Craig Brown - The Lost Diaries

‘Come outside and say that.’ The words shinned out of my mouth like a nuclear siren signalling the decimation of a world boorishly encyclopaedic in its slavish variety. On the ashpuke streets wheezing with urine-drenched tramps, the Hitch and I squared up to one another, eyes unblinking, like men. I flexed my arms; the Hitch flexed his. GO! Hands working faster than the speed of travelling luminous energy, we began to trade smacks, all the while singing, ‘A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see and all that he could see see see was the bot –’

By this time, we were biffing our way through it full pelt. But I got to the end – ‘bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea’ – before him, and the Hitch collapsed fighting for breath like a man fighting for breath, his defeat ameliorated by his knowledge that with his hands and his rhyme he had just participated in the tumescent whirligig of literary history in the late twentieth century.

MARTIN AMIS

Anji Hunter was helpful. She said Campbell and Mandelson once had a shaky relationship, but it’s much improved. ‘These days, when Alas-tair pours the tea for Peter, it’s into a cup,’ she says.

LANCE PRICE

The second week of February is now virtually over, and I still haven’t found time to assist poor Andrew with the uphill struggle he is having over the rearrangement of his cushions, so utterly hectic has my own life been, what with the frightful bother of trying to impose some semblance of order on my scarf drawer. ‘Scarf’ – that’s an interesting word, and of course ‘cushion’ is another, and we discussed how interesting they were over dinner the night before last. Norman St John of Fawnsley pointed out that there is no other word in the English language spelt c-u-s-h-i-o-n, in that order, and when I pointed out that it is also the only word in English spelt exactly in that way meaning something you can sit on, darling Roy Strong got tremendously over-excited, clapping his hands together, and was kind enough to tell me how clever I was!! The two of them were such utter poppets that after they had finished their main courses I told them they could get off their knees for pudding and sit with us around the grown-ups’ table.

DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

If I am a master of the easy paradox, it is essentially because no paradox is easy to master. My prose style is the style of a pro(se). The clever effect is achieved by reversing the first half of a sentence so that the reversal achieves an effect of cleverness. This has gained me an international reputation for being smart, though I am not one to smart at the international reputation I have gained.

CLIVE JAMES

I told the Queen Mother how pretty she was looking and she said, ‘I always try to put on something special in jewellery for you, Woodrow, because I know how much you like it.’ At this point, I said, ‘You are a poppet, Ma’am,’ and placed my right hand on her upper back. I then began to rub it up and down in a soothing and strangely sensual manner. I may say she has the most sublime back of any of the Royal Family, up to and including Princess Michael. It was all I could do to restrain myself from sitting astride her on that sofa and licking it discreetly with my tongue.

Our talk turned to Nelson Mandela. She asked me if the rumours were true that he was black. I told her that, yes, they were. ‘So does he play the trumpet?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid not, Ma’am,’ I replied.

‘What a wicked waste,’ she said, adding that Louis Armstrong had played the trumpet quite beautifully, and that he had never felt the need to waste time struggling against apartheid.

‘It’s just like the miners,’ she added. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are to be able to spend their lives in a mine. Think how cosy it must be down there! Such fun! I do love black!’

She is one of the most politically astute women I have ever met. ‘Might it not be a rather marvellous idea,’ she said, signalling to her footman to unwrap me a Bittermint, ‘were the good old Royal Air Force to bomb Liverpool? It would be like the war all over again, with everyone singing songs and pulling together. Such larks!’

I will suggest it to Margaret in the morning. *

WOODROW WYATT

Watched something on TV about Florence Nightingale, poor love. I was a nurse in the Crimea, and believe me, it’s no easy job walking around with your lamp, tending to all those brave soldiers with blood spurting out of them, hearing their last words, wrapping them up in bandages and that. So why are the media always going at poor Florence? She’s just doing her bit, for God’s sake, but they can’t understand that, can they, so they try and make out she’s only in it for the publicity. I don’t tell people this, but when I came back from the Crimea, I founded Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Kiddies, but I don’t go on about it, it’s a secret.

HEATHER MILLS MCCARTNEY

Gerry Adams is common, with that simply ghastly beard of his. But Ian Paisley is a poppet. One longs to put him in one’s pocket and take him home, then have him bellow sweet nothings in one’s ear! Heaven! I wonder if a very, very bold check tweed Biligorri two-piece might suit him? I saw Paisley (such a pretty name) last night on Newsnight arguing the toss with Jemima Paxman. Halfway through the interview, he turned to the camera and winked at me.

And him a Reverend!

Saucy boy.

NICHOLAS HASLAM

Joni Mitchell song on the radio. ‘I’ve looked at life from both sides now but clouds got in my way’? What’s she on about? Why let a cloud get in your bloody way? It’s only made of fluff or whatever. Just tell it to fuck the fuck off, that’s what I say.

JANET STREET-PORTER

For lunch, I eat some rice. Why am I the only person in the world who eats rice?

GERMAINE GREER

Concomitantly, silence is, as I have pointed out in pioneering books and seminars, invariably quarried and pillaged by lesser minds (usually without acknowledgement and certainly without apology), golden.

Cities, towns, conurbations, large groups of buildings placed near or proximate to one another to form a definable whole, are both the conduits and the receptacles for noise, sound, clamour ( klamari in Swahili, calamari in Italian, though I prefer the cannelloni). At regular time period intervals, I retreat to the French hillsides with my distinguished yet unspoken wife, to breathe in the silence, unloud and noiseless, that was once partaken by the by no means lesser minds of Flaubert and Racine.

Maritally, we sit in a fieldy meadow in an incipiently quiet time/space continuum observing the hush ( huss in Somali) stretching far beneath us, down to the herd, team, group of cows below. ‘Ah, silence!’ I exclaim exclamatorily in simple wonderment. ‘Silence – the silence that is with us now – a silence golden as James’s Bowl, as Apuleius’ Ass, as Frazer’s Bough, that silence blessed by my original study, now translated into fifteen languages, taken up yet still not acknowledged by those whose academic reputations fall sadly short of my own. Ah, silence! A void, a circumstantial gap, a vivid diaspora, the sound, rare and provocative, created when one’s talk ceases. Silence, both metaphysical and actual, both concomitant and –’