The Lost Diaries. Craig Brown

then the fire will die and dying be dead. Nor will the water boil and the pasta will drain dry and not cooked and hard to the teeth.

      The salt falls nor does it cease to fall.

      The water boils. So be it.

      Cease from placing your hand in the boiling water. Place your hand in the boiling water and it will cause you pain.

      Much pain?

      Very much pain.

      In the pot the bubbles bubble up and bubble some more. The bubbles are bubbly. Never more bubbly bubbles bubbling bubbliest. And having bubbled the bubbles still bubbly.

      Or bubblier?

      Or bubblier.

      Across the kitchen a board intended for chopping. Here. Take it. Chop.

      What will I chop? There are no ingredients to chop.

      Just chop. Don’t cease from chopping. To chop is to become a man.

      After ten minutes. The pasta stiff and dry and upright no more. The pasta lank and wet and soft. In the eternal damp of water.

      Pour water free like some ancient anointing. The pasta left alone in the pot. Alone and naked.

      The salt. Where’s the salt?

      The salt is gone. Lost to the water and gone forever.

      I grieve for the salt.

      It is the salt for which I grieve.

      Tip the pasta out.

      The pasta?

      Yes. Tip it out. Onto.

      A plate?

      Yes. And stop.

      Finishing your sentences?

      Yes.

      Why?

      Because it is so.

      Irritating?

       CORMAC McCARTHY

      Darling Debo,

      Could you bear to cast your bejewell’d eye o’er this weary traveller’s joyous twitterings?

      Day 1. Yanina, 8 March. We arrive in Prevaza from Yanina with Konitsa and Kalpaki before venturing forth to Kalpaki with Prevaza and Yanina. Umbrous olives procrastinate pleadingly over the weary waters in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which a repining river flows flowingly. O’erhead flies a squawking convoy of stuffed courgettes, flapping fearlessly towards a destination undefined. Ah, the joy of skipping on the petulant pine-needles and the verdant grass underfoot! Gentians cluster in every fissure, and clusters fissure in every gentian. Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly! One nearly swoons away with the magic of the language as a sunbaked Sarakatsan muleteer, Christos Karvounis, cackles cautiously, recalling rough-hewn rambles with…<twenty pages cut for reasons of space>

      …and when we wake up – joy upon joys! – we fulsomely find we have another thirty-nine delightful days to gorgeously go.

      Bundles of love,

      Paddy

       PATRICK LEIGH-FERMOR, FROM A LETTER TO DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

       January 3rd

      Nothing in your memory anywhere of anything so good. Now the pasta is eaten. Disappeared. The pasta disappeared as everything disappears. As the comma disappears and the semi-colon disappears and the inverted comma disappears and the apostrophe disappears and the adjectives and the pronouns all disappear.

      Leaving just full stops and And.

      And And?

      And And.

      And And.

       CORMAC MCCARTHY

      Darling Twat,

      Can’t wait to read your last scrumptious screed, possibly first thing next year, or, failing that, the year after, leisure permitting.

      Greece – it was Greece, wasn’t it? – sounds desperately Greek, which is just as it should be. One would hate to hear that it had turned all French.

      P.S. Why does everyone insist on being so beastly about poor Dr Crippen? He may have been a mite offhand with his wife, but, my word, he was an excellent doctor with a perfectly lovely smile, a dear old friend of Mecca.^*

      In tearing haste,

      Debo

       DEBORAH, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE, LETTER TO PATRICK LEIGH-FERMOR

       January 4th

      People have been kind enough to call me sharp. To be blunt, I am sharp. It was probably Rilke who first taught me that if ever a man is to be sharp, he needs also to be blunt. This was a revelation to me, partly because I already knew it. The sharp man must make pointed statements in rounded prose, remaining careful that the points emerge from his heart, and not from his head, or they will come out flat. Voltaire, too, taught me to square my feelings with my thoughts, particularly when talking among my circle.

       CLIVE JAMES

      T.S. Eliot died today, in 1965. His books only ever sold a few thousand copies. No one reads him now, and he is still dead. But is he still in print? I doubt it. Yet he enjoyed a modest reputation while he remained alive.

       V.S. NAIPAUL

       January 5th

      I’m sat at an official banquet in the Guildhall or wherever. ‘Only trouble with prawn cocktails,’ I say to the Queen of the Neverlands as I lick my spoon, ‘is that they’re always too small, don’t you find?’

      The lady mutters some double dutch in responsibility. As I’m reaching for the bread and butter, I notice there’s a heck of a lot of prawn cocktail left in her glass dish and she’s just pecking at it. ‘Tell you what – we’ll swap dishes – you take mine and I’ll take yours! That way we’ll both be happy! Vous compronay?’

      With that, I reach for her prawn cocktail, retaining my own spoon. Sorry, but I don’t want to catch foreign germs.

      ‘Very tasty!’ I say, turning to the gentleman on my right, the President of Venice or Venezuela or whatever, and try to break the ice. ‘Not finishing your prawn cocktail, then, Pedro? Defeated you, has it?’

      He looks blank, so to set him at his ease I reach over, shove my spoon in his prawn cocktail and help him out with it. And very tasty it is too, very tasty indeed.

      ‘Much-o grassy-arse, mon amigo!’ I say with a pleasant chuckle, very slow so’s he’ll be able to understand, then grab myself another couple of bread rolls before the waiter runs off with them. These official banquets can leave one feeling very peckish you know, so it’s lucky I’ve had a burger and beans before I came out, washed down with sherry trifle and cheddar cheese, all rounded off with a nice tin of condensed, all very pleasant. Yes, I do love my food.

      Come the main course, the old tum is up to its tricks again, making me feel full when I’m not, but I don’t want to miss out on the meat – I’ve always loved my meat – so I seek to remedialise the situation. I look over the President’s shoulder for a toilet, very discreetly you understand, but there isn’t one within a hundred yards. I don’t want to disruptify the banquet, so while the President’s talking to the person on his right and the Queen’s talking to the person on her left, I reach for the old napkin.

      There’s nothing