Thursday November 15, 1979

. _. Driving rain. To the dentist for my six monthly inspection. My dentist, or butcher, is an obliging bearded youth who is reeking of garlic, and who seems quite disinterested in doing anything whatsoever with the contents of my mouth. Hough, his predecessor, who has disappeared, pulled, filled and twisted anything he could get his hands on. Got a soaking going home, but smiled throughout the process.

Princess Anne's son is two years old today, and HRH isn't at Gatcombe Park to celebrate with the toddler. The princess is in Canada on a Save the Children Fund mission. Dedication for you. Leaving a child at home to go to a minor function in Ottawa.

A Margaret and Jim night. No Ally.

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Wednesday November 14, 1979

_. Snow appeared but rain soon followed to make it disappear. Two phone calls of varying importance. Ally phoned after lunch with some sombre news about her car. The repairs amount to £60 and the machine requires a further fortune spending on an exhaust and numerous other odds and ends. She says that when she went to bed on Sunday night she went into a deep sleep, failed to hear her alarm clock, and woke at 4:40pm on Monday! She does not appreciate my concern and says I am overwrought. The poor girl is now financially ruined and things look very bleak.

The next phone call came this evening and was from Dave L. He wants a copy of an old Sunday Observer magazine. I explained the chances of me laying hands on a copy are slim. He chatted about MM and Marita and concluded somewhat teasingly that he has news which he cannot possibly repeat.
'Is it about them getting married'? I enquired. 'Yes', he replied: 'Who told you'? I laughed and answered: 'You did of course, just now.' I'd tricked it out of him. Oh, we did laugh. How cunning of me. The wedding, he says, is to take place on December 8, in Rawdon.

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Tuesday November 13, 1979

_. Tomorrow is the birthday of the Prince of Wales. His thirty first. He is to attend a concert by Shirley Bassey at Wembley, but no delightful deb is included in his party. Whatever the gossip columnists might say he isn't taking Sabrina, Davina, Rowena or Mavis. The poor man must be sick to death of the constant badgering and speculation. Blimey, he is only 31, and yet the Press seems to have given up hope of ever seeing 'action man' take a bride. Charles's cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, was 36, my Uncle Peter was 35, and Sir Cecil Beaton remains single at 70. So, all is not lost.

Lynn and Dave came to dinner tonight. Afterwards I was very rude and when we all retired to the sitting room I buried my head behind 'The Times' which appeared today for the first time in almost a year. Thank God it's back. Sue took to her bed at 11 but Pete stayed until 12:15, and we watched a dreadful film about an air crash. Bed with Hitler at 12:30.

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Monday November 12, 1979

_. Can I talk about Senator Edward Kennedy and then Mrs Margaret Thatcher? The senator is most certainly the next president of the United States, but Mother doesn't seem to think so. I am of the opinion that anyone with the surname Kennedy can do nothing but succeed in American politics. Mother says that the fact that Teddy murdered his girlfriend in 1969 rules him out of the race. As we all know, Americans like their presidents to be bent, crooked and twisted. My chauffeur, Jim, says that the sitting president commands tremendous power over his party and that it would be unprecedented for the Democrats to discard the president and select some other candidate. However, the word is that Carter now is more unpopular than Nixon was in his final days after Watergate, and that Carter's credibility is nil. We shall see.

My next subject is our dearly beloved prime minister. Isn't she doing well? Tonight she addressed the Lord Mayor of London's banquet and gave a performance almost Churchillian in its stature. Listening to her tonight made me so aware that at last we have a leader. We actually have someone of stature at the helm. Harold Macmillan has likened Thatcher to Queen Elizabeth I.

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Sunday November 11, 1979

_. Remembrance Sunday
    22nd Sunday after Trinity

Spent a long day at Club Street with Ally and Dave the Sailor. I am besotted with Ally's stereo machine. So much so that I now aspire to be a Radio 1 DJ like that great man Tony Blackburn.

Dave is a decent chap, and I do feel very sorry for him because I think he thought his weekend with Ally would follow a different course. After all, we do know what sailors are, don't we? Poor boy. I doubt whether he will be quick to return, even though he has been made very welcome. Ally is of the same opinion.

The spitfire remains incapacitated and so at 7, we happy threesome, took a bus to the White Cross and had fish and chips. By now Dave the Sailor is so subdued I am feeling uneasy. We were so relieved when a bus came at 10 and took him off to Leeds. Saw Ally onto a bus back to Bradford at 10:30 and walked home in the rain. Hilda and Tony are being entertained by Mum and Dad. Uncle Tony is now a Rotarian.

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Saturday November 10, 1979

_. Dave the Sailor arrived. Out this evening with Sue, Peter, Ally and the sailor to the White Cross. Many of the locals are heavily bandaged, covered in bruises, and missing vital limbs. The landlord explained that a recent brawl had raged in the hostelry which had resulted in nothing short of a massacre.

