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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.
