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Alan Bennett |
Perhaps if Alan tried giving the gulls a friendly smile...
AS I’m a pretty reticent fellow I do my best to walk past Alan Bennett whenever I see near my offices in Camden Town without acknowledging him in any way.
Poor chap, he has such a well-known face that he deserves a bit of peace without everyone smiling at him.
But in his diary in the current edition of the London Review of Books he writes of one day when everyone gave him a smile.
He writes: “Bike over to Gloucester Crescent and leave the bike there while I walk round to M&S. People often smile at me but this afternoon nearly everyone smiles. It’s only when I come back to Parkway to have my hair cut that I realise I’m still wearing my crash helmet.”
There are other little gems in his diary such as how he represses his “natural inclination” to smile whenever he rides past two bored armed policemen guarding the Primrose Hill home of the foreign secretary, David Miliband.
“I never do (smile),” he writes, “because though I know they’re bored and it’s not their fault, I feel to smile condones a state of affairs (and a foreign policy) which necessitates ministers of the crown being under guard.”
In an entry for July 23 he makes it clear that like Joan Bakewell, almost a neighbour in Primrose Hill, seagulls drive him mad. He describes how he was pushing his bike through the Gloucester Crescent gate when a heron “flaps up from the creeper on top of the pergola. It flies down the street getting all the seagulls agitated, and when I come out five minutes later the gulls are still making a din.
“The bird, having hidden round the corner, now takes off again and flies to No 62 and perches on the fanlight above the door... I fetch a neighbour to see it and we watch it for a while, but the heron obviously feels this is getting a bit too what cameramen call clubby, and takes off again up the Crescent where we (and I hope the gulls) lose sight of it...
“It confirms too my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground.”
Now, now Alan, you’re going over the top a bit – I like the sight and sounds of seagulls. They remind me of the waves crashing against beaches and cliffs and memories I don’t want to lose!
Lydia’s extraordinary Keynesian conversion
NOW that Keynesian economics are back in vogue, perhaps 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury will feature again in the economists groupies’ itinerary and enjoy the same sort of attention that Karl Marx’s tomb gets up the road in Highgate Cemetery.
John Maynard Keynes lived at the Gordon Square house for 30 years and wrote his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in it – getting down on paper the ideas that shapedpost-war global economics.
But if that’s not interesting enough, we must never forget his wife, the extraordinary Lydia Lopokova, who also lived at the house – much to the chagrin of the more snobbish elements of the Bloomsbury Set, of which Keynes was a member.
They were horrified that Keynes – an avowed homosexual since the age of 16 – should fall in love with “a half-witted canary” as Lytton Strachey called Lydia.
She was in fact a ballerina whose extravagant stage antics had earned her cult status and a special place in the hearts of British audiences.
When her knickers “accidentally” slipped down as she danced the lead in Les Sylphides, she joyously threw them into the wings much to everybody’s delight.
Her take on economists was not flattering: “no touch with life, inferiority complexes and no great ideas”.
But she was eloquent in her praise of Keynes’s General Theory: “beautiful like Bach,” she called it.
And her appreciation of Keynes’s remarkable easy transition to heterosexual rumpy-pumpy is well chronicled in a recent biography of Lydia: The Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25).
It’s going to be out in paperback in April, and while it may not change the world as The General Theory did, it’s a cracking good read.
Obama’s speech was poetry, in Motion’s view
I CAUGHT up with politics Professor John Keane and quizzed the academic on his views of Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday.
John, who lives in Kentish Town, wrote a marvellous biography of Tom Paine and I was curious to see what he thought of the presidential address, which quoted the 18th-century philosopher.
He told me that in the past 20 years Paine had been quoted by the American Right and he was pleased to see Tom reclaimed by the Left.
John told me: “When Obama said ‘Let it be told to the future world... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at a common danger, came forth to meet,’ he was quoting from a text Paine wrote called Crisis Number One, which included the phrase ‘these are the times that try men’s souls’.
“It was written just before Christmas in 1776 and the context was that Philadelphia was about to be taken by the British.”
Crisis Number One was read to American troops before they went into battle.
“It was a moving moment,” said John.
Meanwhile, champagne corks popped in Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s Camden Town home as he hunkered down to watch the events unfold.
As we spoke, Andrew told me he was chilling a bottle of bubbly in anticipation of the moment George W Bush hands over the White House keys – and was particularly interested in the new man’s speech.
“Barack Obama has this remarkable ability to write as if he were writing poetry,” Andrew told me.
“I like listening to him speak. It is an extraordinary reminder of the power of rhetoric.”
While Belsize Park-based musician John Williams provided a specially composed piece to be played by a string orchestra before Obama made his first speech as President, I hear there will be no poem written by Andrew to mark the event.
“I’d feel impertinent writing about it – it is more for the Americans to do so,” Andrew said.
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