A Life in the Day by Hunter Davies

Author:Hunter Davies [Davies, Hunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

15

NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT

And then I became a publisher. Among other things.

Being a publisher was one of several new projects and amusements I first took on in the 1980s. I suppose I could have bought a fast car, moved to a posh house in Hampstead, started a proper property company, or even bought some decent clothes, the sort of supposedly modern gear I often acquired in the sixties, but I didn’t fancy any of that.

I gave up my regular Sunday Times work around 1980, the one I had been doing roughly six months of each year during the seventies, and soon hankered after doing something else, now and again, instead of just sitting at my desk writing books.

When I finished on the Sunday Times Magazine, I was so relieved not to have to go to an office ever again, not to have to waste all that time travelling, listening to people chuntering on, moaning about their secretary, their expenses, the size of their office, their dopey ideas for an amazing story which would mean them flying to Cuba this very afternoon.

But after a few months at home, writing away every day, all on my own, I began to realise there was one thing I missed – lunch.

I was moaning on about this when Margaret said why not organise your own lunches? I had already organised my own football team, Dartmouth Park United, which played only a few hundred yards away on the Heath, at a time of my convenience, with me as captain, picking my own team. I think they allowed me to score all the goals as well.

I sat down and in thirty minutes had made a list of forty writers I either knew or knew of who lived within two miles, all of whom were working from home and probably, like me, interested in a regular lunch with fellow hacks, at which we could rubbish agents and publishers.

Only two out of the forty said definitely no. One was A. J. P. Taylor, the eminent historian, who lived two streets away. He said if I was organising a regular dinner, he would come, but he no longer ate lunch. David Cornwell (John le Carré) said he would rather meet his fellow writers in the next world, not this world.

I booked a room in a cheapo Greek restaurant at Camden Town, near the Tube, which I thought would be handy for most people. The idea was that once invited, you were invited forever, on the last Wednesday of every month, even if you never showed up for months or even years. And you could bring another writer.

The first lunch, on 30 March 1983, was packed, with lots of drinking and shouting and eating. Those attending included Margaret Drabble, Joan Bakewell, Kingsley Amis, Eva Figes, John Hillaby. Later writers who attended included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie. One of the visiting writers was Jessica Mitford, over from the USA.

After the first lunch, I got a distraught phone call from a

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