The Lost Diaries. Craig Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ the full stop, he said. Now blow your man’s nose & wipe away those ugly tears, I said, thrusting my handkerchief at this hirsute & now broken stick. In all honesty, I cannot recollect arm-wrestling with such easeful triumph since last I took on Edith Sitwell.

      

       VIRGINIA WOOLF

       January 7th

      Another average day. First, I grunge the sicky-wicky, then I scowze out the scab-tube, then I skunk down the flunk-pustule, and that just about takes me up to lunch. For lunch, I have a light shit-snack of cannelloni with tomato sauce like the castrated cocks of two hundred dwarves dowsed in their own blood, then it’s back to irking the scuzz-wock. Then I’ll screw-whack the scrag-head and soil the downside of the whinge-pussy before getting in a bit of shagbagging the apothegm before a dinner of Supa-scrag-fleck-on-toast. After dinner, it’s down to the spick-arse to sconse some clap-wax off a Pluto-gasket, and then it’s into my jim-jams and nighty-night with heads down for beddy-byes.

      

       MARTIN AMIS

      Day 18,263. The housemates are celebrating their half-century in the Big Brother house. 11.15 a.m. Mikey and Richard have wrapped up well and are in the garden. Glyn is having a bit of a cough. His back’s been playing up again. Imogen and Lea are making their way on their zimmer frames to the living area. Satnav and Cornflake, who only joined the house thirty-two years ago, are in the kitchen, getting their bearings. Nikki is in the diary room. She’s left her teeth somewhere but she can’t remember where.

      NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.

      BB: Today, Nikki, you have been in the Big Brother house for fifty years. You are now seventy three years of age. Nikki – how do you feel?

      NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.

      BB: Thank you, Nikki. You may now leave the diary room.

      NIKKI: Big Brother? One more thing.

      BB: Yes, Nikki?

      NIKKI: I’m bored shitless she really does my head in she’s gonna push me so far one of these days she so really fucks me off so much I fuckin’ swear it does my head in.

      BB: Thank you, Nikki.

       January 8th

      A delightful evening of much jollity! Mummy and Daddy to dinner. Over truly splendid creamy meringues prepared by our truly splendid housekeeper Dalisay, Harold tells them with his usual brilliant eloquence of the terrible things that are going on in Serbia – and all thanks, he explains, to those positively brutal and monstrous Americans! Over coffee, Harold treats us all to a truly splendid reading of ‘Up Your Fucking Arse’, his truly splendid denunciation of the Bush regime. Mummy and Daddy both have their eyes closed in immense concentration. Awfully touching!

       LADY ANTONIA FRASER

       January 9th

      I flick the light switch and the light goes on. Whatever happened to faulty electrical fittings? In the old days, two or three youngsters would be electrocuted every day through haphazard wirings. But no more. Things do not always change for the better, I fear.

      

       ROGER SCRUTON

       January 10th

      The river flows, and it keeps flowin’. And having flown, it flows again. There’s no rhyme or reason, my friend, that’s just the way rivers flow. What is in the river is not river but water, but it’s not just the water that flows, but the river too.

      

       BOB DYLAN

      Yet another programme on the television about the so-called Queen but it doesn’t answer the question: who the heck is the REAL Elizabeth Windsor? A lot of people think that just because she’s commander-in-chief of the British armed forces, she’s out there with her machine-gun and her stash of grenades, leading her troops into battle against her subject peoples on a day-to-day basis. Not so. Aged eighty years old, she hasn’t so much as raised a fist and given an assailant a bloody nose or kicked an opponent in the balls with her dainty size-four feet for quite a few years now.

      Instead, she sits all alone in a basement of Buckingham Castle with the curtains drawn watching repeats of EastEnders on her ten-inch black-and-white television while scooping tinned spaghetti hoops into her mouth with her gloved hands. She could watch absolutely anything she chose – she’s even got a remote control, for crying out loud – including programmes about culture and politics. But no, she does not choose. Instead, she just sits there, watching whatever she wants. Just like my mother in her aged care facility. These old people truly make my blood boil. The Queen could have taken an Aborigine male to her marriage bed and thus presented a beacon of hope to all the oppressed people of the world, but did she do it? Did she heck. An Aborigine husband would have signalled that whatever her toffee-nosed advisers might tell her, dammit, she was on the side of the poor and the craply-treated. And the young couple could have gone on a true Royal walkabout, living off grubs and nettles and tracing the songlines of the Home Counties for a period of seven years before returning barefoot to the so-called civilisation that is commonly known – don’t make me laugh! – as London Town. But she just didn’t make the effort. Ha! Don’t talk to Lilibet about effort. Sorry, guys –it’s a word that doesn’t feature in her vocabulary.

       GERMAINE GREER

       January 11th

      1979 is not getting off to a good start. News of PM’s proposed state of emergency v. depressing. In the morning, I begin to prepare an advisory paper setting out a far-reaching plan for the future well-being of the UK but suddenly it’s midday and time for lunch, so I scribble ‘WHY NOT SELL OFF NORTH SEA OIL’ in big letters and hand it to the PM, making it to the Gay Hussar just in time for lovely chilled wild cherry soup followed by veal goulash with lovely Shirley Williams.

      Shirley desperately concerned about child poverty up North. I say how desperately concerned I am about it as well, and tell her that I think Jim is probably desperately concerned too. Tell her the best way to tackle it is to redefine it, thus bringing 95 per cent of all people into category of ‘better off.’ It’s the least we can do to give them a leg-up. Pudding a lovely walnut cheese pancake with extra cream. Shirley suggests I might like to take over the Chairmanship of British Leyland. Back to No. 10 just in time to hear news of economic collapse, then off to Covent Garden for lovely Tosca.

       BERNARD DONOUGHUE

      Using my special friends-and-family key, I let myself into Buckingham Palace and put my head round the Queen’s sitting-room door.

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