The Lost Diaries. Craig Brown

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      Find corpse in upstairs guest bathroom. Freak out. Sell house.

      

       KEITH RICHARDS

       March 16th

      Oh Jasus. Oh Jasus oh Jasus oh Jasus. Oh Jasus. Will you look at that? asks Dad. I look down at me plate. Oh Jasus, he asks, was there ever a child like him for the greed and the gluttony, the gluttony and the greed? And now the others are staring at me plate, and they’d take a pitchfork to me head out of jealousy if we hadn’t sold the pitchfork to Ma McGubbins to pay for the last season’s hay which they needed to feed the donkey to pull the peat to buy another pitchfork to replace the one they’d sold to old Ma McGubbins.

      How’s he get to have two peas? says Malachy. Oh Jasus, is tis birthday? Dad snatches one of me peas and cuts it in half, snatching half for himself and placing the other half in his top pocket for safekeeping, alongside last year’s moth. Malachy caught the moth in his sock and Dad said he’d keep it for our St Patrick’s Day fry-up, moths cook beautiful in batter he said though their wings can prove a mite chewy, it’s all that flying they do, Jasus who’d be a moth in this day and age? Malachy says moths are Protestant, ye’ve never seen a moth with a rosary, now have you, he says, but Mam says they’re good Catholics, and all that flitterfluttering is them making the sign of the cross to the good Lord, is it not.

      So I’m cutting me remainin’ pea into four and spreading the quarters round the plate to give an impression of quantity when there’s a swoosh from the chimney and Great Grandma McCourt emerges covered in soot, her false teeth close behind. She’s been out whorin’ agin, whispers Alphie. Jasus, how can ye tell? I hiss back. She’s suckin’ on a cough-drop, says Alphie, they always pay her in cough-drops. But is it not a mortal sin? I ask. Will she not be condemning her soul to eternal damnation?

      Not for a cough-drop, snaps Mam. Maybe for a sherbet lemon or two toffees, now shaddup and eat your pea or you won’t be getting your mouse-tail for puddin’.

      

       FRANK MCCOURT ^*

      The trouble with staying in places like Windsor Castle is that you so rarely meet anyone of interest. Bumped into the Reagans as I was going up the stairs. Dull little couple. He’s making a goodish stab of being President of the USA, she has a reasonable figure but eyes too far apart. Feel sorry for the pair of them. Should I put him on the board of the Tote? Might give him something to do.

      

       WOODROW WYATT

       March 17th

      I have always found the look and smell of a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup powerfully erotic, in that noble word’s original sense of ‘tasting slightly of tomatoes’. In the contemporary sense of the word, it is not erotic at all, or at any rate not nearly as erotic as a can of tinned peaches in heavy syrup, one of which I remember taking to the opera and courting successfully in the spring of ‘48, only to be turned down when it came to bed because it had become suspicious of my infatuation with a beautifully ripe pineapple. All full-blooded Englishmen, particularly those of Irish descent, have found sexual desire within their loins for the suppurating convexities and soft, skeiny protuberances of the fruit (originally ‘froo-it’, owing to the fact that, if it had an unrelenting central core, it was hard to bite froo it), and this explains why the Establishment has never allowed a law to be placed on the statute books forbidding full intercourse with any type of fruit.

      

       ANTHONY BURGESS

      I collar Reagan over a brandy and give him some advice. ‘A lot of people tend to forget,’ I say, ‘that America’s a very big country.’ He is very grateful.

      

       WOODROW WYATT

       March 18th

      My God, I despair of women sometimes. My whole life and my every breath has been informed with the imprint of my love and respect, admiration indeed, of women. But for Christ’s sake, they sometimes let me down. If there is one type of woman I hate it is the very thin type of woman. And if there is another type of woman who gets up my nose it’s the fatty. And what about those detestable in-betweenies, those spineless wretches who don’t have the guts to be one thing or the other? They frankly get on my wick. Not until woman can truly be herself – neither fat nor thin nor in-between – can our sisterhood hope to save this doomed planet.

      

       GERMAINE GREER

      Time to leave Windsor Castle. I worry over a point of etiquette. How much should one tip the Queen?

      

       WOODROW WYATT

       March 19th

      You are wrong, I am right.

      I am right, you are wrong. You are Ron, I am Reg. But who is he?

       EDWARD DE BONO ^*

      Pair of Siamese twins knocks on my door, lovely couple of ladies, joined at the hip or wherever, they say we need the media attention, one of us has a tragic terminal illness, the other’s struggling with a tragic drugs problem, we want to strike while the iron’s hot, Max, so how can you help us?

      As luck would have it, this very morning my client and good friend Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame had been on the old mobile asking if I knew a pair of Siamese twins he could perform his magic on, so, swings and roundabouts, to cut a long story short I put Simon and the tragic Siameses in touch at a mutually agreed venue of my choice and Bob’s your uncle, the twins are lined up for a major role on next season’s X-Factor, followed by an episode of their own on Celebrity Surgery, I can’t tell you any more at this moment in time but believe me it’ll be dynamite, and between ourselves one of them’s enjoying something of a fling with one of Stephen Lawrence’s young killers, so that can’t be bad, especially if a marriage results, Hello are interested, so’s UK Living TV, you name it, sweetheart, we’re talking mega-bucks. Yes, it’s nice to be able to put something back.

       MAX CLIFFORD

       March 20th

      We invaderate Iraq. Thanks to our courageous actions, today our world is a safer place than it will ever be.

      

       GEORGE W. BUSH

       March 21st

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