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Monday, June 17th

A damp, musty kind of morning – pools of water on the roofs and roads after the night’s rain, which came down after a series of thunderstorms last night. Have just heard on LBC that the Houses of Parliament are burning – a bomb was placed in the kitchens at Westminster Hall and went off at 8.30. There have been five casualties, one serious. The fireboat is out on the Thames and, according to the news, the fire is still spreading. This must be the biggest propa-ganda coup of all for the IRA (if it is them), but I think it will rebound heavily – echoes of 1940, when P’ment was last burning, etc, etc.

Occasionally, when these rather traumatic things happen, you imagine for just a moment that this is it – there’ll be a national panic, a crisis after which nothing will ever be the same again! But in an instant it all passes. Thomas is at school giving flowers he’s brought back from Abbotsley to Mrs McCann, with a look of great pleasure and achievement on his face, Helen is at the doctor’s, having an examination for our third child, Mrs B1 is being relentlessly importuned by William, who is trying to persuade her to stop cleaning the bathroom and buy some sweets for him, and I am about to sit down, reach for the notebook and try and think of ways to make people laugh. So life goes on, and Parliament-burning quickly assumes a perspective.

Monday, June 24th

This morning we saw a rough cut of the film – the first time I’ve seen the whole lot put together. In its raw state, without dubbing, sound f/x, music and any editing guidance by the two Terrys, it tends to be rather heavy in certain scenes – the Knights of Ni and the opening of Anthrax possibly – but there are set pieces like the Plague Village, the fight with the Rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade which work very well, even at this stage, and the recently filmed Black Knight fight wasn’t in, which I hear is also a great set piece.

The only scene which I felt was seriously deficient at this stage is the appearance of the Three-Headed Knight. It just doesn’t look imposing enough, and very similar in set-up to the Knights of Ni.

Ended up at the Linguaphone Institute in Oxford Street, where I enrolled for a course of Italian lessons. Rather dog-eared surroundings, but the people there are pleasant and smile a lot and Mr C, my Italian coach, looks convincingly Italian and makes little jokes about his language – ‘When you hear an Italian couple having a row, it sounds as if they are singing in an opera’ – and little jokes about his own incompetence with the tape recorder – ‘I am the only man to have fused a candle’ and ‘I pressed so many knobs, I eventually got Vatican Radio’. Anyway, he’s jolly. But the course he started me on looked so unutterably dull – it was all about being a businessman and leaving briefcases at the airport and meeting secretaries and – oh! – it was so awful I told them I didn’t think I could manage to summon up any enthusiasm for it. So he went away and came back with a slightly more difficult course, still heavily business-orientated, but with more general conversational words and phrases.

So I got into my little booth and played with the tape recorder. I hope I can keep this course going. It was a big psychological step to come in off hot and dusty Oxford Street and commit myself to it, but I feel that I must start now if I’m ever going to learn a new language – or at least attempt to become anything less than helpless when I travel.

Wednesday, July 3rd

A grim, grey morning with gusting winds and bursts of rain and general drizzle. Suddenly the sunny days of May and early June seem light-years away. But it’s good for application. Started work at 9.15 [on new Python TV series] and by lunchtime had ‘The Golden Age of Ballooning’ typed and organised into a twenty-nine-page script, which could do as a half-hour on its own. Feel rather pleased, as it is almost entirely my own work.

With this satisfactory morning behind me and even a little sunshine peering through