying: hated it. Nor can we call him by his matey primonomenclaturalition, which is, of course, Iosif: Iosif is no mate of mine.
And why, pray, is it necessary to point out at this post-millennial juncture that Iosif Stalin – or Starling – is no mate of this fifty-two-year-old male novelist? Or, to put it another way: Novelist male old year fifty-two this of mate no is – Starling or – Stalin Iosif that juncture this at out point to necessary it is, pray, why and?
It can here be stated, boldly and fearlessly: Iosif Stalin was a very bad man. And my contention goes further, and can herein be tersely stated: he wasn’t nice at all.
MARTIN AMIS
March 6th
Buy new house with lovely clean swimmin pool. Build new upstairs room for throwin TVs out of.
KEITH RICHARDS
Women divide into two categories. The kind who does what you tell her to. And the kind who doesn’t. Frankly, I’ve got a hell of a lot of time for them both. But one or two I can’t abide.
Not long ago, I had lunch with Mother Teresa at Wilton’s. She was no bigger than the partridge on my plate. In fact, I was half-tempted to pour my remaining gravy over her. I could have downed her in a couple of mouthfuls and still had room for a decent rice pudding.
God helps those who help themselves, I advised her. You’re frankly barking up the wrong tree grubbing around the backstreets of Calcutta. No one goes there. They’re not what I’d call serious players.
Sadly, she chose not to take my advice. Small wonder she died with barely a penny to her name. With her reputation and connections, she could have expected – what? – 250, 300K?
No one likes a little person, be it man or woman. If you’re going to be a hard-hitter, you’ve got to be over 5ft 2ins. And let’s not imagine that slogging around in a grubby habit gets you anywhere, either. For all her undoubted domestic virtues, Mother Teresa would never have made the position of Sub-Editor on a national newspaper.
MAX HASTINGS
The X-Factor. Don’t get me started! When those lovely young men come on stage in their tight little trousers and sing their hearts out for Sharon, my heart melts. I truly care about every single one of them, I really do, and the public senses that, and that’s why they love me.
Just yesterday, I was being driven along by my chauffeur in our $463,000 limousine. I was in the back with my plastic surgeon Roger, who was just putting the finishing touches to my new toes (sorry, but you’ve got to have six on each foot these days if you want to be noticed). Suddenly, we hear this fucking yell from the river. A boat had capsized, and there’s five people in the water struggling for their fucking lives, bless ’em!
Call me a great big softy, but I couldn’t just leave them to drown, I’m sorry, that’s not the kind of person I am! So I get the chauffeur to park near the river, and I get out the old mirror and make sure I’m looking fan-tastic – I’d never let the fans down, they want to see me at my best – then I squeeze into my $3,000 stilettos and walk ever so sexily down to the riverside, where there’s just the one lifebelt to throw them.
The five of them are still thrashing about in the river, all fucking soggy and that, hair all over the place, only now there’s only four, bless, because one’s gone under! ‘Sorry guys, I can only rescue the one of you!’ I announce, as sweetly as possible, because I truly care about them all, and I’d dearly love to be able to save each and every one of them from drowning.
‘So which of you lovely young people is it going to be?’ I ask them. They look so adorable, all shivery and panicky and cuddly, thrashing about in the river and that. By now, they’re all so desperate, they’re screaming for help at the very tops of their super voices, they really are! Yes, they love me!
‘Decisions, decisions!’ I say, flashing my trademark smile. ‘I only wish I could save you all, you’re all so truly fabulous!’
By now another one’s gone under, and there’s just the three left –but it doesn’t make my choice any easier! ‘Ho-hum!’ I say. ‘This is one of the toughest decisions of my life. It’s truly momentous! You know what, guys? Sharon’s going to have to have herself a little sit-me-down before deciding.’
You could almost feel the tension in that river! So I have’s myself my little sit-me-down, and check on my make-up – but when I get up again, the last three have disappeared below the water!
Yes – I’d left it too late! Story of my life! I’ll never forget those young people’s faces. I’d made their day! They looked so thrilled to have met Sharon Osbourne before they drowned. I walked back to the limousine with a lovely warm feeling in my heart. See, when you’re in my position, you’ve got to put something back, you really have.
SHARON OSBOURNE
I hate pineapple. It should be banned.
