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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