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.
LINDSAY ANDERSON
I crave simplicity. What could be more satisfying than a simple boiled egg? Ever since, as a young man, I became the first Englishman to visit Europe, I have pursued a love affair with the boiled egg. A boiled egg is a feast for all the senses: the eyes amazed by the deep rich yellow contrasted with the stark, translucent, almost virginal white; the ears alive to the gentle knock-knock-knock on the warmly curvaceous and softly yielding shell; the mouth teased by expectations of the flowing yolk softly easing its way along the salivating contours of the tongue, and down, down, down into the throat; the penis quivering in readiness to be used as a spoon, diving deep, deep, deep, deep into the very nub and hollow of the ovoid, then rising up once more, now drenched in the brightest yellow. And it’s also very pleasant with toast.
SIR TERENCE CONRAN
March 11th
The young Victoria’s life, it seems to me, really begins the moment she sees the super-sexy Prince Albert in his skin-tight figure-hugging uniform and thinks to herself, ‘Hmmm, tasty! You know what? I want some of that!’
The couple fall head-over-heels in love,