Kitabı oku: «The Lost Diaries»

January
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…<twenty pages cut for reasons of space>

…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.^*

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 ^*

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^* 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