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Thursday, February 6th

We have written a synopsis of the Holy Grail for the EMI publicity people. Eric wrote it some time ago and it is extremely funny and totally unrelated to anything that happens in the film. ‘Might this not be a bad thing?’ says Mark to me over the phone today. EMI are worried that Up North there are critics who often review the film entirely from the synopsis, without ever seeing it; surely therefore we should provide a straight synopsis as well. My mind boggles at asking Python to help incompetent idiots who haven’t time to see the film they’re talking about.

Monday, February 10th

Mark rang, as he usually does when I’m having an enjoyable evening, this time on a matter of great profundity – the invitations for the Magazine Critics’ showing of the Holy Grail.

I am so sick of being Python odd-job man, and yet the alternative is to not know what’s going on in your name – which is infinitely more dangerous. I think of this when Mark rings and it just keeps me from physical violence.

Saturday, February 15th, Southwold

A drizzling, grey morning. We are going to Southwold for the weekend. Manage to pack three kids, carrycot, ourselves and Tom’s new bicycle in the Citroen and we arrive, after a slow run, at about 2.45. A late lunch. But at least the weather has improved – it’s sunnier and colder than in London. A fresh Suffolk wind off the sea clears the nostrils and freezes the fingers. We are staying at the Swan Hotel.

Funny that, fifteen years ago, when Helen and I first met in Southwold, the Swan Hotel represented the unattainable – the comfort and sophistication which we were never likely to know. Heavy tweed suits, ladies in suede jackets moving between heavy leather armchairs and through finely carved doorways – it was a world miles away from our own.

And now we are here, part of it all, in rooms which are floodlit from outside, with wrought-iron balconies and a view out onto a square that, in scale, feels like Toy Town – a neat, little miniature, into which at any time you expect a Victorian coach and four to appear, with ladies in big bonnets and men with side whiskers.

Wednesday, February 19th

Am now reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals, so watch out for hypersensitive observations on the weather. If she were alive now she could totally transform the image of the Meteorological Office. Weather forecasts would become works of art.

Me, myself, personally having always rather keenly felt the changes in atmosphere and attitude which different kinds of weather create, took it as a good omen that today was a sunny, brilliantly sunny, neo-spring morning, for the first gathering of all the Pythons for six months or so.

At any rate, Eric and John were at the Henshaws’ when I arrived – both tanned. Eric was back from a week in Tenerife with Barry Cryer, and John from Africa. Anne Henshaw was a good deep skiing brown. I felt like the skinny schoolboy whose mother never lets him go out. Fortunately Mark looked more sallow than usual and Graham when he arrived looked truly dreadful. Pale as if he had just come out from under a stone and hobbling with a broken bone in his foot. He’d done it on a chair. Graham seems to be going through his body breaking every bone at least once.

But there is a good feeling to the group and, when we start to talk about publicity ideas the chemistry works and ideas bubble out in a stream.

When we suggest a ‘Dummy Premiere in the presence of Her Royal Highness the Dummy Princess Margaret’ – with a car laid on to transport this now famous Python dummy lady to the theatre,1 and us all lined up shaking hands, Mark says that EMI just wouldn’t wear it. Terry J said’Mark, if you don’t feel that you can fight EMI for the things we want, then someone else ought to be doing the job.’

Well, at the end of the meeting, Mark is still doing the job.

This evening dinner at the Henshaws’. A famous bearded playwright is there. Yes, David Mercer himself.2 Odd to sit opposite a man you have unflatteringly impersonated on TV. Also an American writer