We went back to Pine Tops with wine for further revelries. Out to the Woolpack at Yeadon with Sue and Pete. They took us to a house party on the Coppice Wood estate. We bumped into Jill and Tim and they came along to the party. Today is Tim's 20th birthday. The host of the party, a miserable soul, reigned over the proceedings. The sailor had a fracas with another guest and so we made a speedy exit. Jill and Tim carried us off to Bradford taking lots of booze from the party in the back of his van.

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Friday November 9, 1979

_. Ally phoned me this afternoon to see what I intended doing this weekend. I told her I would ring back in the evening after Dave the Sailor's arrival. I worked until 5pm and then went over to the Eagle Tavern on North Street with Dave Pitts and Steve Burnip to Bob Cockroft's party. [He is defecting from the EP to the YP and is to be Fred Manby's replacement on the People column]. I only intended having a couple of drinks, just to be sociable, and my financial situation is far from healthy, but the paralysing effect of alcohol rendered me insensitive to respectable banter, and I rolled around the walls sloshing Timothy Taylor's ale  over all and sundry. Home by bus at 10:30. I went to see Margaret Phillips at the fish and chip shop on Victoria Road. She came across as cheerful, but said something to the effect  that she occasionally feels her late husband's presence in the vicinity of the deep fat fryer. A framed portrait of the late John Phillips takes pride of place above the list of shop prices. At home I'm still quite pissed. Watched John Cleese and Michael Palin in discussion with Bishop Mervin Stockwood and Malcolm Muggeridge on the subject of the new [Monty] Python epic, 'The Life of Brian'. It's a film I cannot wait to see.

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Thursday November 8, 1979

_. Out with Sarah at 12 to Da Mario's for a belated birthday nosh.  She was in a better frame of mind today. it is good to be seen out with Sarah walking around the town. Sarah in her finest furs. We do attract a few turned heads and envious glances because she is an imposing lady.

No buses, and so I got a train at 5:20 in pouring rain. Took a bath and went out with Lynn and Dave to Ally's at 7 for dinner. She dished up a splendid dinner of prawn cocktails, steak, strawberries, &c, and the wine flowed in usual abundance. We left at almost 2am. Lynn joked about 'Dave the Sailor' arriving tomorrow which wasn't well received.

Dave the sailor is from Devon, but an old friend of Ally's from Winchester. He contacted Ally a few weeks ago to say he was going on leave, and that he wanted to 'be smothered' in Yorkshire hospitality. Ally agreed to this without giving it too much thought. She's like that, isn't she? Dave is all very well propping up the bar in the Plough. He's quite manageable there, but is it right that he should be in Ally's house, just the two of them? Does the sailor have designs on the dear girl?

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Wednesday November 7, 1979

_. Sarah's 27th birthday. She refused to celebrate or be even remotely cheerful, but I gave a large card with a verse of my own composition. I can be quite poetic, you know.

Jennifer Myers, the wife of my cousin Derek [son of my mother's sister, Eleanor] gave birth to a son today. I believe the baby is to be called Oliver, but this has yet to be confirmed. Hardly an earth shattering event for me because my cousins, and half cousins number over fifty. My poor mother was a great-aunt at 28.

Adolf Hitler continues to provide great entertainment on these long, autumnal evenings. I don't despise the chap either, which is odd. No, I am no fascist or National Front supporter. Hitler may have been mad, but then so was the German population for tolerating him.

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Tuesday November 6, 1979

_. Back to the grindstone. In fact the YP is nothing short of a labour camp. One might as well emigrate to Czechoslovakia and lend support to the Charter 77 malarkey, because my working conditions are no better than those of your average commie dissident in a cheap eastern bloc republic.

No work seems to have been done in the office since I left for my weekend break on Friday lunchtime. I worked from 5pm. Poor Gilberto is having trouble with the news desk. Chris Oakley, for all his south American wanderings, is making rude and heated noises in high places re Gilberto's command of the Queen's English.

My taxi driver this evening was a deaf mute.

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Monday November 5, 1979

_. Took our leave of Chillandham Cross at about 11:30. Up to Oxford and then to Woodstock, where we had a couple of drinks in the empty pub there. Blenheim Palace is closed until March next year, not that we had time to inspect the Oxfordshire culture anyway. The northward journey saw a deterioration in the weather, and freezing rain pelted the car as we trundled along. We emerged from the car at Stratford-on-Avon to inspect the town. My first visit to the home town of the Bard since December, 1974, when I joined Dave L and his college cronies on a marathon pub crawl. We went round the town like Dickensian urchins staring into restaurants and breathing heavily on cake shop windows. Heading up the M1 at 6:30 we saw almost every bonfire north of Watford. Smoke drifted over the motorway.

Ally is a petal.

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