Alan Bennett’s 2022 diary, published in the London Review of Books, records the 88-year-old playwright contemplating old age, feeling bored by Covid precautions, chronicling an ever-changing carousel of UK prime ministers and remembering those we lost this year.
In July, for example, his partner Rupert has bought some lateral flow testing kits from the pharmacy, “and I go through the procedure of a cotton wool stick up one nostril and the same up the other … Had Sickert been still painting this is the kind of scene he would have recorded, a seemingly aimless couple waiting for the result.” The test is negative, he adds, “which, since we are both feeling rotten, is a slight disappointment”.
Bennett’s 2022 diary is his 40th to appear in the LRB, the first having been an account of what he did in 1983. Since then he has shared his thoughts on his health and mobility (he has arthritis), politics and friendships. Last year, he found himself longing for a stairlift but refusing to have one, “for aesthetic reasons”. In 2022, he considers the dubious rewards of wearing brand new hearing aids: “I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.”
Like many people, Bennett lost friends in 2022. In February, he recalls the last phone call he received from the comedian Barry Cryer, who died on 25 January. “He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke,” he writes. “When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your day’ and ring off … The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.”
In March, he watches Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service, via Zoom, and finds himself close to tears. “One of the pleasures and indeed consolations of a memorial service is in looking round to see who’s there,” which is not possible by video link. “So, ideally it should be a roving Zoom. Not, I’m sure, that Geoffrey would have thought he was worth the trouble.”
And in September, he marks the death of Hilary Mantel, revealing that he preferred her earlier novels to her later, more famous works. The dialogue in Every Day Is Mother’s Day, about a Northern social worker, he found “funny and enviable”, he records. But her hugely popular Wolf Hall trilogy was “harder to take … with the block always round the corner. Mind you, I don’t like tension. I must be the only one of his readers who found Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman too much to take.”
However, Bennett reserves his longest diary entry for the Queen – and for Prunella Scales, who played her (with “a touch of the suburban”) in his 1988, one-act stage play, A Question of Attribution. On 10 September, he reveals what the Queen whispered to Scales when she gave her a CBE (“I suppose you think you ought to be doing this!”); his father’s response to all the “splother” of ceremony when the royal car passed through Headingley, and why it “nearly fetched a tear” to his eye; and how he ended up saying the word “erection” in front of her majesty during a performance of Beyond the Fringe in 1961, and the audience’s reaction (“awkward silence”). Apparently, King Charles is a much bigger fan of the theatre than his late mother was, and his “loud laughter” always helps to warm up an audience.
While typically wise, observant and funny, Bennett admits that Covid has interfered with his understanding of time during 2022, and is apologetic about the patchiness of the year’s diary entries. The country’s political landscape hasn’t helped: Boris Johnson was impossible to ignore but “tedious” to write about, and “by the time I’d got round to Liz Truss she’d gone”.
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These days, he writes, “I’m often confused by what day it is, not to mention the date.”
LRB Diary for 2023 by Alan Bennett (Profile Books Ltd, £12.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.