March. With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch.

Alan Bennett · Diary: On failing to impress the queen · LRB 5

May. Remember as a child at Halliday Place in Armley when Dad was rubbing his face with a (sometimes) ill-smelling towel his face used to squeak. UK: Rishi Sunak hosts talks with Kamala Harris, vice-president of the US, at No 10, followed by a private dinner; Harris also delivers a policy speech on the future of AI at the US embassy in London; Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, speaks at the annual conference of the King’s Fund, a health think tank; start of Movember, the moustache-growing charity event held during November each year to raise funds and awareness for men’s health. One of the pleasures and indeed consolations of a memorial service is in looking round to see who’s there, not something that’s possible on Zoom. So, ideally it should be a roving Zoom. Not, I’m sure, that Geoffrey would have thought he was worth the trouble.He notes being sent a new bio­graphy of Graham Greene, but he wouldn’t read it because he was never a fan. “I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A ­darling of the Sunday papers in the l960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.” He only met Greene once, when he came to see his play The Old Country, and Alec Guinness introduced them. He remembered that, “Greene’s was the limpest hand I’d ever shaken. Nor did he say a word about the play, for or against.” Although this is a diary, Bennett doesn’t really say how he spends his days – staring out of the window, presumably, and remembering the past. He talks about the year his family spent in Guildford just after the war, where they noticed that the fish and chip shops used oil instead of beef dripping. “To us the oil smelled disgusting and was yet another score on which ‘down south’ proved a disappointment.” I don’t think Her Majesty ever came to any other of my plays, though not, I’m sure, due to my youthful bêtise. Still, when I next wrote about the queen it might also have caused offence. This was A Question of Attribution, put on at the National Theatre in 1988 and the first time the queen had been represented on the stage. This needs to be said. Prunella Scales’s seamless portrayal of Her Majesty not only preceded, it also surpassed any that came after. Physically much the same as HMQ, Pru had no claim or aspirations to glamour, she even had a touch of the suburban. The sad thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. He is a longtime Soviet agent and one of the questions implicit in the scene is whether the queen knows this. June. When in 2019 I had a flutter with my heart and a momentary loss of speech, it must have been around the time of the stand-off between Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court because the young doctor in A&E at UCH testing my mental capacity asked me what the word was for closing down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one. It is not all doom and gloom. On 26 March of that first year, Nicholas Hytner rings with the exciting news that the BBC would like to record a new version of Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues of 1988 because it is exactly the sort of thing that could be done on Zoom. The director pops round later that day to discuss details, which he is obliged to semaphore from the other side of the street. Bennett, in turn, worries that weeks of social isolation have robbed him of the power of speech. On the phone to the optician about his broken glasses, he finds that he has lost the words, and his partner has to take over. Later, arriving at the vaccination centre for his first jab, Bennett firmly announces that he is here “for the virus” (in his defence, he points out that both of them are “v words”).

House Arrest: Diary selections from the pandemic year, House Arrest: Diary selections from the pandemic year,

A very slight book ( I read it on a short bus journey of less than 30 minutes). Although I love Alan Bennett’s diaries I’m not entirely sure that this was deserving of a publication on its own. It’s billed as the Pandemic Diaries but considering, for the best part of two years, we lived with some sort of restriction, Bennett glosses over so much (I don’t know how much of his diaries have been edited down or even if he writes them every day). However, it added that the saga raised “questions around the conditions on which departing members of government retain and subsequently use official information which need to be considered by organisations such as the Cabinet Office”. Many prospective readers are likely to have enjoyed previous volumes of Bennett diaries and once again this one, though slight, will not disappoint. Condition: Very Good. Ships from the UK. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects. The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly.There is a proper process to these things, it is an independent inquiry, it has the resources it needs, it has the powers it needs, and what we should do in this house is to let them get on and do their job.”

House Arrest to The World in 2050 Books of the month: From House Arrest to The World in 2050

I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have been cripplingly shy. For me she was a creature of myth and I was happy for her to remain so, my notion of her set out in a speech made by the queen herself in ‘The Uncommon Reader’:In ‘The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future, Hamish McRae, who writes about economics for The Independent, is surprisingly optimistic about the UK’s future Referring to the knighthood graciously awarded to the former Artistic Director of the National Theatre, one inevitably wonders why, despite his antipathy to the current prime minister counterbalanced by a love of the Queen, this review is not being written about the efforts of Sir Alan Bennett or even Lord Bennett? February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door. Whately, as care minister, warned that restrictions on visitors to care homes at the time were “inhumane”. Rishi Sunak told Starmer: “Rather than comment on piecemeal bits of information, I’m sure [Starmer] will agree with me the right way for these things to be looked at is the Covid inquiry.