Last Man Standing

The London Review of Books keeps trying to get me to take out a subscription- and to do so it drops me crumbs- and among these crumbs today is the now traditional extract from Alan Bennett's Diary for the year that's coming to an end- Bennett being one of Eng Lits great diarists (with it seeming not at all unlikely that the Diary will outlast everything else he's written.) It comes with a recent photograph of him enjoying afternoon tea with Jonathan Miller- Miller looking cadaverous as is not surprising really, but also irritably quizzical. Bennett is now the last surviving member of the pre-fab quartet who shook up the culture with Beyond the Fringe.

The final entry in the LRB's digest is for Dec 13 and relates to the election- "It's a gang not a government. Sure, he smells- but you can get used to anything"

Hampstead Heath

I've been reading and hearing about Hampstead Heath all my life; John Constable painted it, Coleridge tramped across it, Mr Pickwick researched and delivered a paper on the sources of its ponds- but I'd never been there before yesterday.

And all we had to do was go out Becky's front gate, turn left, turn left again, turn right- and we were there. It's less wild than I thought it would be- less dark and alternative- in fact no more remarkable than any other big city park. We walked past a couple of the ponds and saw, off to our left, the hill where people in the movies go to gaze out over London. There were lots of dog walkers on the paths- many in large family groups- as we were. I was wearing my multicoloured holiday jacket, my pink trousers and my new Peaky Blinders cap (Thank you Joe and Victoria!). I turned heads. People wondered if I was some kind of performance artist- or so I was told afterwards. I wasn't noticing. I was too busy running through the mud to admire the ponds and take pictures.