DIARY
ROBERT HARRIS 0 . ne of the great advantages of being a writer, it's always said, is that you can live anywhere. As my wife and I have two chil- dren under the age of four, we decided last year that it was ridiculous to go on living in dirty, noisy, crime-infested Notting Hill. Instead, we would do what all our friends only talk of doing. We would move to the country. Accordingly, our home is now a Victorian Gothic rectory in Berkshire, on the banks of the Kennet and Avon Canal. Glancing out of my idyllic study window at my idyllic river view last Friday, I was star- tled to see a bright orange oxygen cylinder float by, followed by a pair of black rubber flippers. A team of police frogmen were searching the canal. It turned out that the Village video store (that traditional rural amenity) had been held up by two armed teenagers who had then fled past our house and hurled their gun into the water. Now, Notting Hill Gate, as you can imagine, has a pretty low reputation among the good burghers of Berkshire, but in 15 years of living in London I never once came this close to violent crime — a fact I have been smugly pointing out to our new neighbours.
Igrew up in a village in Leicestershire so I am not a complete urban junkie. I had some idea of what I was letting myself in for. Indeed, in many respects, the quality of rural living has improved out of all recogni- tion over the past decade. There are better wine merchants in Hungerford, for exam- ple, and even in our next-door village, than I ever discovered in W11. There is a good delicatessen. There is a cinema complex With ten screens at Swindon — only about 25 minutes away, as long as one is willing to drive like a junior member of the royal family — and another at Basingstoke. (This may not sound much to you, dear reader, but it's life and death to us.) What you can- not obtain, curiously, is a good range of magazines and books. The Spectator is on sale everywhere, but you would have to drive a good 30 miles to find, say, the Lon- don Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review or the New Statesman, And even when one finds them, most of the books reviewed in their pages turn out to be similarly unobtainable. Natu- rally, you can order them — I ordered Lionel Davidson's riveting new thriller, 1(041nsky Heights, from the bookshop in Newbury last week, and it arrived the fol- lowing day — but it isn't the same as brows- ing. If I had to make a list of what I missed most about London the first two items would be Waterstone's in Notting Hill Gate and Waterstone's in Kensington High Street. There are, though, some good sec- ond-hand bookshops locally. One success- ful dealer and collector who lives in our vii- lage recently put me in my place very smartly. What, I asked him, was the book he was most proud of owning? 'A first edi- tion of Thomas More's Utopia,' he replied, coolly. 'There are only a dozen in exis- tence.'
Of course, it is just possible that living in the country has driven me mad. Hurrying through the baggage reclaim area at Termi- nal 4 the other week, I bumped into an old colleague from the BBC, a man I hadn't seen for ten years. We introduced our respective spouses. 'And this is my wife, Elizabeth,' I said, at which my wife gave me a peculiar look — as well she might, as her name is Gill. Now I come to think of it, I can't really blame this kind of mental short- circuit on rural living. A few years ago in London we had dinner at the home of some friends. The other guests were Charles Wheeler and his wife. We passed a very pleasant evening, at the end of which Mrs Wheeler shook my hand politely and said, 'Goodbye,' to which I responded, equally politely, 'Hello.'
'Berlusconi promises the best government money can buy.' One consequence of the curious death of Stephen Milligan has been to make me doubt, for the first time in a quarter of a century, the quality and completeness of my sex education. I thought I had learned it all by the age of 12 in a comprehensive school playground, but obviously a detailed knowledge of 'scarfing', like a grounding in Latin irregular verbs, is one of those bene- fits only bestowed by a good private school. To cover the shenanigans of the Conserva- tive Party these days one not only requires Nicholas Comfort's Guide to Political Phrase and Fable, but also his father Alex's More Joy of Sex. How hypocritical it was of John Patten, the Education Secretary, to scuttle around last week like a Victorian maiden aunt merely because some nurse at a primary school in Leeds, in response to a pupil's question, had given a blow-by-blow account of oral sex. Mr Patten should be glad that at least it was a question the poor woman could answer, and not about some perversion being practised on the govern- ment benches.
While we're on the subject of Mr Patten, I thought his article published in these pages two weeks ago ('Bitter, boring or bemused') was one of the rummest pieces of journalism I've read for some time. Pur- porting to be a brave, even reckless, attack on political pundits (a richly deserving tar- get) it actually turned out to be an extend- ed exercise in creeping and crawling. True, Mr Patten was cautiously rude about four non-Conservative journalists (Hugo Young, Joe Rogaly, Peter Kellner and Edward Pearce) but then proceeded to be unctu- ously smarmy to no fewer than 16, each in a position to help his flagging career, whom he variously described as 'perceptive' and 'demigods'. Here was the fearless Patten on Bill Deedes ('extraordinary and marvel- lous'), on Peregrine Worsthorne ('writing more splendidly than ever'), Simon Jenkins ('going through a splendid renaissance') Peter Riddell ('Reithian standards'), Paul Johnson Chas written so well on Christiani- ty and other matters, he might have left political journalism for pure scholarship long ago') . . On and on it went, this planting of little love-notes to the Fourth Estate. 'I no longer much care what anyone writes about me,' Mr Patten insisted. Oh yeah? A 4:1 ratio of crawling to criticism suggests the contrary. But let us be charita- ble. Let us assume he really doesn't mind what anyone says of him. In that case he won't object if I observe that he is a grovel- ling, cringing, truckling, bumsucking, backscratching, bootlicking, fawning, syco- phantic, ingratiating, toadying, creeping Jesus, who should be removed from office at the first opportunity.
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