Craig Brown - The Lost Diaries

Whenever I have met them, I have found the British public extraordinarily ignorant of the demands and pressures with which we in the so-called ‘upper classes’ (how I hate all this ‘class’ nonsense!) are confronted day by day. I sometimes think that the ‘ordinary’ people, for all their immense pluck, fail to appreciate the many onerous tasks that befall the Stately Home owner, and I welcome this opportunity to ‘put them in the picture’. Rearranging the cushions on the sofa in my dressing room is one such task, and the time and planning involved are not to be underestimated. First, I have one of our staff nip out to the local shops to buy me a range of excellent new French devices known as ‘crayons’, which are what we used to know as pencils, but with brightly coloured leads. I then spend a week or so measuring out on a piece of paper and colouring in four squares – pink, pale yellow, Lincoln green and navy blue – and a further week cutting them out. This leaves me just a fortnight to juggle these four coloured squares around this way and that, until I am perfectly satisfied that I have ‘come up’ with the best new arrangement. It all makes for a highly enjoyable topic of dinner conversation too, and come February our guests delight in spending an hour and a half or so over the soup arguing the pros and cons of, say, having the pink on the left or the pale yellow on the right, and thoroughly productive it is too.

ANDREW, DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE

What a decade the Sixties is turning out to be. It was tonight, in that steamy liberated atmosphere of sexual awakening, that I first set eyes on Harold Pinter. We were at a party. It was, as I recall, a fondue party. None of the usual rules applied. Knives, forks, spoons: who needed them? Cutlery was dismissed as conventional, and even serviettes had been discarded. Instead, we would – wildly, madly, crazily – dip pieces of bread just any-old-how into a hot cheesy sauce. Then we would toss them into our mouths as ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ played suggestively in the background. The effect was electrifying.

Pinter and I went outside together. I said nothing. He said nothing. I said nothing back. He added nothing. Nothing would come between us. Pinter was already known for his pauses, but in those extraordinary moments he managed to stretch it from a slight pause to a mild hesitation and then, before we both knew it, to a full-blown silence.

Pinter was to become known as the master of the pause. He certainly couldn’t keep his pause off me.

JOAN BAKEWELL

As I was being shaved yesterday morning, I found myself reflecting that no English monarch since the death of Edward III can be put quite in the first class, though Queen Elizabeth I was undoubtedly sound, and Queen Victoria was nearly Beta Plus.

And what of God? Though His mind is too eclectic to be considered truly first-rate, He may still be justly credited with one or two good ideas, the Rees-Mogg family being just one example. We stretch back twelve centuries to Ras Mag, the distinguished President of the Ancient Pict Chamber of Commerce, and a notably successful Vice-Chairman of the Woad Preservation Society. To Rees-Moggs, Windsor Castle is a comparatively modern, somewhat – dare I say it – nouveau riche building, as are its present tenants. But I still incline to the point of view that it should be rebuilt. Life itself is not unlike Windsor Castle: sturdy yet fragile, admitting visitors yet essentially private, permanent yet strangely temporary.

WILLIAM REES-MOGG

This morning, I moved to pour myself a cup of tea. As I sat stirring that cup, or, rather, the hard, strong tea within it, my elbow moved back and for’d, back and for’d in a movement that danced to a mysterious rhythm. I was nearing the end of my stirring, and weary, when as fate would have it my elbow inadvertently nudged the vase on the corner table. In consequence, the vase fell off the table, and the dampened daffodils within it were hurled onto the floor, causing our maid, previously young and carefree, to slip as she passed by. She fell headlong onto my prone body, so that a passer-by, unaware of the incidents that had preceded this tragic scene, might have surmised with good reason that she was nailed to me, like Jesus Christ on the cross.

Alas, that is not what the second Mrs Hardy surmised as she entered the room a few brief seconds later. Instead, she threw up her hands and hurled cruel epithets of abuse at myself and also at the maid, who had, when the caterwauling came to a stop, aged most visibly, her hair now wispy and grey, with furrows deep in her face like time-honour’d sheep-tracks over old familiar hills.

This afternoon, a fresh cup of tea was brought to me, this time by a fresh maid with an uncomely gait and the severest of squints. The second Mrs Hardy looked on with an air that betrayed contentment. I am left in a state of unknowing as to where our first maid has gone. I suspect it is somewhere far away and forsaken, and that our paths are never more to cross.

Why me?

THOMAS HARDY

To an exhibition of driftwood jewellery at the Commonwealth Institute. I am waiting for Her Majesty in the company of Denis MacShane, MP, a junior Foreign Office Minister. He is still recovering from the excitement of playing host to Her Majesty three weeks ago.

‘Have you noticed how she wears her hats so well?’ he observes, respectfully. ‘Always firmly on the head. And she’s brilliant with gloves, too. She knows where to put every single finger, one in each slot. I’ve never seen her get it wrong.’

She arrives in lilac coat and matching hat. She approaches a figure holding a labrador on a lead.

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘A dog.’

‘She gets it right every time,’ the Lord Lieutenant of the county whispers to me. ‘Marvellous with animals.’

GYLES BRANDRETH

JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! You look fablus! Cwoor! You look gwate! Just gwate! Darn she look fablus, laze and gennulmun? Fand-astic! Wooh! I twuly can’t bleev you’re here with me today! Unbleevbul! Fancy a quickie? Fand-asdic! And you’ve also done all of us in this little countwy of ours the gwate honour of atchly coming to live amongst us!

MADONNA: Yes.

JONATHAN ROSS: Unbleevbaw. We all thank you fwom the bottom of our hearts for coming to live here. Jes thing of that laze and gennulmun –Madonna atchly living in England! Canyer bleev it? So er I guess you um must like it here?

MADONNA: Yes. Quite.

JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! Gwate! Thank you so much for answerwing that question! Hilawious! So now Madonna’s gonna tweat us to a toadly genius new song! Let’s hear it for Madonna, laze and gennulmun!

MADONNA:

Ah trahda stayur head, trahda stayon tarp

Trahda playapart, but somehow ahfugart

Ahdlark to spress my stream parnda view

Ahm not chrisjun nodda jew

Ooohweeoooweeoooh

This is American Lahf

JONATHAN ROSS: FABLUS! GWATE! FAND-ASDIC! Now, lez facey, you are the singaw biggest star in the histwy of the whirl of wall time ever. Thas quite an achievemun!

MADONNA: Wodever.

JONATHAN ROSS: Gwate! It must be litwully amazing being you! Tell us what you do on a nawmaw day?!

MADONNA: This and that.

JONATHAN ROSS: Fand-asdic! Gwate weply! Tellyawha, if I was Madonna, I’d get out of bed, stwip naked and just look at myself in the miwwor for hours on end!!! I mean, you’ve got the most FAND-ASDIC physique, you weally have! Gwate bweasts! Cwooor! If I were you, I’d just go STARKERS and look at them in the miwwor all day long – then I’d turn wownd and take a gander at that incwedibull bum! Is that what you do on a normal day, then? Is it?