KATIE PRICE
January 24th, 1925
My Dear Lady Cunard,
Thank you so much for that lovely stay last weekend. We both enjoyed ourselves very much. It was really very kind of you to have us.
I do hope my little ‘diversion’ on Saturday evening wasn’t too awfully inconvenient for you, and that your servants have managed to get most of the mud out of the carpets! From something you said –or was it just a look? – I came away thinking that I may, in your eyes, have done something ‘wrong’. If so, I can only apologise, but what is a man if he cannot seize the moment to strip off all his loathsome lily-livered clothes and wrestle his fellow man naked, strong, tumultuous, full of the very urge of life that lies within them, and all in a deep, soft, dirty – real dirty – and splodgesome sea of mud.
You may argue – in your typically grey, bourgeois, corrupt, stinking, decaying way – that I had no ‘right’ to order your gardeners to load ten, eleven, twelve wheelbarrows high with sludge from the ditches, wheel them into the blue drawing room and offload them in the area in front of the blazing fire. And you may also argue –loudmouthed bitch – that I could at least have rolled up your priceless carpet – symbol of all that is petty and extravagant and worthless in this age – and placed it to one side.
Away with your arguments! An end to your grey, sniffy, hoity-toity objections! When I rolled with your stable lad in the mud, as we pummelled each other with our fists and each felt the brute within and the mud without, I at last felt free and open and alive and triumphant and, yes, pure! How dare you suggest that mud-wrestling between two men should be confined to the outdoors, should be shunted away into the barns and the brooks, should be well away from all the upholstery and fine furnishings. There is nothing dirty in mud! This pervasive and wretched belief in household cleanliness is the sign of a decrepit age! There is no good carpet, no good sofa, that has not been splattered with the mud thrown off as two or more bold and muscle-bound men come a-grappling! Your priggish mud-hatred fills my blood with contempt.
Finally, once again, many thanks for the most marvellous stay. You made us feel so ‘at home’. We both came home greatly refreshed, and full of wonderful memories of a really terrific weekend.
Yours ever,
David
D.H. LAWRENCE,LETTER TO LADY CUNARD
I spoke to TB and started drafting resignation letters. I felt desperately sorry for Peter Mandelson. He had clearly been crying, and needed my support.
I went over to him, said this is all absolutely dreadful but we just have to get through it. I put one arm around his shoulder, and with the other I eased the knife, as gently as I could, between his shoul-derblades. By this time, he was writhing in pain, but I assured him that I would be strong for him, and do everything physically possible to ease his passing.
He kept saying why, why, why, but I reassured him that it just had to be done. As the tears cascaded down his cheeks, I sat alongside him and comforted him and read him his farewell resignation letter, and I gripped his shoulder and told him he had to be strong and then I gave it one last thrust. ‘You don’t deserve this, Peter, you really don’t, you’re one of the greatest ministers this country ever had,’ I said.
Bumped into JP on the way home, and he congratulated me on a very smooth operation. We agreed that Mandelson’s no better than a cartload of bollocks and we’re 100 per cent better off without him.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
January 25th
To Cuba. Introduced to President Castro. No oil painting. Very full of himself. Absurd bushy beard, army ‘fatigues’, regional accent (Welsh?). Inquire whether he is a Derbyshire Castro. ‘I myself am a regular at Chatsworth,’ I add, helpfully. He fails to take the bait. Instead, he drones on about the Missile Crisis. Missile Crisis this, Missile Crisis that. Typically lower class, living from crisis to crisis. So dreadfully panicky.
JAMES LEES-MILNE
PHILIP PULLMAN: I don’t like the word ‘God’, never have done, never will do. It’s meaningless, for the simple reason that God doesn’t exist.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, Philip, that’s a fascinating point. I think you’ve hit on something very very profound there, indeed something very meaningful, in a spiritual way.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Christianity is on a hiding to nothing, because Jesus was not the son of God.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That’s marvellously bold, Philip, and I salute you for it! It takes a creative artist of your tremendous powers of observation to say something so challenging and stimulating for the rest of us! But would you mind awfully if I took you up on something you said just now about Jesus?
PHILIP PULLMAN: As you know, I’m a very busy man, but not too busy to spare you a moment or two, Rowan. Fire away!
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: You said something to the effect that Jesus was not the son of God, and also that – do please correct me if I’m wrong! –Christianity is on ‘a hiding to nothing…’
PHILIP PULLMAN: Absolutely.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, that’s a wonderful phrase, tremendously powerful. ‘A hiding to nothing’. You at your impressive best! For me, it’s a phrase that carries real emotional power. And of course, in a very real sense, the Christian pursuit of God – or whatever we want to call him! –is indeed a pursuit of nothing, in the sense that the divinity, or what-have-you, is immaterial and not of this earth. So the expression ‘a hiding to nothing’ very much sums up what the Christian Church should be aiming for. I think we’re entirely at one on that, I must say.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Rowan, in my new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which you have so kindly agreed to help me publicise –
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Oh, it was the very least I could do…
PHILIP PULLMAN:…Very kind, nevertheless. In my new book, I attempt to show organised religion as a source of falsehood and wickedness. As a theologian, would you go along with this?
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, of course, it’s a fascinating topic for conjecture, tremendously rich and intriguing, but, no, as the leader of an organised religion, on the whole I’m not sure I entirely buy into that. Frankly, I can see problems with it. Put it this way, Philip: it gives me pause.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Really, Rowan – it’s so easy to be dismissive!
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I hope I wasn’t dismissive. Perhaps I was, and if so, I can only apologise.
PHILIP PULLMAN: Apology accepted. So I think we can both agree that the established Church is a source of falsehood and wickedness. We have plenty of common ground.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: Well, though it’s a profoundly interesting point, perhaps I wouldn’t want to go quite as far as…
PHILIP PULLMAN: So we’re entirely at one on that.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I’ve always considered ‘at one’ an extraordinarily helpful phrase, and I must say it thrills me deeply to hear you use it, Philip. It reinforces my sense that, for all our surface differences, the two of us are really thinking along the same lines. Very much so.
PHILIP PULLMAN: And another point I make in my book is that any head of an organised religion is likely to torture and kill anyone who disagrees with him.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: That’s a very striking point, Philip, though we may have one or two minor points of difference on the detail – for instance, as Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never seriously consider torturing