GERMAINE GREER
March 7th
A hectic week ahead. After church, Mr Lucian Freud, who is a painter, arrives to paint another portrait.
He is quite old.
When I ask if he likes corgis, he tells me he does.
Good, I say. I ask him if he has been painting long.
He tells me he has.
How interesting, I say.
He doesn’t reply.
Otherwise precious little small talk. He tells me he paints pictures, mainly. A lovely hobby, I say.
I might have asked him if he wouldn’t be awfully kind and paint over that crack on the bathroom ceiling, but I forgot. They tell me he can be desperately expensive, so I think we got off lightly!
Freud: not a name you hear very often.
HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Let’s face it – we are at a watershed in world history. And like all watersheds, it’s full not only of sheds, but of water too. Yup, this shed is full of water – and we’ve got to do something. So let’s be brutally honest. You can’t store all that water in a shed without something dreadful happening. First of all, the water could spill out through the gaps in the walls. Look, I don’t pretend to be an expert in watersheds, or how they’re constructed. I’m an artist. But what I do know is this. If there’s too much water in the shed, then it doesn’t matter how many people you’ve got guarding it, or trying to plug the holes. That shed is going to burst.
And then we’ll all get soaking wet.
Our clothes will be ruined. Our hair will go all flat. And there’s no point even talking about highlights in a situation like that. It’ll all be totally unmanageable.
And that scares the shit out of me.
GEORGE MICHAEL
March 8th
8 March 1960: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Twelve today! The Headmaster approaches me personally and wishes me Many Happy Returns of The Day!! I tell him how simply WONDERFUL he’s looking, and insist (‘There’s nothing in the world I’d like more, Headmaster!’) on walking with him. He is understandably overjoyed, but says he’d rather walk alone. Poor old fellow – no one likes to be outshone!! Onwards and upwards!
GYLES BRANDRETH
8 March 1970: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Twenty-two today!! That’s twenty-two years of fun and laughter and all-round entertainment for all my family and friends! I’ve had the most MARVELLOUS year with literally billions of achievements to my name! I’ve built a full-size traction engine (The Gyles Brandreth) out of 5,734,297 matches, I’ve written, directed and starred in my own musical (Gyles: The Musical), I’ve published The Gyles Brandreth Book of Irish Knock-Knock Jokes, I’ve become the first ever person to sing ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ backwards on Radio Luxembourg, I’ve made best friends with Fanny Cradock, Gilbert Harding and Mr Pastry, I’ve climbed the world’s smallest hill, and I haven’t even mentioned my exciting new range of brightly-coloured pom-poms to brighten up your dowdy old oven gloves! Next stop: I plan to ascend Mount Everest!
GYLES BRANDRETH
8 March 1980: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Thirty-two today!!! I may not yet have quite managed to climb Mount Everest – the offer from the gentlemen’s mountainwear sponsors simply wasn’t jolly enough, financially! – but I did manage to break the world record for playing twenty-four different songs on the spoons in under two minutes while standing on one foot on a lilo dressed as a nun!
Yesterday, I attended a formal dinner for all us former Presidents of the Oxford Union. Frankly, I stood out from the others. I was the only one who came as Little Bo Peep.
This year I wrote thirty-two books, including the bestselling 501 Uses for a Daffodil, I ghost-wrote the Simply Fantastic Michael Miles Quiz Book, I was paid nearly £17,542 for telling my ten best John Gielgud Bloopers at 167 luncheons, I continued to present my own daily mid-morning phone-in programme on Radio Solent, I masterminded the Potty Putty Museum in Bradford-on-Avon and I helped market a splendid new keep-fit machine which lets you run flat-out without getting anywhere! All this and my new best friend Jeffrey Archer has assured me that if ever I feel like becoming an MP he’ll see to it that I’m Chief Secretary to the Treasury before the year’s out!
Next aim: to climb Mount Snowdon!
GYLES BRANDRETH
8 March 1990: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Forty-two today!!! I never quite managed to climb Mount Snowdon – but at least I’ve done the next best thing, which is to make the world’s second largest sherry trifle!!
