From Pearls in Vinegar, 2004:

David Hockney is marching through London with the Countryside Alliance, not in favour of fox hunting per se but because he’s a libertarian. His placard reads “End Bossiness Now.” But it seems too abrupt, even un-British. So he changes his slogan to “End Bossiness Soon.”

Alan Bennett writes a short story sympathetic to a pedophilic character just out of prison who gets a maintenance job in the public gardens and attacks a little girl, a flirtatious little girl, as he and Bennett would put it. Is there anyone Bennett doesn’t like? I suspect he saw something nasty in the woodshed when he was a child, and as he writes in the London Review of Books many years later, he did. In real life, the man’s pursuit of little Alan was terrifying, at least to the reader. Bennett’s fictional response is mystifying. Is this what they mean by the Dunkirk spirit, the boy managing to escape in his little boat while French Jewish children perished?

Auberon Waugh plays down his frequent childhood experience of being whipped with a cane on his naked buttocks by a teacher who is sexually aroused by the evident pain. “I cannot find it in my heart to grudge him such little consolations,” he writes. He feels he must be British about it, but he simply seems insane.

On the other hand, Waugh writes that his mother might have been happier if she’d married someone other than his father. “But I am not really all that sure how happy anyone’s life is, when one comes to examine it.” His claim that being tortured as a child never affected him must be untrue. I’ll speak bollocks here, he must think, as readers expect it of me.

101. People I Admire

The American playwright and essayist Jean Kerr who died in 2002 of old age was in the S.J. Perelman class. She was one of the funniest women in print, but like Erma Bombeck who wrote brilliantly about family life, she never got the credit she deserved. She once wrote of the woman she most admired, a woman she overheard saying gently to her little boy on a hot day “Mummy doesn’t like you to ride your bike into the piano.” I took her point. That would have been the woman I most admired too.

102. People Who Suffer

Years ago I read this, somewhere long forgotten. “I heard a man talking to an inquisitive woman at a dinner party in London: ‘Please don’t ask,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t have anything interesting to tell you. I’ve made a terrible mess of my life.’ Six months later he killed himself.”

It’s the softly that drives it.

Leonard Woolf says in his diaries that he doesn’t believe in being happy. But do I really have to give up my artful scheme of happiness just because the monkish Leonard says so? Do I really have to forget that flood of delight, Clarissa Dalloway-like, when I stood on Oxford Street perfectly alone in a foreign city, and said “No one knows me here”? And that moment of exhilaration in that pub behind Liberty, that private moment of unjustified elation that struck without warning. And when I marched down the alley of trees in Kew towards the pagoda, never had I felt such expansion in my heart. But Leonard Woolf says no.