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.*
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