Other noteworthy achievements over this most tremendous of all years: I sucked my way through fifty-eight delicious fruit pastilles in under four minutes on the marvellous Radio Stoke-on-Trent, I was appointed Vice President of the Yo-Yo Club of Great Britain, I was runner-up in the Tie Wearer of the Year semi-final, I launched Betamax, a revolutionary new videotape that’s set to take the world by storm, I became best friends with Monty Modlyn, Captain Mark Phillips and all three Beverley Sisters, and I’ve just handed in my fantastic tome, Absolutely the Best: 100 Years of Asbestos!.
We arranged a tremendous birthday dinner, with guests Mr and Mrs Charlie Drake, Larry Grayson, Magnus Pyke, the Tim Rices, the Lionel Blairs, the Jeffrey Archers and the Krankies. Larry told a truly classic anecdote about John Gielgud – apparently, in a fit of madness he once mistook Eileen Atkins for Maggie Smith!!! Cue the sound of clangers dropping!
Promise to self: in the next five years I shall certainly climb the Eiffel Tower!
GYLES BRANDRETH
8 March 2000: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Fifty-two today!!!!
I still haven’t got round to climbing the Eiffel Tower, but at least I have spoken on the art of plate-spinning to the Epsom and Ewell Back Pain Association Annual Dinner!!
Today I finish my Illustrated History of the Novelty Pullover, tomorrow I write my Life of William Shakespeare (now they’ll HAVE to take me seriously), the next day I get going on Gyles Brandreth’s Great Big Book of Fun Party Games Involving Balloons and over the weekend I’m ghosting The Michael Barrymore Book of Totally Impossible Brain-Teasers. Meanwhile, plans for my National Museum of Cocktail Party Umbrellas in Rottingdean are coming on apace.
GYLES BRANDRETH
March 9th
My uncle Stiffy, who lived for a lightly-poached tongue, had strong views on food. ‘Never remove the gunk from a trotter before boiling it,’ he would say, whilst tending to a particularly troublesome toenail with a fine sixteenth-century silver corkscrew. ‘There’s oodles of nutrition in filth.’
At Chatsworth, we take care to remember Uncle Stiffy’s maxim whenever we boil a trotter. This is what makes this receipt so particularly tasty.
TROTTER ON HORSEBACK
1 pig’s trotter
2 onions
2 pts water
2 slices Mother’s Pride
Do make sure your pig is completely dead before removing its trotter. Great Aunt Squinty forgot, and lost an eye as a consequence. Thankfully, the eye boiled up well, and made an interesting addition to the fruit salad we served on Coronation Day. Waste not, want not, as our old Governess used to say. If ever she came across a dead insect – a bluebottle or wasp – she would never dream of throwing it away. After all, what is a Lemon Curd without insects?
First, discard the onions. You will not be needing them for this receipt.
Now boil the trotter in the water for 10–15 minutes, but not a second longer. It should remain nice and chewy, with that delicious trottery flavour.
Wrap it in the two slices of Mother’s Pride, buttered to taste. Serve warm-ish. Ideal for a late breakfast, or perchance as that ‘little something extra’ for afternoon tea.
DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE
I’m five years bloody old. My parents and me have nothing in common, no conversation, no small talk, nothing. Now I find they’ve booked me into a primary school. How bloody dare they? Don’t they know who I am?
The school is rotten. The uniform is a total turn-off, the teachers are middle-aged with no like sense of style and the service is truly appalling.
JANET STREET-PORTER
March 10th
England in March! What a horrid, class-ridden, snobbish nation, packed with the most ghastly common little low-brows.
Today I am forced to suffer a disgracefully expensive five-course luncheon at the Savoy with Arnold Wesker, who, I regret to say, certainly isn’t up to much, intellectually speaking: I ask him to name five plays I had personally directed in the past three years – and he doesn’t even know!
But we agree on the burning need for a truly savage and satirical film that skewers the fat-cats in our overblown, moribund, post-imperial society.
Suddenly, an impertinent suburban waiter interrupts us to ask if we would care for a sweet.
‘“Care for a sweet”?’ I complain bitterly. ‘“Care for a sweet”?!! What sort of a country are we living in when a functionary interrupts a highly serious discussion to ask if one would “care for a sweet”! Very well, I’ll have the Black Forest Gâteau – but only as a symbol of our overblown and tasteless age.’
Outside the Savoy, a pompous hotel functionary in a top hat and braid asks if he can hail me a cab.
I tell him in no uncertain terms that, as an anarchist, I am perfectly well equipped to hail one for myself. But the first cab drives straight past me with someone else in the back. I have never known such a kick in the teeth. I have been suppressed and disregarded in this country for decades – and now this! It’s really too much.
