The Lost Diaries

Using my special friends-and-family key, I let myself into Buckingham Palace and put my head round the Queen’s sitting-room door.

Elizabeth tells me she’s been hurting dreadfully and has lost her sense of identity. ‘I’m, like, who am I?’ she says. She always turns to me for comfort. She finds me very down to earth. ‘You’re a very caring person, Heather,’ she says. ‘Probably too caring for your own good. When my time comes, I hope they’ll make you Queen. It’s what Diana would have wanted, and to replace me they’ll need someone well known throughout the world for her tireless charity work.’

I’m like, ‘I couldn’t be Queen, that’s not my style, I’m not up to it.’ But she gets me sat down and says, ‘You’ve spent your whole life caring for others, Heather. And it’s time you got them to care for you. You’d fit this throne real beautiful – and what’s more, for all the love you’ve got inside you, you deserve it, love.’

HEATHER MILLS McCARTNEY

January 12th

News comes through of the death of General Galtieri. A lot of unhelpful things are being said of him. But at least he had the guts to stand up to her, which is more than one can say for the Bakers and Gummers and Hurds of this world.

And one should never forget that Galtieri was a superb connoisseur of porcelain. He was kind enough to give me a delightful Wedgwood tea service when I was over on a visit. We exchanged Christmas cards ever after.

SIR EDWARD HEATH

January 13th

What are you that makes me feel thus? Are you thus what makes me feel that? Feel me thus that you makes what are?

You are my winged Pegasus, my hirsute daffodil, my sea urchin of song, my orang-utan pirouetting on a high wire, my banana unpeeled, my mango spurting vertiginous aspidistras over the umbrous concavities of Sappho’s juts and nooks. You affect me as a young gazelle affects the mountain over which it lollops, dollops and, er, sollops –oh, bollops.

I close my beautiful brown deep brown soft brown eyes. My lips like smoked salmon wrapped in cream cheese parcels with a sprig of fennel, moist, urgent, costly but on special offer, meet your lips, as fresh and nutritious as the morning’s cod.

My tongue laps your lips; your lips are lapped, and, lapping lips lip lappingly like lollipops over lipped laps slapped slippingly. Your mouth opens and closes, blowing and sucking, sucking and blowing as my hands wreathe your gills in luscious circles of contentment.

Your gills? Wreathe your gills? I open my eyes. My God! It is not you at all but the goldfish I am kissing. That which I am kissing is the goldfish!

JEANETTE WINTERSON

January 14th

It happened again this morning. I had just finished tape-recording myself for the archives, swallowing my third mug of tea and finishing off a banana fruit when the newspapers – many of them still delivered by workers to the private homes of millionaires, even in this day and age! – were delivered to my home. What, I wondered, are the latest press comments about me and the democratic policies I have been fighting for tooth and nail these past fifty years? I read every page of the Daily Express, including sports and arts, into the tape-recorder, but, on my playback, failed to hear a single mention of myself and my policies.

It’s their new strategy, y’see. Having in the past sought to undermine democracy by lampooning me, they now try to achieve the same result by ignoring me, making me out to be some sort of ‘fringe’ character!

Poured m’self another cup of tea. The tape-recorder picked up all the glugs, so it obviously doesn’t need new batteries quite yet.

TONY BENN

(#litres_trial_promo)

To Chatsworth. Poky.

WOODROW WYATT

January 15th

Repetition is the memory of repetition. And repetition is the memory of repetition.

ADAM PHILLIPS

January 16th

BBC announcers insist on using the expression ‘This is the news.’ One hears it every night, without fail. Yet news is plural. They should say, ‘These are the news,’ and, half an hour later, ‘Those were the news.’ They never will, of course, because the BBC is a socialist institution, within which correct English is regarded as the enemy of the state. Have we ever had a more horrid public culture?

