History is just one fucking thing after another

I was slightly confused recently to spot some Alan Bennett CDs in the window of a local shop. The store is the Bengali equivalent of a 99p shop. I know this because underneath the elegant Bangla script on the painted sign across the shop front, it says in much smaller letters “99p shop”. Most of the merchandise seems to be household goods - cheap kitchen roll, stacks of scouring sponges, cut-price 2 litre bottles of pop which all look like they would glow in the dark. Anything purchased is handed to the customer in a blue carrier bag, which might as well have been made of wet stressed tissue paper. And the clientele are exactly as you would expect in such a store. Minging. So what the hell are they doing selling Alan Bennett CDs?

Bennett wrote up a very entertaining diary of his year in the Times Literary Supplement in January. Here are a couple of entries…

April 22nd
An absurd direction from the ENO management requesting all employees at the Coliseum to cease from calling each ‘darling’ and indeed from touching one another at all or using other terms of endearment.

News of this is gleefully received at the National Theatre where copies of the directive are given to everybody arriving at the stage door and announcements over the tannoy take on a husky intimacy. ‘Sweethearts. Could we have two of those delightful electricians to the stage of the Cottesloe. Hurry, hurry, hurry. A bientot.’

October 11th
Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the manuscript of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are about to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in manuscript and the rest as printed in the London Review of Books. Opening the box Andrew remarks that it’s a long time since he’s seen one of these, manuscripts nowadays generally coming in the form of a floppy disc. For my part I hope they don’t notice the smear of jam on the box, the odd grease spot and even the faint odour of milk, a consequence of the manuscript being put regularly in the fridge for safekeeping whenever we go away. I used to keep my manuscripts in boxes on the floor of the kitchen but about twenty years or so ago I had a burst boiler which flooded the kitchen and ruined half of them. I told Miss Shepherd, then living in her van, of this disaster. 'Oh dear,' she said mustering what she could in the way of fellow-feeling. 'What a waste of water.'