LINDSAY ANDERSON
I crave simplicity. What could be more satisfying than a simple boiled egg? Ever since, as a young man, I became the first Englishman to visit Europe, I have pursued a love affair with the boiled egg. A boiled egg is a feast for all the senses: the eyes amazed by the deep rich yellow contrasted with the stark, translucent, almost virginal white; the ears alive to the gentle knock-knock-knock on the warmly curvaceous and softly yielding shell; the mouth teased by expectations of the flowing yolk softly easing its way along the salivating contours of the tongue, and down, down, down into the throat; the penis quivering in readiness to be used as a spoon, diving deep, deep, deep, deep into the very nub and hollow of the ovoid, then rising up once more, now drenched in the brightest yellow. And it’s also very pleasant with toast.
SIR TERENCE CONRAN
March 11th
The young Victoria’s life, it seems to me, really begins the moment she sees the super-sexy Prince Albert in his skin-tight figure-hugging uniform and thinks to herself, ‘Hmmm, tasty! You know what? I want some of that!’
The couple fall head-over-heels in love, and simply adore driving around the little country lanes near Windsor in his fast car on hot summer days. They love each other totally, and uncovering that really was revelatory for me. The more I read about her – and in the end I finished an entire biography, non-swanks! – I couldn’t believe how their love was so exactly like my own love for Andrew.
As couples, we were like peas in the proverbial iPod. Victoria and Albert used to eat meals together – and so did me and Andrew. Victoria and Albert used to sometimes go out together – and so did us. Victoria and Albert stayed married until the day he died – and so did me and Andrew, or nearly. Victoria wrestled the whole of her life with weight issues bound up with a lack of self-confidence – and so did me. And, just like I, Victoria eventually went to live in the United States of America, where the people respected her honesty, admired her for her amazing work with WeightWatchers and literally took her to their hearts. The list goes on and on.
SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
Albert Einstein. Let’s face it, the guy didn’t know the first thing about science.
GERMAINE GREER
March 12th
Violet and I attended pre-luncheon drinks with the Somersets at Gloucester. Then on to the Gloucesters in Somerset. The Devonshires had brought Kent along. Halfway through the luncheon, the butler informed us that Lady Avon was at the door. ‘Tell her to join us!’ said Gloucester, drawing up a chair for her. She sat down and was halfway through her main course (medaillons de veau, pommes Lyonnaises, épinards à la crème – all perfectly eatable), entertaining us with fulsome praise for a new lemon-scented shower gel, whatever that may be, when it emerged that the butler had misheard. She was not Lady Avon at all, but the Avon Lady.
ANTHONY POWELL
In the operations room at Downing Street, the telephone rings. Prime Ministerial aides sigh knowingly. They know from long experience that when a phone rings, there is sure to be someone on the other end of the line.
It is a call for the Prime Minister from someone very important, perhaps even a VIP. According to seasoned observers, Tony Blair has matured in office. He is now very adept, very professional with a telephone. And today is no exception. He takes the telephone receiver in his right hand, and places it to his ear. This way, he can not only hear what is being said, but speak himself, knowing he will be heard down the other end.
‘Hello. It is good to speak to you,’ he says in a clear voice into the telephone receiver. Whoever it is on the other end will probably have heard him, loud and clear. By saying, ‘Hello. It is good to speak to you,’ he is signalling to the other person not only that he is now on the ‘other end of the line’, but also that he is pleased to be able to speak to him. A born diplomat, this morning he is also proving himself a highly skilled politician.
SIR PETER STOTHARD
(#litres_trial_promo)
March 13th
Riding into New York I was struck, not for the first time, by how busy it is, and how many skyscrapers there are: it’s the city that never sleeps, a bit like Beijing or Vladivostok. Dublin’s quite like that too.
CHARLEY BOORMAN
March 14th, 1960
TO HAROLD MACMILLAN
Darling H,
You were such an absolute poppet last night in Downing Street listening to silly me rambling on about Larry’s deceit – and you so dreadfully, dreadfully busy, too! But if Larry hadn’t promised, absolutely promised, me the role, and then reneged on that promise, I would never have burdened you with my worries, particularly when you were so busy trying to sort out your little Balance of Payments.
