Home > The Magazine > The Week

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Diary

Penny Smith

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Penny Smith gives a rundown of her week

Monday, 4 a.m. Noses back on grindstones. Mondays are always hideous. Peer over the computer at my Newshour co-host John Stapleton. ‘How was the weekend?’ He dined with friends and relations on both nights. The local bottle bank had been alerted. We go through scripts and write our questions for the interviews. John has a rant. I throw a smouldering faggot on the burning embers and he’s still at it in make-up. We laugh a lot. Or he laughs at me, and I laugh at my own jokes.

He does a different sleep pattern — he carries on after GMTV, and goes to bed at 9 p.m.-ish. I always go for a four-hour sleep after work, and then do the other four hours at midnight. Tonight is Candide at the English National Opera. It is superb. One of the best things I’ve seen there recently. Inventive and brilliant. Bump into Richard E. Grant and his wife Joan, who look very elegant. I hardly sleep for worrying that no one will turn up to my book launch tomorrow.

Tuesday I do an interview for the Daily Mail, and then don’t sleep for worrying about it. Have I said something I oughtn’t to have said? Have a coffee to perk me up at 4 p.m., then spend an hour deciding what shoes to wear. Phone Clare. ‘You’ll be fine in sandals.’ At 6 p.m., totter from the flat to go to the venue in Soho, where friendly people from HarperCollins force a glass of champagne down my throat. Christopher Biggins is already there. I needn’t have worried. It is so packed by 8 p.m., you couldn’t insert a flat fish. At 9 p.m., just as it is thinning out, Sarah Brown drops in with a couple of security men. Who’d have thought when we became friends 18 years ago at a wedding...

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Penny Smith | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.