Angus Mackay Diaries Volume XVI (1999 – 2000)
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Angus Mackay Diaries Volume XVI (1999 – 2000) ANGUS MACKAY DIARY NO. 160 March 26th 1999 – May 13th 1999 Friday, March 26, 1999 It’s some months since I last had a theatre anxiety dream. Now I’ve had two, one last night, I mean Thursday night, & one just now. Once again, as so often, based on Birmingham Rep., my first, with all the travel worries of Paris & The Old Vic. (where did I stay for The Old Vic? No idea.) But the element that amused me, was that last night’s dream followed on from Thursday nights, with full narrative thrust. I was passionately resisting going tonight to a venue, when we could go in the morning. Shades of hideous film locations there. Why does one get hotter in bed? If I doze off after the papers, I sometimes get hotter than the duvets would necessarily dictate. Did I say how grotesque! Oscar acceptance speech of G. Paltrow, which made me think less of her? I have now seen some of the C4 gay series, ‘Queer As Folk’, & it’s rather good. Witty & true. A boy called Charlie Hunnam has something. A pop group, lead singer, a tepid blonde in pink & a small ruffle or two, with bare midriff, announces ‘we should be making hay, but we’re dead from the waist up’. Well, from the bare midriff up. No word from Roy & Marian about dinner at Grano. Ah, well. Saturday, March 27, 1999 Sunday, March 28, 1999 He surprises me every time. I rang at lunchtime to tell him that clocks go forward – he never knows – & he said come to dinner. So I did. Arlete let me in, & I didn’t see him except from the neck down for the next quarter of an hour, as he was on the steps putting in a new ‘phone line – for something or other. That suggested that they might not be leaving quite immediately, & I had been heartened by the neat net curtains & pretty window boxes of the once hellish house next door. And so it proved. He said he was pissed off with looking at places, especially after Greenfield House …. and was amazed that I hadn’t heard of it. He was sure he’d told me about it, because of course he had in his head. A rather worrying story, in certain of its elements & I could see why A had been worried. I can’t be bothered with all the details. The main point is that he liked the property, & that it was a repossession, & that the former owner was resisting it by living in a caravan on a bit of the land. K. characteristically went to see him. Now K. is v. brave & good like that, but with eccentricity it can work both ways. K. is eminently practical, but that does not necessarily make you a good judge of character. A. was worried at K. coming to an ‘arrangement’ with this man, which included giving him £100,000…. So K. told me all this at length, & was very much on his line of ‘please do not interrupt me’, when A. said she was doing so because we didn’t need that bit because we already know the next bit. Even I sometimes ‘interrupt’ – that is, drop in a remark carrying the argument forward. It’s called conversation…. I think it’s partly drink, but his mind does move in such narratives slower than mine, & obviously slower than Arlete’s. ‘To cut a long story short’, scrupulously accurate as it was, he decided not, to my relief, thinking of the squatter, whose unlikely name was Goodacre, though he thinks his was far the best offer, ‘& there is a lot to be done to it…’ but the really bizarre thing is its position. It’s down a lane leading nowhere else, there is a barn i.e. studio, ‘difficult to get planning permission to put in a window’, & some acres, six, was it? perhaps not so much. The Really odd thing is that it’s just outside Punnett’s Town, half or three quarters of a mile from the cottage. The milkman was in P. Town. I’m glad he likes the same sort of country. A sad nostalgic regret that I can’t give him the cottage. Told about Nigel’s visit for his b’day. He came on his own with the baby. I was struck yet again by the mystery of parenthood. The Nigel I’ve known over the years, & a scrubbed boy, a tongue-tied adolescent, a lad about town with others, a volubly funny careless playing-the- field young man, I find extremely difficult to see, coming to K. with a baby on his own, feeding it at the table, changing it, attending to it. Did it interrupt his stories? It is the unexpected unselfishness of young parents that impresses me. I can’t imagine myself being so unselfish. K. echoed that. So dinner was over, sea bass & a delicious salad. A. didn’t have the fish, just pasta & beans. I hope she’s not pregnant in view of the talk. I did wonder for a moment, as she looked a bit worn – it’s probably the curse. Over the coffee K. brought up Kosovo & we talked of it, and with A. on one side, against the bombing, & K. & I saying what else can we do? Even with darling D., I never found out what pacifists would actually do, except nothing. He’s given up looking till later in the year. We talked of this flat. He made it plain that he would look after me one way or another. I said that I’ve never meant to live with him just wanted to be close. ‘That’s what I want too’. Sunday, I spent starting on the filing cabinet, where the top drawer at least, was not as much deteriorated from the damp as I’d expected. The only effect really, was that some of the opened envelopes had stuck together again. I was, as usual, surprised by some of the findings – I haven’t been through it since I’ve lived here. So there’s a wodge of letters from Mummy, Daddy & Lalla, straight into the bin. Also Ed Fox’s, tho’ I’ve kept a card from Eileen & Ed’ – that fiery short-lived affair. A wodge of Prim’s letters went, too, tho’ they were sometimes witty. Of course, some have to go for space, but I was interested to find how quickly & immediately I tore up certain letters & kept others. The sort of things one can completely forget our grand chauffeur car hire people, Crawford’s, supplied receipts for all the cars we paid for during Prim’s broken ankle stay, so that she could claim them in her court case against the theatre & the out of alignment lift. Edna’s letters about building on to Nora’s Wood Crest. Quite a clutch of Alan Bennett, a file of Noel, seven or eight Ingrid’s, including a telegram saying from one supporting actress to another, when D got the Clarence Derwent & I. got the Oscar. Five or six from Sybil, & a card signed Edith Evans, in writing recalling the shop-girl she was. Monday, March 29, 1999 K. rang 11.15 p.m., query about the tapes. Rang off sharpish. Forgot to say he talked to me seriously about the flat, & seems prepared to do the repairs & damp. Can I face it? He also told me that his work has been a bit trying, ‘not getting a job I wanted, & getting work I didn’t want’. The job he wanted was ‘a drama’, a play, I presume, & he submitted a lot of stuff. He said irritably, ‘and I know just why I didn’t get it, my stuff was too bloody good’. Now with some people, that might be idle boasting & self-justification. But with K., at his age & so successful & with perfect confidence, it is simply a statement of fact. It has happened more than once, & will again. Remember the C4 logo. Managed to go to the shops & go out to buy some books, I think the first time I’ve been out twice since my knee. Found a reprint of a book on Ninette de Valois by Catherine Surley Walters, first published in 1987. It has some chapters by Dame Ninette, & it is a curiously exciting to see ‘Contribulations by Ninette de Valois copyright Ninette de Valois 1998’. I asked for selected Writings 1974 – 99 by Richard Mabey, & after a little confusion with a dim assistant who said ‘Maybe?’, I found it in gardening, tho’ I would put it in natural history. I wish I could stop bookshops dividing Natural History into the Dogs, Cats, Birds & so on. Opened the R.M in the shop & was struck by a sentence about a nightingale’s song ‘whose character relies so much and its pauses’. Dear old Brian Blessed, with a huge beard on his huge body, told Ester Rantzsen in his huge Niagara voice, that he went to look for the yeti, ‘I asked my Sherpa what the yeti looked like, & he stared at me & said it looks like you’. He didn’t laugh. Just as well, his laugh is enormous. Tuesday, March 30, 1999 K rang to say hadn’t I mentioned something about bills I couldn’t pay. I said the water rate wasn’t due Thursday, so let’s wait for the reminder, in case some money comes in, & the gas bill I’ve re-estimated & sent back, so same story.