House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

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With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch. Although this is a diary, Bennett doesn’t really say how he spends his days – staring out of the window, presumably, and remembering the past. He talks about the year his family spent in Guildford just after the war, where they noticed that the fish and chip shops used oil instead of beef dripping. “To us the oil smelled disgusting and was yet another score on which ‘down south’ proved a disappointment.” Pupils in English schools were told to wear face masks despite limited evidence of the policy’s efficacy after Johnson was told by Whitty that it was probably “not worth an argument” with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, on the issue.

House Arrest: Diary selections from the pandemic year, House Arrest: Diary selections from the pandemic year,

I don’t think Her Majesty ever came to any other of my plays, though not, I’m sure, due to my youthful bêtise. Still, when I next wrote about the queen it might also have caused offence. This was A Question of Attribution, put on at the National Theatre in 1988 and the first time the queen had been represented on the stage. This needs to be said. Prunella Scales’s seamless portrayal of Her Majesty not only preceded, it also surpassed any that came after. Physically much the same as HMQ, Pru had no claim or aspirations to glamour, she even had a touch of the suburban. The sad thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. He is a longtime Soviet agent and one of the questions implicit in the scene is whether the queen knows this. Bought today and have no idea when this was published but it feels just like sitting with Alan Bennett for a chat. Never seen this before and within an hour I have found another delight in his writing. Literary figures played a key role in some of the songs of Radiohead, and Thom Yorke has paid tribute to the inspiration of writers such as Ben Okri. The band were also influenced by Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 science fiction novel Cat’s Cradle when composing their song “Nice Dream”. The Vonnegut link is one of the hundreds of intriguing facts in a new biography of the band, Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse (Palazzo Editions), written by John Aizlewood, a music expert and editor of Q magazine in its heyday. Covering more than three decades, the book is a must-have for fans of this influential group. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should think: “Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.” It’s not what EM Forster meant by “only connect”, but it’s what I mean. March. With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch.One of the pleasures and indeed consolations of a memorial service is in looking round to see who’s there, not something that’s possible on Zoom. So, ideally it should be a roving Zoom. Not, I’m sure, that Geoffrey would have thought he was worth the trouble. Many prospective readers are likely to have enjoyed previous volumes of Bennett diaries and once again this one, though slight, will not disappoint.

‘He manages to make me look like a blond Hitler’: Alan

The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly. One has met and indeed entertained many visiting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and their wives not much better … One has given one’s white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be queen, I have often thought, the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots. One is often said to have a fund of common sense but that is another way of saying that one doesn’t have much else, and accordingly perhaps I have at the instance of my various governments been forced to participate if only passively in decisions I consider ill-advised and often shameful. Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.Thanks to arthritis I’m now much less mobile than I was. Gone are the days when I could jump on my bike to pop down to the shops, so static semi-isolation is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine. Himself no slouch when it came to work, George Steiner once asked a Soviet dissident how he got through so much. “House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.” Alas, so far as work is concerned, I haven’t yet noticed much difference.

House Arrest (Pandemic Diaries) Hardcover 5 May 2022

As a banana-a-day muncher, I admit I was intrigued by a fact box called “Think you know bananas?” in Alex Renton’s entertaining 13 Foods That Shape Our World: How Hunger has Changed the Past, Present and Future (BBC Books). Turns out, I’ve been yellow-bellied in my fruit adventures, never having even tried any of the thousand varieties that are neither yellow nor even banana flavoured. The silk or tundan type, for example, grown in west Africa, has a tangy hint of apple. The most intriguing-sounding variety, though, is a red one that has “a faint raspberry flavour”. I bet that causes a few slip-ups in blind tastings. Whately, as care minister, warned that restrictions on visitors to care homes at the time were “inhumane”. Although he refused the former honour 25 years ago, given the quality of many recent elevations to the peerage including one bemoaned in this book, the House of Lords could certainly benefit from both his wit and wisdom. Our national treasure at work during the pandemic – sharing his everyday thoughts, alongside his increasing physical infirmities, in his own inimitable way. Warm, human and open, usually with a nonchalant air. As captivating as always. Something in the day sparks a reminiscence and he wanders off tangentially – how I relate to that!However, it added that the saga raised “questions around the conditions on which departing members of government retain and subsequently use official information which need to be considered by organisations such as the Cabinet Office”. As an over-70, I am officially exhorted to remain isolated and indoors which is to say that my usual going on now has governmental endorsement.

House Arrest to The World in 2050 Books of the month: From House Arrest to The World in 2050

January 2022. Sent a brochure for Venice, as we regularly are, in which the Orient Express figures prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car. It was an international train, headed, I think, for Istanbul, but overnight transformed in certain sections into something much more domestic. I went First, thinking, rightly, that this meant luxury, but venturing further down the train one found humbler passengers spilling out into the corridor along with their belongings in bulging cardboard boxes, hens and on one occasion a goat. When one eventually arrived in Venice, where I’d never been, in the late afternoon it did seem like an achievement: one came out of the station to find the canals not sequestered away in some tourist area but there on the steps of the station itself, Venice the only place that lived up to its publicity. On the vaporetto one passed the fire station, the gleaming boats ready arrayed, and that seemed wondrous too, that here even the fire engines were in boat form. I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have been cripplingly shy. For me she was a creature of myth and I was happy for her to remain so, my notion of her set out in a speech made by the queen herself in ‘The Uncommon Reader’:Rishi Sunak told Starmer: “Rather than comment on piecemeal bits of information, I’m sure [Starmer] will agree with me the right way for these things to be looked at is the Covid inquiry. It is not all doom and gloom. On 26 March of that first year, Nicholas Hytner rings with the exciting news that the BBC would like to record a new version of Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 because it is exactly the sort of thing that could be done on Zoom. The director pops round later that day to discuss details, which he is obliged to semaphore from the other side of the street. Bennett, in turn, worries that weeks of social isolation have robbed him of the power of speech. On the phone to the optician about his broken glasses, he finds that he has lost the words, and his partner has to take over. Later, arriving at the vaccination centre for his first jab, Bennett firmly announces that he is here “for the virus” (in his defence, he points out that both of them are “v words”). He notes being sent a new bio­graphy of Graham Greene, but he wouldn’t read it because he was never a fan. “I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A ­darling of the Sunday papers in the l960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.” He only met Greene once, when he came to see his play The Old Country, and Alec Guinness introduced them. He remembered that, “Greene’s was the limpest hand I’d ever shaken. Nor did he say a word about the play, for or against.” It’s always been assumed that the late queen didn’t much like the theatre, which can’t be said of her successor, who’s often to be found at plays, and if it’s a comedy, far from dampening down an audience, Charles’s presence and his loud laughter help to get them going.