The Lost Diaries

‘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