happened on this day. It is a blank. At the end of my life I may want it, may long to have it. There was a new moon: that I remember. But who came or what I did – all is lost. It’s just a day missed, a day crossing the line.
Katherine Mansfield
1932 [France]
Alarming rumours are going about; country people are getting worried; tradesmen cannot get payment . . .
‘Is it true what they say, that we are going to have war again?’
Three times in the last four days this question has been asked of Em. [his wife], who hastens to reassure as best she can.
‘No country is in a state to make war today,’ she replies.
‘But then why have matches gone up two sous?’
André Gide
1975
Yesterday I had three letters from three friends, so different in every way that it was startling to find the same problem making for depression. One is a young married woman with two small children and a husband who is a company man. She feels shut out by his work, resents his cavalier way of bringing ‘friends’, meaning clients, home without warning, but especially their lack of communication because there is never time. He is also away a lot on business. The second is a friend whose husband retired recently; on his retirement they moved away from the town where they had always lived to be near the ocean. He is at a loose end and she feels caught, angry and depressed without being able to define why. The third is a woman professor, quite young, who lives happily with a woman colleague but speaks of her ‘bone loneliness.’
‘Loneliness’ for me is associated with love relationships. We are lonely when there is not perfect communion. In solitude one can achieve a good relationship with oneself. It struck me forcibly that I could never speak of ‘bone loneliness’ now, though I have certainly experienced it when I was in love. And I feel sure that poignant phrase would have described my mother often.
May Sarton
1978
At Temple Meads Station in Bristol waiting for the late train back to London, I went to the buffet on the platform and bought a sandwich, a Fry’s chocolate bar, some Wrigley’s spearmint gum and an apple. I was about to pay when an old man in a raincoat pushed forward and thrust a pound note at the girl. I thought he was trying to get ahead of me and I was going to say, ‘Excuse me’, but it turned out that he was paying for my food, which came to 54 pence. He turned to me and said, ‘I know you, I know who you are,’ left the money and disappeared. I did not know what to do, but thought it was very touching.
Tony Benn
1986 [New York]
Friends of Alan’s [Parker] invite us to dinner at an Italian restaurant called La Primavera, which they are trying out for the first time. More like La Prima Donnas. Hair in here is a real ‘do’, faces taut, diamonds sharp, toupées fixed and ties sapphire-pinned. New money, old flesh. Child-sized pasta portions clock in at thirty dollars. Talk is all deals and dollars and dumping money here to dough it up there. The artistic endeavour of making movies is relegated to a corner of minor irritation and inconvenience. Yet it seems everyone wants to know the stars. Meanwhile Alan is getting major attention from everyone in the place – maître d’, waiters, other guests, and we cannot work out why. Until the owner ‘compliments’ him with ‘You have lost so much weight Mr Kissinger.’ We were taken aback long enough not to dispel the mistake and settled back for the five-star service, laughing all the way through complimentary dessert and liqueurs. Must be these new glasses.
Richard E. Grant
29 January
1660
Spent the afternoon in casting up my accounts, and do find myself to be worth £40 or more, which I did not think, but am afraid that I have forgot something.
Samuel Pepys
1837
Had a Lady to dinner here today. The Lady’s maid is taken very sick today: I sopose she has been eating too much or something of the kind. But she is very subject to sickness. Last summer, when we were coming home from Canterbury, she actually spewed all the way, a distance of sixty miles and not less time than eight hours. The people stared as we passed through the towns and villages as she couldent stop even then. It amused me very much to see how the country people stood stareing with their mouthes half open and half shut to see her pumping over the side of the carriage and me sitting by, quite unconserned, gnawing a piece of cake or some sandwiches or something or other, as her sickness did not spoil my apatite. It was very bad for her but I couldent do her any good as it was the motion of the carriage that caused her illness. I gave her something to drink every time we changed horses but no sooner than it was down it came up again, and so the road from Canterbury to London was pretty well perfumed with Brandy, Rum, Shrub, wine and such stuff. She very soon recovered after she got home and was all the better for it after. It’s eleven o’clock. My fire is out and I am off to bed.
William Tayler
1860
Saw Barriere who told us this striking anecdote. On the Place de Grève he had seen a condemned man whose hair had visibly stood on end when he had been turned to face the scaffold. Yet this was the man who, when Dr. Pariset had asked him what he wanted before he died, had answered: ‘A leg of mutton and a woman.’
The Brothers Goncourt
1950
A lovely, remote time at Murphys’. They spoke of Elsa Maxwell and how she raised money for Russian Ambulance in World War 1, absconded with money, then returned to social success after three years. How a friend, Lily Havemeyer, had a caller who brought Miss Maxwell to lunch. Elsa looked over the place – marvelous for party – said to Lily (first meeting) ‘You go shopping for the day and leave me your servants, your house and carte blanche and at night you will find yourself with a party all Paris will talk about.’ ‘No’ was all Lily said.
Dawn Powell
1969
At Lindy Dufferin’s party for Duncan Grant I’d chatted to David Hockney and suggested what a marvellous subject Fred Ashton would make for him. At the time Fred was perching on the arms of a sofa with his fingers exquisitely arranged – the only word for it – around a cigarette. From afar en profile he looked like some exotic parakeet. David was clearly excited by the possibility. At the time he was drawing W. H. Auden so I thought that I ought to go and look.
Number 17 Powis Terrace is one of those late-Victorian stucco terraces in Notting Hill Gate with a vast columned portico and every sign that gentility had long since fled. The houses were now tatty tenements and I climbed up what can only be described as a squalid staircase-well to be met by David. Original is the only word one could ever apply to him with his bleached blond hair and owl spectacles. But I couldn’t help loving him and admiring his quick logic and unique perception. He’s rather large and square, getting fat in fact, and somehow terribly conscious of it. The whole time I was there he kept on feeling beneath his shirt as though checking up on the expansion of the wodges. We sat down in his kitchen together with his slim blond American boy-friend Peter Schlesinger, and lunched off consommé, toast and