I can’t tell you how much I value your friendship – your powers of oratory, your command of politics, your urbane manner, those splendidly coarse yet effortlessly elegant tweed suits and, perhaps above all, your magnificent moustaches. Promise me you’ll never shave them off. They look so very becoming on you – and one dreads to contemplate what lies beneath. My best love to your darling Dorothy, too. She looked so very lovely in that pretty floral dress last night.
Your dearest,
Johnny
JOHN GIELGUD
TO DADIE RYLANDS
Dearest Darling Dadie,
One feels so dreadfully sorry for them both. Harold, perfectly hideous in tweeds, is now something desperately important in politics. He does go on so. I fear that moustache of his has gone to his head. He asks my advice on the Balance of Payments. I tell him that Tony Quayle would be excellent in the lead, with Peggy as second fiddle, but he pays no heed. These politicians are so one-track minded.
Dorothy M was clad from top to toe in the most hideous fabric, poor darling. Had I not known better, I would have taken her for a large pair of curtains and attempted to draw her shut.
Big kiss, Johnny
JOHN GIELGUD
March 15th
Mauritius in March, so many years ago. I was wearing a rather low-cut bathing suit which displayed my bosom to maximum advantage! It was unconventional in those days to wear a rather low-cut bathing suit to a formal dinner party! But then I have always been a rather unconventional sort of woman!
Needless to say, the eyes of the men at the table were literally glued to my cleavage!
(#litres_trial_promo) So I decided to divert their attention by insisting on a round of silly games!
‘I know what!’ I shrieked, delightedly. ‘Let’s play hunt the thimble!’ And with that I withdrew into the sitting room, and got darling Mrs Stokes, who once cooked her perfect sherry trifle for Adolf Eichmann, to place a thimble down what many have been kind enough to describe as my remarkable cleavage!
‘Hunt the thimble – ready, steady, go!’ I whooped as I returned to the dining room! In fact, I tried to make it easier for them by pointing at the likely area! But sadly not one of the gentlemen looked up, thank you very much!
On closer investigation, I discovered they were otherwise engaged in plopping their ‘members’ (how I hate that word!) on the table to see whose was the largest!
Then they all got out their felt-tips, painted funny faces on them and re-enacted the Battle of Omdurman! ‘I know when I’m not wanted, gents!’ I exclaimed, good-heartedly dipping into my own bosom for my thimble and retreating upstairs for an early night with something milky and a copy of the latest Vogue!
LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH
Find corpse in upstairs guest bathroom. Freak out. Sell house.
KEITH RICHARDS
March 16th
Oh Jasus. Oh Jasus oh Jasus oh Jasus. Oh Jasus. Will you look at that? asks Dad. I look down at me plate. Oh Jasus, he asks, was there ever a child like him for the greed and the gluttony, the gluttony and the greed? And now the others are staring at me plate, and they’d take a pitchfork to me head out of jealousy if we hadn’t sold the pitchfork to Ma McGubbins to pay for the last season’s hay which they needed to feed the donkey to pull the peat to buy another pitchfork to replace the one they’d sold to old Ma McGubbins.
How’s he get to have two peas? says Malachy. Oh Jasus, is tis birthday? Dad snatches one of me peas and cuts it in half, snatching half for himself and placing the other half in his top pocket for safekeeping, alongside last year’s moth. Malachy caught the moth in his sock and Dad said he’d keep it for our St Patrick’s Day fry-up, moths cook beautiful in batter he said though their wings can prove a mite chewy, it’s all that flying they do, Jasus who’d be a moth in this day and age? Malachy says moths are Protestant, ye’ve never seen a moth with a rosary, now have you, he says, but Mam says they’re good Catholics, and all that flitterfluttering is them making the sign of the cross to the good Lord, is it not.
So I’m cutting me remainin’ pea into four and spreading the quarters round the plate to give an impression of quantity when there’s a swoosh from the chimney and Great Grandma McCourt emerges covered in soot, her false teeth close behind. She’s been out whorin’ agin, whispers Alphie. Jasus, how can ye tell? I hiss back. She’s suckin’ on a cough-drop, says Alphie, they always pay her in cough-drops. But is it not a mortal sin? I ask. Will she not be condemning her soul to eternal damnation?
