Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 25

Alfred Wainwright died today, in 1991. He wasted a lifetime on walking, but still never managed to get beyond the Lake District.

V.S. NAIPAUL

Whatever happened to fun? In the heady, far-off days of my youth, we certainly knew how to have fun! My grandmother, Edith, the seventh Marchioness of Londonderry, taught me how! She had always been intent on injecting gaiety into life!

Her charmed circle would gossip like mad, play silly games, flirt with each other, tell outrageous jokes, widdle down the stairwell, and drink copious quantities of the delicious pre-war Londonderry champagne!

She even enjoyed a close friendship with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald! ‘He was an old-fashioned socialist,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘He loved beautiful things, gorgeous pageantry, fine silverware, dressing up in resplendent uniforms, being waited on hand and foot, and taking the cream of the British aristocracy up the botty!’

Throughout my life, we couldn’t have had half so much fun without our full complement of servants, all of them the most tremendous characters!

The marvellous thing was how much they respected us! I’ll never forget what the inimitable Mr Chambers, Daddy’s bathroom butler, said after vigorously wiping Daddy’s behind after he had experienced a particularly severe dose of diarrhoea! He said, ‘It’s come up beautiful, sir – and may I add what a pleasure and a privilege it has been for me to attend to you today!’

Sadly, Mr Chambers shot himself the next day. It could have been the most frightful blow, but thankfully the vacancy was soon filled!

LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH

Cut a hole in a bedsheet. Put your head through it. Step into a washing machine. Ask your friend to switch it on. Watch the world spin round and round. Step out of the machine. Your bedsheet will still have a hole. Ask your maid to repair it. You are an artist. Yoko loves you.

YOKO ONO