The Lost Diaries

Freud: not a name you hear very often.

HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Let’s face it – we are at a watershed in world history. And like all watersheds, it’s full not only of sheds, but of water too. Yup, this shed is full of water – and we’ve got to do something. So let’s be brutally honest. You can’t store all that water in a shed without something dreadful happening. First of all, the water could spill out through the gaps in the walls. Look, I don’t pretend to be an expert in watersheds, or how they’re constructed. I’m an artist. But what I do know is this. If there’s too much water in the shed, then it doesn’t matter how many people you’ve got guarding it, or trying to plug the holes. That shed is going to burst.

And then we’ll all get soaking wet.

Our clothes will be ruined. Our hair will go all flat. And there’s no point even talking about highlights in a situation like that. It’ll all be totally unmanageable.

And that scares the shit out of me.

GEORGE MICHAEL

March 8th

8 March 1960: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Twelve today! The Headmaster approaches me personally and wishes me Many Happy Returns of The Day!! I tell him how simply WONDERFUL he’s looking, and insist (‘There’s nothing in the world I’d like more, Headmaster!’) on walking with him. He is understandably overjoyed, but says he’d rather walk alone. Poor old fellow – no one likes to be outshone!! Onwards and upwards!

GYLES BRANDRETH

8 March 1970: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Twenty-two today!! That’s twenty-two years of fun and laughter and all-round entertainment for all my family and friends! I’ve had the most MARVELLOUS year with literally billions of achievements to my name! I’ve built a full-size traction engine (The Gyles Brandreth) out of 5,734,297 matches, I’ve written, directed and starred in my own musical (Gyles: The Musical), I’ve published The Gyles Brandreth Book of Irish Knock-Knock Jokes, I’ve become the first ever person to sing ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ backwards on Radio Luxembourg, I’ve made best friends with Fanny Cradock, Gilbert Harding and Mr Pastry, I’ve climbed the world’s smallest hill, and I haven’t even mentioned my exciting new range of brightly-coloured pom-poms to brighten up your dowdy old oven gloves! Next stop: I plan to ascend Mount Everest!

GYLES BRANDRETH

8 March 1980: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Thirty-two today!!! I may not yet have quite managed to climb Mount Everest – the offer from the gentlemen’s mountainwear sponsors simply wasn’t jolly enough, financially! – but I did manage to break the world record for playing twenty-four different songs on the spoons in under two minutes while standing on one foot on a lilo dressed as a nun!

Yesterday, I attended a formal dinner for all us former Presidents of the Oxford Union. Frankly, I stood out from the others. I was the only one who came as Little Bo Peep.

This year I wrote thirty-two books, including the bestselling 501 Uses for a Daffodil, I ghost-wrote the Simply Fantastic Michael Miles Quiz Book, I was paid nearly £17,542 for telling my ten best John Gielgud Bloopers at 167 luncheons, I continued to present my own daily mid-morning phone-in programme on Radio Solent, I masterminded the Potty Putty Museum in Bradford-on-Avon and I helped market a splendid new keep-fit machine which lets you run flat-out without getting anywhere! All this and my new best friend Jeffrey Archer has assured me that if ever I feel like becoming an MP he’ll see to it that I’m Chief Secretary to the Treasury before the year’s out!

Next aim: to climb Mount Snowdon!

GYLES BRANDRETH

8 March 1990: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Forty-two today!!! I never quite managed to climb Mount Snowdon – but at least I’ve done the next best thing, which is to make the world’s second largest sherry trifle!!

Other noteworthy achievements over this most tremendous of all years: I sucked my way through fifty-eight delicious fruit pastilles in under four minutes on the marvellous Radio Stoke-on-Trent, I was appointed Vice President of the Yo-Yo Club of Great Britain, I was runner-up in the Tie Wearer of the Year semi-final, I launched Betamax, a revolutionary new videotape that’s set to take the world by storm, I became best friends with Monty Modlyn, Captain Mark Phillips and all three Beverley Sisters, and I’ve just handed in my fantastic tome, Absolutely the Best: 100 Years of Asbestos!.

