Craig Brown - The Lost Diaries

Greece – it was Greece, wasn’t it? – sounds desperately Greek, which is just as it should be. One would hate to hear that it had turned all French.

P.S. Why does everyone insist on being so beastly about poor Dr Crippen? He may have been a mite offhand with his wife, but, my word, he was an excellent doctor with a perfectly lovely smile, a dear old friend of Mecca. *

In tearing haste,

Debo

DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE, LETTER TO PATRICK LEIGH-FERMOR

People have been kind enough to call me sharp. To be blunt, I am sharp. It was probably Rilke who first taught me that if ever a man is to be sharp, he needs also to be blunt. This was a revelation to me, partly because I already knew it. The sharp man must make pointed statements in rounded prose, remaining careful that the points emerge from his heart, and not from his head, or they will come out flat. Voltaire, too, taught me to square my feelings with my thoughts, particularly when talking among my circle.

CLIVE JAMES

T.S. Eliot died today, in 1965. His books only ever sold a few thousand copies. No one reads him now, and he is still dead. But is he still in print? I doubt it. Yet he enjoyed a modest reputation while he remained alive.

V.S. NAIPAUL

I’m sat at an official banquet in the Guildhall or wherever. ‘Only trouble with prawn cocktails,’ I say to the Queen of the Neverlands as I lick my spoon, ‘is that they’re always too small, don’t you find?’

The lady mutters some double dutch in responsibility. As I’m reaching for the bread and butter, I notice there’s a heck of a lot of prawn cocktail left in her glass dish and she’s just pecking at it. ‘Tell you what – we’ll swap dishes – you take mine and I’ll take yours! That way we’ll both be happy! Vous compronay?’

With that, I reach for her prawn cocktail, retaining my own spoon. Sorry, but I don’t want to catch foreign germs.

‘Very tasty!’ I say, turning to the gentleman on my right, the President of Venice or Venezuela or whatever, and try to break the ice. ‘Not finishing your prawn cocktail, then, Pedro? Defeated you, has it?’

He looks blank, so to set him at his ease I reach over, shove my spoon in his prawn cocktail and help him out with it. And very tasty it is too, very tasty indeed.

‘Much-o grassy-arse, mon amigo!’ I say with a pleasant chuckle, very slow so’s he’ll be able to understand, then grab myself another couple of bread rolls before the waiter runs off with them. These official banquets can leave one feeling very peckish you know, so it’s lucky I’ve had a burger and beans before I came out, washed down with sherry trifle and cheddar cheese, all rounded off with a nice tin of condensed, all very pleasant. Yes, I do love my food.

Come the main course, the old tum is up to its tricks again, making me feel full when I’m not, but I don’t want to miss out on the meat – I’ve always loved my meat – so I seek to remedialise the situation. I look over the President’s shoulder for a toilet, very discreetly you understand, but there isn’t one within a hundred yards. I don’t want to disruptify the banquet, so while the President’s talking to the person on his right and the Queen’s talking to the person on her left, I reach for the old napkin.

There’s nothing you can teach me about napkin-folding. In seconds, I’ve folded my napkin into the shape of a bucket, and am just adding the finishing touches to the handle and preparing to do my business when Queen Snooty of the Neverlands turns round and asks me where exactly I live blah blah blah.

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

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.