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!