Crown had fallen out during the procession, and had been picked up by a Serjeant-Major.
‘Chips’ Channon
1996
Today there is much fuss about Harriet Harman, of the Shadow Cabinet, sending her 11-year-old son to St Olave’s School in what the media describe as ‘leafy Orpington’. Presumably it is not very leafy at this time of year. Part of the trouble is that the boy has to take an exam and face an interview. Without such things I can’t see how the school would know in what form to place him. Neither do I see why all the emphasis is put on Ms Harman’s decision; presumably her husband should have at least 50 per cent say in the matter, and perhaps Master Joseph may have his views on education.
Alec Guinness
24 January
1684
The frost still continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes in formal streetes, as in a Citty, or Continual faire, all sorts of Trades and shops furnished, and full of Commodities, even to a Printing presse, where the People and Ladys tooke a fansy to have their names Printed and the day and yeare set downe, when printed on the Thames: This humour tooke so universaly, that ’twas estimated the Printer gained five pound a day, for printing a line onely, at six-pence a Name, besides what he gott by Ballads etc: Coaches now plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from severall other staires too and froo, as in the streetes; also on sleds, sliding with skeetes; There was likewise, Bull-baiting, Horse and Coach races, Pupet-plays and interludes, Cookes and Tipling, and lewder places; so as it seem’d to be a bacchanalia, Triumph or Carnoval on the Water, whilest it was a severe Judgement upon the land: the Trees not only splitting as if lightning-strock, but Men and Cattell perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with yce, that no vessells could stirr out, or come in.
John Evelyn
1856
A journal is a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said. I am occasionally reminded of a statement which I have made in conversation and immediately forgotten, which would read much better than what I put in my journal. It is a ripe, dry fruit of long-past experience which falls from me easily, without giving pain or pleasure. The charm of the journal must consist in a certain greenness, though fresh, and not in maturity. Here I cannot afford to be remembering what I said or did, my scurf cast off, but what I am and aspire to become.
H. D. Thoreau
1938 [Nanking]
We’re all degenerating around here. We’re becoming spineless, losing our respectability. In Indiscreet Letters from Peking, a book about the siege of Peking in 1900, Putnam Wheale reports how he and many other Europeans simply joined in the looting. I don’t think we’re all that far from it ourselves. My houseboy Chang bought an electric table fan worth 38 dollars for $1.20 today, and expects me to be pleased. A couple of genuine Ming vases, costing one dollar each, gaze at me with reproach from my fireplace mantel.
If I felt like it, I could fill the entire house with cheap curios – meaning stolen and then sold for a song on the black market. Only food is expensive these days: A chicken now costs two dollars, the exact same price as those two Ming vases.
John Rabe
1942 [Jersey]
Things are depressing all the time. Almost every night, the Evening Post reports sudden deaths. It is very strange – lack of proper nourishment must be the cause. Then there are lots of ‘foreign’ workmen in the island, brought by the Germans. These are half-starved, and half-clothed, and reported to have strange and dangerous diseases. However, we have all had a ration of a quarter pound of chocolate each this week. It was wonderful – chocolate!
Nan Le Ruez
1953
There are two kinds of men on tubes. Those who blow their noses and then examine the results in a handkerchief, and those who blow their noses without exhibiting any such curiosity, and simply replace the handkerchief in the pocket. I, generally, come under the first category.
Kenneth Williams
1996
The car taking me to Moorfields wriggled its way through tiny, twisted City streets which were almost deserted; a few thin clerks with blue noses hunched themselves against the bitter wind, walking stiffly and alone, like the black matchstick figures in a Lowry industrial townscape. The women to be seen were, for the most part, dressed as Paddington Bear. It is a pleasing hat but the face peeping from underneath it should be under thirty. The car slid past St Paul’s Cathedral which somehow looked smaller than usual and rather drab. Elizabeth Frink’s sheep, nearby, are being driven by their shepherd, as was pointed out to me a few years ago, and not following him as the Bible recommends. Things are out of joint.
Alec Guinness
25 January
1851
I’ve fallen in love or imagine that I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.
Leo Tolstoy
1885
Daudet spoke of the first years of his married life. He told me that his wife did not know that there was such a thing as a pawnshop; and once she had been enlightened, she would never refer to it by name but would ask him: ‘Have you been there?’ The delightful thing about it all is that this girl who had been brought up in such a middle-class way of life was not at all dismayed by this new existence among people scrounging dinners, cadging twenty-franc pieces, and borrowing pairs of trousers.
‘You know,’ said Daudet, ‘the dear little thing spent nothing, absolutely nothing on herself. We have still got the little account books we kept at that time, in which, beside twenty francs taken by myself or someone else, the only entry for her, occurring here and there, now and then, is Omnibus, 30 centimes.’ Mme Daudet interrupted him to say ingenuously: ‘I don’t think that I was really mature at that time: I didn’t understand . . .’ My own opinion is rather that she had the trustfulness of people who are happy and in love, the certainty that everything will turn out all right in the end.
The Brothers Goncourt
1936
My younger daughter managed to get through Downing Street and so had a very good view of the procession as it came down Whitehall from the station on its way to Westminster Hall for the Lying in State. She told me that she had never seen anyone look so ill or as unhappy as the Prince of Wales looked that day. He was evidently going through the most fearful mental and physical anguish. And I heard from someone else that in Trafalgar Square they were afraid he would not be able to go on to the very end.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
1940
Chaplin got on to the subject of the Duke of Windsor, whom he met several times during a trip to Europe. Windsor was then the Prince of Wales. His first question was, ‘How old are you?’ He wanted to know what Chaplin had done in the 1914 war – and when Chaplin told him, ‘Nothing,’ there was a frosty silence. Then Chaplin asked him how many
