House Arrest by Alan Bennett

Author:Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

With its innocent delight in little girls – these were Kilvert’s nieces – it’s a characteristic passage from the young Victorian clergyman’s diaries. But unless the street numbers have changed, 23 Gloucester Crescent is my sometime house, and the home too of the Lady in the Van, who wouldn’t have liked the children at all.

Mark Bostridge tells me that Kilvert must have been visiting his younger sister Emily (Wyndowe) and her family. It’s nice to think that Kilvert once called at the house. He joins a list of visitors that includes

Barbra Streisand

Kenneth Williams

John Gielgud

Vincent Price

Morrissey

To which can now be added the name of the Reverend Francis Kilvert.

2 December A litotic temperament – seeing the positive in a negative way, ‘Not bad.’

3 December Reading and hugely enjoying Ferdy Mount’s Kiss Myself Goodbye (even surviving a chapter on motor racing).

Also bucked to find myself mentioned approvingly in Shaun Bythell’s stocking-filler of a book about the characters (complaining, whistling, farting) who infest second-hand bookshops. And not as a complainer, farter or whistler either.

9 December I’m sorry that this year’s diary dwells so much on my physical incapacity. Farewell to the bike has to some extent meant farewell to the health that went with it, and my life is increasingly medicated. I am blessed in my passage through the therapeutic jungle by Louise, who’s an ideal pharmacist, cheerful, funny and unbegrudging. It’s a busy pharmacy in Camden Town, with its quota of recovering addicts and ancients like myself, to whom Louise dispenses not merely medicaments but much-needed good cheer. I’m happy to acknowledge the part she plays in my well-being. I must cost the NHS a fortune, and I’m glad that through Talking Heads we were able to repay some of that, if only a little. Johnson never fails to call it ‘our NHS’, though this offers no assurance that he won’t sell it off, but one hopes that now he’s lost his chum across the water there may be less of that.

15 December There were those in 1914 who believed that war was just what was needed – as a cleanser and a salutary shock. England would be the better for it. As we wait for the result of the final Brexit talks, the heirs of these fools are still with us.

24 December In the late afternoon we watch Carols from King’s, which isn’t the customary Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. It may be that the BBC, or even King’s, has got nervous about overdoing religion. The service has a dramatic shape, beginning with Isaiah and ending with the Nativity and St John. Now, or today anyway, no nine lessons but an anthology of devotional stuff, well meant but telling no tale. Christmas is a time for repetition – the repetition part of the ritual. The congregation isn’t bored with Christmas, only the programme-makers.

31 December My year ends when Rupert takes me up to one of the health centres in Camden, which has been kitted out as a vaccination centre. Though neither

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