CHARLES MOORE

I maintain (though she might, in truth, query this) that it was I who usefully introduced my Aunt Phyl to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton in 1973. Or was it 1974? Conceivably (and here I am, metaphorically speaking, sticking my neck out) it was 1972, or even 1971, though if it was 1971, then it might not have been the castellated hostelry that we ate in, as a useful visit to my local library yesterday afternoon between 3.30 p.m. and 4.23 p.m. confirmed me in my suspicion that the hostelry in question was in fact closed for the greater part of 1971, owing to a refurbishment programme. In that case, and if it really was 1971, which, frankly, seems increasingly unlikely given the other dates available, then it is within the realms of possibility that we ate at another hostelry entirely, possibly one overlooking the North Sea, and, if so, it is equally possible that we feasted not on scampi and chips but on shepherd’s pie. Did we also consume a side order of vegetables? Memory is, I have found, a fickle servant, so I am unable to recall whether, on this occasion, we indulged in a side order of vegetables, if we were there at all. It is, I fear, another blank, another lost or discarded piece in the jigsaw of my past.

MARGARET DRABBLE

January 17th

They tell me that in some shops they have started selling loaves of bread that are what they call ‘ready-and-sliced’. I fervently hope this is one trend that doesn’t ‘catch on’. And is there really any need for this new-fangled idea of soup in tins? Broth tastes so much better bubbling away in a great big open pot, stirred by a chef who really knows his stuff and served at one’s table in the open air by a marvellous old character somewhere on a wonderful Highland moor. By denying our children such pleasures, I fear we are in profound danger of cutting them off from reality.

HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES

January 18th

Throughout this year, I shall be following the famous not to say distinguished rock singer Michael George for a three-part documentary series. Today, we recorded the first in a series of interviews, as well as my introduction. There’s a very great deal of excitement about this extraordinary project:

MELVYN: Michael George

(#litres_trial_promo) shot to fame as a leading member of the trio Whim!. As a signwriter, sorry, songwriter, he has achieved international success by writing acclaimed songs such as um er by writing several um famous songs. Michael George is now internationally acknowledged as a erm as a leading erm singer, indeed as one of the most singery and singerest singers erm of his generation. On the eve of his first world tour since his last, Michael George gave us this exclusive insight into the way he erm…

GEORGE: Super to see you, Melvyn! How you doin’? Ooh, you smell nice! Mmmm…doesn’t he smell nice, boys?

MELVYN: Can we start with the early days, Michael? You began life as a foetus and then you were a baby for – what? one or two years – and then, am I right in thinking, proceeded to become a child, in your case a boy?

GEORGE: Yeah, it was really eating me up, all I wanted was my dignity and my self-determination and the whole process of like being a child made me understand something about how this government really manipulates us into believing – sorry, Melvyn, can we stop for a sec? You know what? I’m feeling a bit sweaty. Do I look sweaty to you, Melvyn? Now, be honest!

MELVYN: Zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzz. (Wakes with a start.) Where am I? Who are you? Where were we?! Yes! Go on!

GEORGE: D’you know, Melvyn, I’m feeling a bit sweaty?

MELVYN: Um. No. Remind me. How does it go?

MELVYN BRAGG

January 19th

Swiftian? Come off it. That’s what I thought when I read this week’s obituaries, dripping with a sweaty mixture of vintage port, caviar and Marmite sandwiches, of Auberon Waugh.

I remember it well, the smug old world of El Vino in Fleet Street. Right-wing journalists would mix with left-wing journalists, both drowning their differences in champagne (so much more fizzy than common-or-garden white wine, dontcha know, old chap). It was all just a game – and instead of smashing each other’s faces with their fists, and demanding urgent, much needed social reforms, they preferred to discuss their differences over what they would no doubt call a drinkie-poo. They spent hours ‘debating’, ‘exchanging opinions’, ‘seeing the other point of view’, and so on, in a typical recreation of the toffee-nosed public schools which had, years before, puked them out in their stiff collars, sporting blazers, corduroy shorts and school neckties imprinted with a hundred little swastikas.

To that hoity-toity coterie, all that matters is a joke or two. And it doesn’t matter if the rest of us can’t for the life of us understand it. ‘Knock, Knock,’ they say, and when their victim replies: ‘Who’s there?’ they mention a perfectly ordinary Christian name, rendering us, their victims, speechless. ‘There’s an Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman,’ they say.

‘And we are all part of the EEC,’ I correct them.