The Lost Diaries

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.