PHILIP PULLMAN: You say you won’t torture or kill those of us who have the temerity to disagree with you! Well, if I’ve extracted that promise from you today, Rowan, then our discussion won’t have been a complete waste of time! Now, I’ve got to rush to another speaking engagement, so I must go. Some of us have work to do! If you could just carry my bags to the taxi, Rowan, there’s a good fellow.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS: I’m frankly overwhelmed that a great author such as yourself thinks of me as a good fellow, Philip!
PHILIP PULLMAN: That’s very literal of you, Rowan. Hurry up, now! Chip-chop!
PHILIP PULLMAN IN CONVERSATION WITHDR ROWAN WILLIAMS
January 26th
Have found a way of knotting my necktie using an extraordinary little gadget on my Swiss Army penknife. Its recommended use in the accompanying pamphlet is for taking the stones out of horses’ hooves, but they keep these other uses quiet, don’t they, just in case the ordinary decent people get to hear of them. Whereas tying my necktie used to take, ooh, a minute, with this handy gadget it can now take over fifteen minutes. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Of course, the minute word gets out about it, it’ll be dynamite, there’ll be the most massive international cover-up involving all the powers the state has at its disposal. But that’s what you’d expect of the feudal hierarchy under which we are forced to live, isn’t it? Either that, or they make one out to be potty!
Unpeel a banana fruit and eat it, first throwing away the mushy white bit inside.
TONY BENN
I’m mad for the economic downturn! Mad for it! Mass unemployment is so sexy, hm? When the economic graph swoops down like that, like a curve from Fragonard, I think it is so gorgeous, so trendy! My new evening-wear range for Chanel is a wonderful homage to that curve, with all my clothes with downturns off the shoulders in dark, dark greys and delicious blacks.
KARL LAGERFELD
January 27th
On this day many, many years ago, I was introduced to Mr Gandhi at a party of Diana Cooper’s.
I was perfectly frank. I informed him there was nothing very clever about parading around in a loincloth drinking one’s own urine and generally acting the giddy goat.
As a result, he fell head over heels in love with me.
Men love to be told the truth, even when painful.
BARBARA CARTLAND
January 28th
I learn from the wireless that the American space ‘shuttle’ (horrid word) Challenger has exploded seconds after lift-off. Serves them jolly well right. When will these tenth-raters learn to place me in charge of their operations? Instead, they leave it to nincompoops and incompetents. Of course, these sissies at Mission Control are interested only in themselves. Their instinct is to engineer matters in such a way that their achievements catch up – surpass, perchance! – my own. What nonsense! Do they not realise that I am widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the vast majority of subjects? In a huff, they conceitedly disregard me and ‘blast off’ without so much as a by-your-leave. And look what happens! Will they never learn?
A.L. ROWSE
It’s only this that motivates me to write about my father at all: this vexed question of masculinity, of what it is to be a man. An unutterably grey nimbus of brutality surrounded my parents. They fought to the death, brandishing decency, the nuclear weapon of the suburban bourgeoisie. On the crap terrace of our suburban semi, my mother would coldheartedly ask my father how his day had been. Shielding the blow, he would reply, viciously, that it had been fine – and with a final savage swipe he would then tell her to put her legs up, before threatening her with a ‘nice’ cup of tea. The two of them were a schizophrenic hermaphrodite, their marriage a screaming Procrustes, always stretched to breaking point – and beyond. I once overheard my mother say, ‘How about a nice biscuit then, dear?’ It was a dubiously interrogatory phrase designed to force upon the prostrate victim an all-out assault, or attack, that could be met only with the tiny porous shit-brown shield of the absent HobNob. When my father replied, ‘Mmm…lovely,’ I knew then that he had allowed his manhood to wither into a nothingness as weary, diminished and yet somehow sublimely totemic as a small mollusc stamped upon by an elephant before being subdivided with a pair of compasses by an aberrant alge-braitician who is nursing a rare neurotic compulsive disorder that forces him to make things very small, or minuscule.
WILL SELF
January 29th
The Prime Minister of Korea is an exceptionally cultured man, a brilliant and congenial scholar and devoted public servant. We were indeed honoured to be able to entertain him to a finger buffet of a selection of finest cuts of British Spam at our Embassy, which has now been moved from the old mansion house to the more convenient and easy-to-clean lean-to just six miles further along the same road. He assured us that he found our new bring-a-bottle policy highly sensible, and was obviously delighted to meet Major Ronald Ferguson, who had agreed to come along to lend the necessary glamour and dignity to the event. The trade agreement went through very smoothly, with Korea agreeing to export millions of pounds of their manufactured goods to us and we, in turn, agreeing not to send any more of our awful stuff to them. Handshakes all round, leaving just enough time to prepare for a reasonably good dinner.
SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON
Deep into my research for my mega-film The Young Victoria. Not many people these days have ever heard of Queen Victoria – and I’m determined to remedy that! I want the world to become aware of one marvellous little lady who went by the name of Queen Victoria – or Her Maj, as she preferred to be known!!!
So who exactly was the young Victoria? My intensive research tells me that not only did she climb her way up the greasy pole to become Queen of All England, but she was also far from the dowdy old boot-faced frump of popular imagination. The young Victoria was in fact a beautiful person with flowers in her hair, porcelain shoulders, great legs and truly galumptious boobs, a fun-loving chick who liked nothing better than hooting with laughter whilst flirting unashamedly with all the dishiest blokes in the room! She was one helluva young lady who adored going down to the local town square to literally stuff herself with barbecued bratwurst in a bun – and lots more ketchup for me, please, Albert!
SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
January 30th
My antecedents, seasoned aristocrats all, were the founders of what we are now pleased to describe, in our impishly ironic way, as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
My great-grandfather, Senator Bore Vidal of New York, the owner of 200,000 acres of prime farming land east of Buffalo, married my great-grandmother Edwina Crashing, the daughter of Amelia Crashing, whose father was one of the Wilds of Montana, giving birth to my grandfather, Senator Wild Crashing Bore, who in turn married Miss Gore Blimey from one of the most influential aristocratic families in London’s gorgeously affluent Hackney East.
From their union sprang, with, I regret to say, more promptitude than pulchritude, the Hon. Mrs Bore V. Dull