26April1996

My dear folks,

This has to be a real quickie. But it’s a lovely evening and would be less than perfect if there were no word of hello. Simon and Garfunkel are tonight’s performers. I wondered why I couldn’t hear them. It was because I had the volume turned right down. Now they’re just loud enough to be part of the atmosphere.

Through the window I can see the early part of one of the loveliest sunsets of the spring. The day dawned brilliant, inspiring groans of dismay from the incoming team this morning & empathetic complaints from the outgoing one. Sunny days don’t only discourage one from going to bed, they make it much harder to sleep. Nothing like the rain pattering on the windows for reassurance. Still, I didn’t sleep badly.

Mavis came upstairs for cuddles a couple of times and got thrown off the bed for his troubles. The rule is a cuddle before I get up, not when I doing my damnedest to stay asleep. I had a pleasant night, too, spending much of it playing with packages. They can be very creative at times - and equally satisfying. I put together a report on the auction of Jackie Kennedy Onasis’s possessions - an occasion that evoked a burst of hysterical extravagance hardly paralleled in history.

Then came the funniest moment of the night when the input editor asked the team what they would do in the following circumstances. Right, he said, you have a gun with two bullets and you walk into a room and there you find Hitler and Stalin and John Smith. (John Smith, I hasten to add, is my own pseudonym for the most unpopular member of staff at World Service, a universally reviled, rather clever, little creep.) We pondered the correct answer for a moment. He gave it to us. You put both bullets into John Smith’s head, he informed us, just to make sure. I thought this the cruellest funniest thing I had heard in ages and spent the following hour bursting into shrieks of laughter, each of which provoked further shrieks from the rest of the team. This rather unsettled the presenter who not afford to be infected with the hysterical undertone.

Thank you Jones for your fax. Yes, I shall remember your pills. By the way, I have a letter and cheque from Dagmar Davis and co. who are bringing their two sons, one of them a vegan. Do we know any suitable restaurants? I told them I was dubious. Portugal isn’t into vegans.

What else to tell you? Not much! You’ll know all about the Lebanon cease-fire and the latest cases of CJD here in Britain, one of them a 15 year old girl who was besotted on hamburgers. There’s a feeling that the CJD dam wall is going to bust in AIDS fashion one of these days! Kind of scary!

Time to go. Thinking of you !

Blessings
T