Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [41]
There were thousands more people equally hot and equally hurried, and we only just managed to get seats in the restaurant car. John and Connie arrived with about 20 seconds to go, complete with cage and stuffed parrot.
We rehearsed the cabaret – it was about 50 minutes’ worth – and arrived at the ball by about 10.00. We were shown to a cabaret room and a succession of the usual, rather anxious, slight, dishevelled officials came to tell us what was going on.
The University of E. Anglia, like many of the newer English universities, has had a fair amount of publicity for its sit-ins, protests, marches and other symptoms of left-wing radicalism. I was surprised, therefore, that this element seemed to be quite absent from the ball. They appeared to be an audience of exactly the same people who Robert [Hewison] and I performed to at Oxford about seven years ago.
Wednesday, August 4th
Meeting this morning between Charisma Records and John Gledhill, Terry Gilliam and myself to discuss the record cover. Our suggestion was not the easiest thing to sell. A classical record, with everything crossed out rather crudely and ‘Another Monty Python record’ scribbled in at the top. On the back a 97% authentic spiel about Beethoven and about the finer points of his Second Symphony – but, for those who can bear to read it through, it is gradually infiltrated by tennis references.
Charisma seem almost an ideal record company – or indeed company of any kind. Their offices in Brewer Street are functional, rather than plush, set on three floors above a dirty bookshop. Tony Stratton-Smith, who founded the company, has a tiny office at the top, with two hard wooden benches (giving the little room a rather ecclesiastical feel), a desk, a table, and an interesting selection of moderniana on the walls. They do not seem to have any fixed attitudes to their products, they seem to take decisions with the minimum of fuss and, what’s more, they agreed to our record cover – which is quite a risk for any company.
Thursday, August 5th, Southwold
Caught the 8.00 train from Gospel Oak to Broad St. Thomas stood at the door to wave goodbye in his pyjama top – he was very good until I had almost reached the end of the village, when I heard a beseeching shout of ‘Kiss! Daddy. Kiss! Kiss!’ as I turned the corner.
From Broad Street I walked down to Liverpool Street Station, which, at 9.15 in the morning, is like swimming against a very fierce current – such is the surge of people pouring up the approach that in a momentary flash of panic I wondered if I would ever make it to the station. It was a rather frightening sight – this sea of faces. It was like some clever documentary maker’s piece of film illustrating the increasing conformity of people’s lives.
Ate breakfast on the train and was met at Darsham Station at 11.30.
Daddy and I walked across the common to the Harbour Inn. The L-Dopa tablets seem to have completely stopped his Parkinsonian trembling – but they cannot disguise his increasing vagueness and the difficulties of keeping up with what is happening around him.
In the evening I walked up the lane towards Frostenden. It was a clear evening and the sun shone on the gold fields of corn through the trees which side the road and straggle the landscape rather haphazardly, not in neat copses or woods like in chalk country. The effect was warm and secure and reassuring. At the same time, in London, Richard Neville1 was being sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment for publishing the Schoolkids issue of Oz. I can’t help feeling that he would have appreciated this countryside for the same reasons that I do – and yet the only way society has of dealing with his imagination and intelligence is to put him away for over a year.
Wednesday, August 11th
Drove down the A3 through the Surrey Green Belt to visit one of Helen’s friends from teacher training college – it was looking very green today, and the woodland, with patches of rough heathland emerging from the trees, dispelled the usual