The UK based Financial Times, despite its name, is a pretty good general newspaper, though good for financial news as well. So when it offered a one month mini subscription for free, I took it. You get eight articles a day - and they choose which ones. The real draw, though, is that they don’t want a credit card number. This is not free for a month and then multi dollars a month until you remember to cancel. Obviously they are hoping to attract subscribers, but they’ll have to plead for them at the end of the month. And I won’t be one. Already have access to an array of excellent papers. But don’t mind a brief sampling of FT’s offerings.
And so in the Financial Times discover in an interview that Alan Bennet has a new volume of his diaries coming out this month. Was about to say a final volume, and it may in fact be that - he’ll be 92 in May - but it’s not billed that way, and who knows? I have reason to be grateful to Bennett. He’s primarily a playwright, and it’s from him that I learned to choose plays by the writer and not the actors. A brilliant script can come through with fairly average actors but first rate actors cannot salvage a poor script.
We have, between us, seen at least five of his plays in London, notably The Lady in the Van, with Maggie Smith, and The History Boys. And on my first trip to London I saw A Question of Attribution, with Bennet playing Sir Anthony Blunt opposite Prunella Scales (then best known as Mrs Fawlty) as Her Majesty the Queen.
The diaries are as much pleasure as the plays, though in a totally different way. We have the earlier volumes at home and will be looking forward to reading Enough Said, the latest addition.
And in a very minor way my writing a blog is somewhat like Bennet’s writing his diaries. It is primarily a journal, our record of our winter travels written for ourselves. For the first few years I had no ability to put it online and even after that had irregular access to pretty inferior computers and unreliable connections. On the other hand there are now a few people who read it, so it does fulfil a dual function. More explanations and, with luck, fewer typos.
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