DIARY
JILLY COOPER My idea of hell is judging the fancy dress at the Bisley Flower Show. I cannot bear to see those little black-corked upper lips trembling. Happily this year there are enough prizes to go round. The winner, little Lord Erleigh, comes stylishly smoth- ered in leaves and twigs as a bonfire. Per- haps he's been reading Tom Wolfe. Wolves seem to be the only animal not represented in the next class. Like some guest at a fin- ger buffet, Barbara our dog drifts round the ring idly inspecting hamsters, kittens and baby rabbits. But why do the men in the crowd lean over the rope to stroke and lionise a large rat nestling in the cleavage of a pretty teenager, when they'd jump shrieking on to the kitchen table if it dropped in unannounced at home? The rat, after much lobbying, wins second prize. The flower show is always full of incident. Two years ago my friend Anna found a vibrator on the bric-a-brac stall with an out- of-order card propped against it. The year before, my secretary's husband, who had just moved into the village, got so tanked up in the pub beforehand that he mistook the show-tent for a wedding reception and, witnessed by flabbergasted exhibitors, solemnly ate his way through prize-winning jam tarts, quiches and chocolate cakes, until a 90-year-old parish worker, incensed he had started on her best-in-show elder- flower wine, sharply told him to 'piss off.
Isat next to a delightful caterer at a polo match who told me he used to do state din- ners at Downing Street and that Mrs Thatcher's passionate involvement at all levels inspired his staff. The emphasis was on plain food perfectly cooked. Mrs Thatcher's secret was to refuse second helpings of this wonderful grub, but press them on her guests. Then, when their mouths were full, she could belabour what- ever point she wanted to make uninterrupt- ed. She only appeared fazed once, when President Reagan stirred his coffee with a gold fountain pen. But as a waitress shot forward with a teaspoon on a tray, Reagan foxily revealed the pen was a container for sweeteners.
When I first interviewed Mrs Thatch- c2.i. in 1976, a photograph had just appeared in the papers of Denis's first wife. 'My dear,' Mrs Thatcher told me, 'I was amazed how like me she was.' Not only had she never before seen a photo of the first wife, but, not wanting to hurt Denis, had never questioned him about her, which shows staggering self-restraint. Today, ripped untimely from the seat of power, Mrs Thatcher is behaving exactly like a first wife who cannot stop telling the second wife and everyone else how the electorate like creas- es in the front of their boxer-shorts and their broccoli al dente. But in Mrs Thatch- er's case, the electorate didn't have a chance to 'stand by her', as the Sun would call it, before a second marriage had been arranged.
One thing I miss in the country is our old London daily. When she heard our Gloucestershire house was haunted, she uttered the immortal line, 'You'll have to get the vicar in to circumcise it.' Recently she rang to say she'd got a job in a convent: `I don't know what those nuns get up to, I'm sure, but I expect they're all Eliza- bethans.' She was also full of chat about some people who had moved in near our old house, 'They've got one of them round jujitsu baths, and they've built on a new conservative, but it's leaking already.'
Icannot help feeling that for young peo- ple with even remotely solvent parents, the recession is God-given. Spurred on by Leo's grumbling about my pouring money down the drones, I gently suggest my daughter might get a job. 'Oh no, Mum, I'm far too busy planning a little holiday.' `You could go on the dole.' God no, they might find me a job.' And now both chil- dren are at home bringing great joy, but making work rather than getting it. Wash- ing topples over in a tidal wave, every bed- room is occupied by unidentified couples, the telephone rings continually. Seldom in for supper, they return and pig out at mid- night. Next morning, teaspoons rise like Tuscany cypresses from the last centimetre of lasagna. Brie goudged out to the rind leers like a crocodile at topless Hellmans and half-eaten tins of tuna already flecked with flies' eggs. Every wireless is tuned to Radio 1, so the first five minutes of every prom is lost as I fumble for Radio 3. My children aren't wild about classical music. `Very Inspector Morse,' says Felix kindly as I listen to a Mozart violin concerto. Pavarot- ti, however, counts as pop and nightly reverberates sforzando down the valley. Surveying a terrace littered with cigarette butts and beer cans, Leo says they appear to have translated it None Shall Sweep.
As queers make such delightful friends for women, and my new bank, Coutts, is being so wonderful to me, is this where the expression, 'queer as a Coutt' comes from? It hath been otherwise. One of the likely reasons why Coutts is being wonderful to me is because my account is miraculously in the black, and banks are ever April when they woo and December when you're in the red. What I detest is the hypocrisy. They never show small businessmen being slowly roasted on a spit in the telly commercials. An impoverished student friend seduced by the cosiness of these ads, trotted off to talk finance with his bank manager, and for a half-hour chat was charged £60. But my heart aches most for people having their houses repossessed. Bank managers, being mostly men and getting preferential mort- gage rates anyway, have no idea of the anguish even a threat of losing their nests causes women. Shortly after we moved to Gloucestershire, one high-flying bank man- ager brought his mistress down to case the joint. After a weekend of lavish hospitality, with a brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other, he sat back on the terrace examining the 13th-century brickwork, and sighed, `Lovely old property, pity you're going to lose it, and don't think your dirty book (Riders) can save you.'
The next week we took our overdrafts to Lloyds who also suggested, when our mar- riage ran into trouble, that we sell the house and buy a place where we could be together seven nights a week out of tempta- tion's way. 'How about a maisonette in Stroud?' urged the manager, then seeing me whiten near to death, 'Don't you want to save your marriage?' Not that much,' I said despondently. Perhaps I should have stuck with the man from Lloyds and written a Booker Prize-winning novel called Re- possession. Instead I moved to Coutts and everything got better .
Sadly, lovely old properties have unlovely old plumbing systems. Half Leo's authors are recovering from prostate oper- ations, and this morning the ancient pump bringing our water off the hill conked out. Our only supply of water is from the pond. Finding a dead tadpole in my tea, feel I must keep a sense of proportion and that this is definitely a worse tragedy for the tadpole. Thank God we're off to Provence tomorrow for some proper frog water.
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