Alan Bennett

Whereas a play or whatever on TV would invariably prompt a tipsy telephone call from Peter Cook with congratulations that one had got away with it yet again, Jonathan and I were less indulgent, tending to ignore each other’s efforts. I never saw one of his operas and I’m not sure he ever saw one of my plays. He did try though, which is more than I did, and en route to the premiere of The History Boys a traffic jam enabled him to abandon the car (and the attempt) in the middle of Waterloo Bridge. Still, I wouldn’t even have tried.

2 October. I suppose Allelujah!, while not unambiguous, is the closest I’ve ever got to a political play. Some of this is fortuitous. I have always thought that there is an element of prophecy in plays: write it and it happens. With this play it’s been almost embarrassing. Lest I be thought to be trailing behind the facts I should say that Valentine’s trouble over his visa was written months before the Windrush business and indeed the various scandals in NHS hospitals. I had originally intended Valentine to be an older doctor, brought out of retirement by the hospital because of a shortage of staff. In which case to refuse him a visa would have seemed even more shocking, though no more so than the treatment meted out to the long-established immigrants who were so callously singled out.

10 July. It occurs to me, that tedious though Love Island is, it has immensely respectable origins, indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding wanting). Walberswick was always thought to be Bloomsbury on Sea, but its ultimate location could now claim to be Love Island. (World’s smallest facility: the Love Island Library.)

24 June. The day after the referendum, I spend sitting at the kitchen table correcting the proofs of Keeping On Keeping On, finishing them before going to Yorkshire in despair. I imagine this must have been what Munich was like in 1938 – half the nation rejoicing at a supposed deliverance, the other stunned by the country’s self-serving cowardice. Well, we shall see.

10 January. After supper at the National Portrait Gallery restaurant we go next door to the National Gallery, still after all these years a great luxury to be able to go in after hours. Walking through the galleries with the lights springing on as we pass through each door it’s always a temptation to turn aside and look at old favourites, but we press on to the basement of the Sainsbury Wing and the Late Rembrandt show. Oddly arranged in that there are half a dozen of the great self-portraits at the start which I somehow feel should be the climax of the show.