Thursday February 5, 1987

 Moorhouse Inn, Leeds LS11 5NQ

Clemmie is so beautiful and female. She sits up - those lovely blue-grey eyes. So old fashioned.

Hectic. Can we afford £23 a week to educate Samuel privately? I hope so. We do not want agents of Kinnock getting their hands on our progeny. I could take anything from a child except left wing politics.

Margaret Rushton phoned in sick at 7. Or perhaps I should say her mother did. We were left 'staffless' on a pool night. The team from the George The Fourth came here with the usual camp followers. All Tetley women look like prostitutes, with flashed hair and bitten finger nails.

Ally says that one day we'll look back upon these hard-working times and laugh it off. God. It is such a wonderful experience all this.

From the Telegraph Peterborough column: Ouch! If proof were needed that nudists are a thick skinned lot, I learn that delegates attending a meeting of the Federation Naturiste Internationale  in Dublin this Spring  are to be issued with pin-fixed identification badges.

Sapper: Wylie.

Obituary: George Wylie, a sapper who saved St Paul's Cathedral during the 1939-45 War but sold his George Cross in a spirit of disillusionment  two years ago, has died in Bow. He was 77. Wylie was a member of a bomb disposal squad after a heavy night's bombing  on September 12, 1940, when he spotted a one-ton explosive 27ft below Dean's Yard. For three days despite a burning gas main and fears that the bomb which was sinking in the clay soil could explode, Wylie played a vital part in its removal. When it was taken to Hackney Marshes its deliberate explosion caused a 100ft crater. Wylie was one of the first three to be awarded the George Cross after its institution by King George VI ....

-=-