House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

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Whilst only brief in length, 'House Arrest' does provide a lovely snapshot of what life was like for the aging Alan Bennett through the pandemic, told in a manner that only he can However, it added that the saga raised “questions around the conditions on which departing members of government retain and subsequently use official information which need to be considered by organisations such as the Cabinet Office”. March, Yorkshire. We vary our evening stroll, which in my case is more of a trudge, by going up the village to the church to sit in the churchyard. The birds are noisy, rooks and crows mostly, though unlike London no seagulls. And here come the bellringers for their Monday night practice, and quite frail they look too. The key is lost, so the ringers are very happy to chat and gossip while it’s located. Someone with Ukrainian relatives is taking in a family and there has been a dance and coffee morning in aid. Now the church is found to be open so no key is required, the ringers go up the tower as we walk home, and as we are putting the key in our own door the bells start. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth

House Arrest - British Theatre Guide Book review: House Arrest - British Theatre Guide

The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should think: “Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.” It’s not what EM Forster meant by “only connect”, but it’s what I mean. Although he refused the former honour 25 years ago, given the quality of many recent elevations to the peerage including one bemoaned in this book, the House of Lords could certainly benefit from both his wit and wisdom. June. When in 2019 I had a flutter with my heart and a momentary loss of speech, it must have been around the time of the stand-off between Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court because the young doctor in A&E at UCH testing my mental capacity asked me what the word was for closing down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one.

Some time in the afternoon Rupert shouts down that Joe Biden has passed the line and been declared the winner in the presidential election and that the scourge of Trump has been lifted. Though Trump does not agree. Lynn Wagenknecht [owner of the Odeon restaurant in New York] texts from New York saying there is dancing in the street and holds up the phone to let us hear the rejoicing. It should put a smile on people’s faces here but there are few people about. Such relief. Today’s barber is my partner, who manages to make me look like a blond Hitler For much of 1983 and 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood dominated the pop landscape so totally that... ★★★★✩ March. HMQ pictured in the paper at an investiture wearing gloves, presumably as a precaution against Coronavirus. But not just gloves; these are almost gauntlets. I hope they're not the thin end of a precautionary wedge lest Her Majesty end up swathed in protective get-up such as is worn at the average crime scene. There are many depressing items of news in today’s Observer but the most lowering is that, on account of his support for Brexit, Ian Botham is thought likely to be raised to the peerage.

‘He manages to make me look like a blond Hitler’: Alan

The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly. An abiding memory for me is his engaging encounter with a leaf sweeper which puts a smile on AB’s face for the rest of the day. His one regret: he’d forgotten to put his hearing aid in!August, Yorkshire. Write it and it happens. In the monologue The Shrine I wrote for production during Covid, a biker travelling down the A65 dies in a crash and I imagined incurious sheep gathering to look at the scene of the accident. Venice is the only city I’ve been in, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’ One of the pleasures and indeed consolations of a memorial service is in looking round to see who’s there, not something that’s possible on Zoom. So, ideally it should be a roving Zoom. Not, I’m sure, that Geoffrey would have thought he was worth the trouble. In season the A65 is a busy road, some of the traffic headed to Burnsall and Upper Wharfedale, the rest of it en route for the Lake District. Out of season or in the evening we sometimes turn off to Bolton Abbey. One of the locations for A Private Function. Then on to Draughton where much more recently there would be a vase of flowers always fresh, marking the place of an accident and which Mike Harding made into a poem and was my inspiration for the monologue The Shrine in last year’s Talking Heads. We are en route down the A65 for the funeral of a close friend, Michael Hindle, my solicitor. Almost at Skipton we are in a traffic jam. There has been a fatal accident, with an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly lines up and observes the scene.

House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries (Main) by Alan Bennett - WHSmith

In a statement on Wednesday, the Information Commissioner’s Office said it did not regard the messages as an issue it needed to consider, citing exemptions for areas such as journalism and for literary purposes which are in the public interest. The scene in question was a pleasure to write. It brought home to me that HMQ (as she was billed in the programme) was a person like no other, a woman who has been everywhere, met everyone and to whom nothing comes as a surprise. At one point Blunt mentions Venice:May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a (sometimes) ill-smelling towel his face used to squeak. Thanks to arthritis I’m now much less mobile than I was. Gone are the days when I could jump on my bike to pop down to the shops, so static semi-isolation is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine. Himself no slouch when it came to work, George Steiner once asked a Soviet dissident how he got through so much. “House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.” Alas, so far as work is concerned, I haven’t yet noticed much difference. It is filled with wise and often witty observations drawing on a lifetime of cultural interests, often alluding to the author’s stage and TV work but stretching much further afield. He notes being sent a new bio­graphy of Graham Greene, but he wouldn’t read it because he was never a fan. “I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A ­darling of the Sunday papers in the l960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.” He only met Greene once, when he came to see his play The Old Country, and Alec Guinness introduced them. He remembered that, “Greene’s was the limpest hand I’d ever shaken. Nor did he say a word about the play, for or against.”