We arranged a tremendous birthday dinner, with guests Mr and Mrs Charlie Drake, Larry Grayson, Magnus Pyke, the Tim Rices, the Lionel Blairs, the Jeffrey Archers and the Krankies. Larry told a truly classic anecdote about John Gielgud – apparently, in a fit of madness he once mistook Eileen Atkins for Maggie Smith!!! Cue the sound of clangers dropping!

Promise to self: in the next five years I shall certainly climb the Eiffel Tower!

GYLES BRANDRETH

8 March 2000: Happy Birthday Dear Me! Fifty-two today!!!!

I still haven’t got round to climbing the Eiffel Tower, but at least I have spoken on the art of plate-spinning to the Epsom and Ewell Back Pain Association Annual Dinner!!

Today I finish my Illustrated History of the Novelty Pullover, tomorrow I write my Life of William Shakespeare (now they’ll HAVE to take me seriously), the next day I get going on Gyles Brandreth’s Great Big Book of Fun Party Games Involving Balloons and over the weekend I’m ghosting The Michael Barrymore Book of Totally Impossible Brain-Teasers. Meanwhile, plans for my National Museum of Cocktail Party Umbrellas in Rottingdean are coming on apace.

GYLES BRANDRETH

March 9th

My uncle Stiffy, who lived for a lightly-poached tongue, had strong views on food. ‘Never remove the gunk from a trotter before boiling it,’ he would say, whilst tending to a particularly troublesome toenail with a fine sixteenth-century silver corkscrew. ‘There’s oodles of nutrition in filth.’

At Chatsworth, we take care to remember Uncle Stiffy’s maxim whenever we boil a trotter. This is what makes this receipt so particularly tasty.

TROTTER ON HORSEBACK

1 pig’s trotter

2 onions

2 pts water

2 slices Mother’s Pride

Do make sure your pig is completely dead before removing its trotter. Great Aunt Squinty forgot, and lost an eye as a consequence. Thankfully, the eye boiled up well, and made an interesting addition to the fruit salad we served on Coronation Day. Waste not, want not, as our old Governess used to say. If ever she came across a dead insect – a bluebottle or wasp – she would never dream of throwing it away. After all, what is a Lemon Curd without insects?

First, discard the onions. You will not be needing them for this receipt.

Now boil the trotter in the water for 10–15 minutes, but not a second longer. It should remain nice and chewy, with that delicious trottery flavour.

Wrap it in the two slices of Mother’s Pride, buttered to taste. Serve warm-ish. Ideal for a late breakfast, or perchance as that ‘little something extra’ for afternoon tea.

DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

I’m five years bloody old. My parents and me have nothing in common, no conversation, no small talk, nothing. Now I find they’ve booked me into a primary school. How bloody dare they? Don’t they know who I am?

The school is rotten. The uniform is a total turn-off, the teachers are middle-aged with no like sense of style and the service is truly appalling.

JANET STREET-PORTER

March 10th

England in March! What a horrid, class-ridden, snobbish nation, packed with the most ghastly common little low-brows.

Today I am forced to suffer a disgracefully expensive five-course luncheon at the Savoy with Arnold Wesker, who, I regret to say, certainly isn’t up to much, intellectually speaking: I ask him to name five plays I had personally directed in the past three years – and he doesn’t even know!

But we agree on the burning need for a truly savage and satirical film that skewers the fat-cats in our overblown, moribund, post-imperial society.

Suddenly, an impertinent suburban waiter interrupts us to ask if we would care for a sweet.

‘“Care for a sweet”?’ I complain bitterly. ‘“Care for a sweet”?!! What sort of a country are we living in when a functionary interrupts a highly serious discussion to ask if one would “care for a sweet”! Very well, I’ll have the Black Forest Gâteau – but only as a symbol of our overblown and tasteless age.’

Outside the Savoy, a pompous hotel functionary in a top hat and braid asks if he can hail me a cab.

I tell him in no uncertain terms that, as an anarchist, I am perfectly well equipped to hail one for myself. But the first cab drives straight past me with someone else in the back. I have never known such a kick in the teeth. I have been suppressed and disregarded in this country for decades – and now this! It’s really too much.