Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [125]
Monday, December 9th
I lit a fire at lunchtime, tho’ it’s not much less than 50° outside, but Willy wanted to send a letter up the chimney to Father Christmas to ask for a sweet factory.
William is sitting on the floor of my room, looking through old photos of the first four years of his life – like an old man looking back on his memories.
Nothing is expected of me for at least a week. This must be the root cause for the blissful sense of relaxed contentment I feel at the moment – though just having written that fills me with a little apprehension! A twinge of guilt.
Friday, December 20th
Lunchtime at the Angel in Highgate. The jolly lady who runs it has now given five copies of Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book to people for presents. I had to sign one today. (Later in the afternoon, shopping at W H Smith’s in Kensington High Street, I noticed that there were an awful lot of Bert Fegg books on the counter. Unsold or there owing to popular demand? I counted nearly fifty in a pile before I became embarrassed and moved away!)
Talked to Douglas Adams about the disappointed reactions he had had to Python series four. He thought the scripts were far better than the shows.
Saturday, December 21st
A great party at Robert Hewison’s. Ten or fifteen people in his little room at Fetter Lane. Lunchtime – excellent mulled claret, no-one from Python, so little shop talked. Renewed acquaintance with the Walmsleys1 and enjoyed ourselves enormously.
Nigel told us that a man actually exists somewhere in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the government, whose sole job it is to scrutinise every new car number to ensure that the combination of letters and numbers do not accidentally spell something rude, misleading or even ambiguous – in any language. Nigel, too, laughed when he first heard this, but it was put to him that maybe the government had a duty to protect spinster schoolteachers from the possibility of their driving through Czechoslovakia with ‘Want a Good Time?’ on their bumpers.
Wednesday, December 25th
On Christmas morning, the four of us had the house to ourselves. The boys played happily, Helen and I sat around and I read some of A Christmas Carol. Great stuff. After Hardy I feel myself being drawn, unprotesting, into the nineteenth century world, whose books and authors used to be forced at you from an early age, so I developed an image of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, as being heavy, worthy and boring. But now I’m acquiring an enormous taste for these same authors, and rediscovered Dickens’ Christmas Carol (my old Birkdale school copy) with sheer joy.
1 Played by Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi.
1 Sean Duncan, now a judge in Liverpool. We’d been at Shrewsbury and Oxford together.
1 This became Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls (Methuen, 1974), later revised and improved as Dr Fegg’s Encyclopaedia of All World Knowledge (Methuen, 1984).
1 Michael Henshaw had been my accountant since 1966. His wife Anne was helping sort out Python’s affairs.
2 Nancy’s lawyer in New York.
1 In the 1920s, soon after qualifying as an engineer, my father spent five years in India on various public works projects including the Sukkur Barrage across the River Indus in what is now Pakistan. He was always very proud of that.
2 The Sheffield steelmaker for whom he spent many years as Export Manager.
1 Monty Python and the Holy Grail was directed by both Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.
2 Ethel de Keyser (1926-2004), South African anti-apartheid campaigner.
3 Betty