Not for a cough-drop, snaps Mam. Maybe for a sherbet lemon or two toffees, now shaddup and eat your pea or you won’t be getting your mouse-tail for puddin’.
FRANK MCCOURT
(#litres_trial_promo)
The trouble with staying in places like Windsor Castle is that you so rarely meet anyone of interest. Bumped into the Reagans as I was going up the stairs. Dull little couple. He’s making a goodish stab of being President of the USA, she has a reasonable figure but eyes too far apart. Feel sorry for the pair of them. Should I put him on the board of the Tote? Might give him something to do.
WOODROW WYATT
March 17th
I have always found the look and smell of a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup powerfully erotic, in that noble word’s original sense of ‘tasting slightly of tomatoes’. In the contemporary sense of the word, it is not erotic at all, or at any rate not nearly as erotic as a can of tinned peaches in heavy syrup, one of which I remember taking to the opera and courting successfully in the spring of ‘48, only to be turned down when it came to bed because it had become suspicious of my infatuation with a beautifully ripe pineapple. All full-blooded Englishmen, particularly those of Irish descent, have found sexual desire within their loins for the suppurating convexities and soft, skeiny protuberances of the fruit (originally ‘froo-it’, owing to the fact that, if it had an unrelenting central core, it was hard to bite froo it), and this explains why the Establishment has never allowed a law to be placed on the statute books forbidding full intercourse with any type of fruit.
ANTHONY BURGESS
I collar Reagan over a brandy and give him some advice. ‘A lot of people tend to forget,’ I say, ‘that America’s a very big country.’ He is very grateful.
WOODROW WYATT
March 18th
My God, I despair of women sometimes. My whole life and my every breath has been informed with the imprint of my love and respect, admiration indeed, of women. But for Christ’s sake, they sometimes let me down. If there is one type of woman I hate it is the very thin type of woman. And if there is another type of woman who gets up my nose it’s the fatty. And what about those detestable in-betweenies, those spineless wretches who don’t have the guts to be one thing or the other? They frankly get on my wick. Not until woman can truly be herself – neither fat nor thin nor in-between – can our sisterhood hope to save this doomed planet.
GERMAINE GREER
Time to leave Windsor Castle. I worry over a point of etiquette. How much should one tip the Queen?
WOODROW WYATT
March 19th
You are wrong, I am right.
I am right, you are wrong.
You are Ron, I am Reg.
But who is he?
EDWARD DE BONO
(#litres_trial_promo)
Pair of Siamese twins knocks on my door, lovely couple of ladies, joined at the hip or wherever, they say we need the media attention, one of us has a tragic terminal illness, the other’s struggling with a tragic drugs problem, we want to strike while the iron’s hot, Max, so how can you help us?
As luck would have it, this very morning my client and good friend Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame had been on the old mobile asking if I knew a pair of Siamese twins he could perform his magic on, so, swings and roundabouts, to cut a long story short I put Simon and the tragic Siameses in touch at a mutually agreed venue of my choice and Bob’s your uncle, the twins are lined up for a major role on next season’s X-Factor, followed by an episode of their own on Celebrity Surgery, I can’t tell you any more at this moment in time but believe me it’ll be dynamite, and between ourselves one of them’s enjoying something of a fling with one of Stephen Lawrence’s young killers, so that can’t be bad, especially if a marriage results, Hello are interested, so’s UK Living TV, you name it, sweetheart, we’re talking mega-bucks. Yes, it’s nice to be able to put something back.
MAX CLIFFORD
March 20th
We invaderate Iraq. Thanks to our courageous actions, today our world is a safer place than it will ever be.
GEORGE W. BUSH
March 21st
I have often heard it said, and sometimes within earshot of the upper echelons of respectable society, that two and two make four. Yet this is quite plainly not the case. How could two and two possibly make four when it is so obvious to one and all that they make six? To put it simply, if I have two snuff boxes in my left hand, and two snuff boxes in my right hand, the total number of snuff boxes I have in both hands is six. Or to translate the same truth into the characteristically modish and inelegant language of numbers favoured by the more churlish mathematicians:
2+2 = 6
Point proven. Yet our present system of egalitarian government, by which is really meant totalitarian rule by the proletarian hordes (many if not most of whom have dandruff), has convinced generations of citizens (their shoes in grave need of a polish) that the equation 2 + 2 = 4 can somehow be made to hold water. Down this path lies madness. Next, they will be telling us that one and one makes two!!!
