House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

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Some time in the afternoon Rupert shouts down that Joe Biden has passed the line and been declared the winner in the presidential election and that the scourge of Trump has been lifted. Though Trump does not agree. Lynn Wagenknecht [owner of the Odeon restaurant in New York] texts from New York saying there is dancing in the street and holds up the phone to let us hear the rejoicing. It should put a smile on people’s faces here but there are few people about. Such relief. Today’s barber is my partner, who manages to make me look like a blond Hitler She was a great woman, her performance of Let’s Do It at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an old-fashioned working-class man, elaborate, literate and language-loving, which is, or was, more typical of the north than the more cliched dialect-rich versions.

9781800811928 - House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Bennett

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. The York Theatre Royal’s tour of The Habit of Art, the play about Auden and Britten that did well last year and was due to be revived for a festival in New York, has had to be cancelled. I write to the cast apologising and saying that one person who would not be washing his hands every five minutes is WH Auden. 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. The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly.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. I’ve never been that fond of my hands. Now, much washed as we are told, they scarcely bear looking at: shiny, veinous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration. Far from the matt, solid, sensible instruments one has always hankered after. More “artistic”, I suppose. An old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere. In a statement on Wednesday, the Information Commissioner’s Office said it did not regard the messages as an issue it needed to consider, citing exemptions for areas such as journalism and for literary purposes which are in the public interest. 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.

House Arrest - British Theatre Guide Book review: House Arrest - British Theatre Guide

We have agreed that the cast and crew in the Talking Heads remount should do so for a token fee, with any profits to be given to the NHS. I’m somewhat staggered to find that this amounts to a million pounds, possibly more. It’s no skin off my nose, as I never expected the programmes to be repeated, but the financial sacrifice for some of the cast and crew will not just be notional. Astonishing though it is, this gesture passes without notice.

Footnotes

A few years later I met Lord Charteris, who was the queen’s secretary at the time. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I never saw the play but I gather the issue was whether the queen knew and whether Blunt knew that the queen knew. The truth is they both knew. But that, of course, has not to be said.’ 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. There is a proper process to these things, it is an independent inquiry, it has the resources it needs, it has the powers it needs, and what we should do in this house is to let them get on and do their job.” 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.