This grave mathematical deception, from which floweth the depraved and decadent condition of England today, must needs rightly be placed at the feet of Harold Wilson, who, far from being an aristocrat, was the product of inferior breeding, misusing the adverb hopefully and never learning to hold his pipe in a manner befitting a gentleman.
And, forsooth, how much has changed! When I first joined The Times as an apprentice leader-writer in 1950, all journalists on that newspaper were expected, quite rightly, to don top hat and tails at all times. Nor were we permitted to write our own articles, for it was considered an activity unfit for a gentleman. Instead, the necessary pieces were written for us by uniformed parlour maids, whom we would tip generously (sixpence ha’penny every Christmas) for their troubles. Never let it be said that there was a jot or tittle of snobbery about this. Like slavery, it was valued equally on both sides, allowing them to look up to us and, at one and the same time, us to look down on them.
Nowadays, to my certain knowledge, The Times is staffed almost exclusively by common people, many bussed in from the East End in boilersuits. Even Lord Rees-Mogg is obliged to adopt a flat cap, grubby overalls and a cockney accent before reporting for work. And a certain coarseness has crept into the prose. For instance, leading articles on the situation in Iraq invariably begin with the lamentable phraseology, Fuck this for a game of soldiers. It all goes to show that equality may be a good thing in theory, but, like mathematics, it never works in practice.
SIR PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
March 22nd
Nelson Mandela is one bloke I hugely admire. I can’t imagine being locked up in a cell for literally days on end without a personal assistant or even face-cream. I wrote a song about Nelly’s time in prison – ‘It’s Those Little Things I Miss So Bad’ – and I was privileged to sing it at a concert in his honour:
Larked up in jay-ul
Cos my skin’s not pay-ul
Yit’s those lit-tul thungs I myiss swooo bad –
Thwose lit-tul things
That Santa brings
Like dia-mond riiiings
An’ pure gold wiiiings
An’ thwose pearl yearrings I once had
When I finished singing this soulful tribute, I glanced over at the great man. The guy was in tears.
Afterwards, I attended a ceremony at which Nelson Mandela was going to give a bit back to society by presenting yours truly with an honorary degree. It was a marvellous moment as I received my degree from Little Miss Mandela, truly a legend in her own lifetime.
SIR ELTON JOHN
Now I hear that the brave firefighters, lovely, decent lads, are going on strike to try and stop this whole ghastly business of the government’s secret time-changes.
I pop into the local home furnishings store, march up to the bedding counter and ask for some Polos. They say they sell pillows, not Polos, and they show me one. ‘Well, I’ll never be able to fit something that size in my ear!’ I exclaim. What a bunch of proper Charlies!
Eventually, I locate some Polo mints at the sweet shop next door. ‘Do they come with batteries?’ I ask, but it turns out these are extra, like so many things these days. So blow me down if they haven’t even privatised Polo mints! I have no wish to bring personalities into it, that’s not my style, never has been, never will be, but I place the blame fairly and squarely on that smarmy, self-satisfied, grinning lickspittle Tony Blair.
TONY BENN
March 23rd
Buy new house. Find it’s in France. Fuckin drag. Have to sell it.
KEITH RICHARDS
March 24th
TO BERNARD BERENSON
My dear BB,
I must apologise, inter alia, for my tiresome silence. I have now emerged from les horreurs de la term, a pleasing respite, and one that allows me time to devote a generous portion of my thankfully not inconsiderable intellect to the service of this, our most deliciously civilised correspondence.
It was whilst walking round the Christ Church Meadow, and pondering on the complicated subtleties of St Augustine’s theological system, which I had long tried to take seriously, though to little avail (for St Augustine was, frankly, a second-rater, perhaps even a third-rater), that the undoubted truth came upon me that my erstwhile colleague A.L. Rowse is singularly ill-suited to the teaching or writing of history, being dwarfish and plebeian. There is neither breadth nor depth to him, and precious little width or height.
On my return to my study, I set in motion a plot to discredit the oikish Cornish charlatan. Creeping along the corridor on tip-toe, I eased open his door the merest half-inch, deftly placing an open bottle of black ink of the darkest hue on its uppermost surface before tip-toeing back down the corridor again. The entire operation was o’er in something less than a minute.
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