John Laughland

Diary – 4 December 2004

Quare tristis es, anima mea?

A charming retired lady doctor of my acquaintance buttonholes me whenever I run into her in London. She knows I write for The Spectator and she is convinced that this Diary page is an irritating spoof. ‘It’s just not possible that those people, like Joan Collins, could ever actually write such rubbish,’ she tells me in a Donegal accent undiluted by a life spent in Goring. I have pleaded with her, insisting that she is confusing this page with the one in Private Eye, but I can tell she does not quite believe me. At last I have my chance, by penning the page myself, to convince her that the rubbish which follows is real. Or maybe she will simply conclude that I have passed on her story as an anecdote for the spoof-writer of this column who, this week, has assumed my identity.

One’s grip on reality — and on the reality of one’s self — is at its weakest on the cusp between sleep and waking. Last Monday I drifted into consciousness to the sound of my childhood — the seductive and melancholy arc-like whistle of the Barbadian blackbird. The air in my bedroom hung soupy with humidity, for 15 inches of rain had fallen in seven days; there was a sense of loneliness and quiet. During the night, the milliard tiny tree-frogs, each one the size of a thumbnail, whose seemingly disembodied bleeping floods the darkness, had bleeped even more furiously than usual. I potter down to Heron Bay, where a magnificent Palladian fantasy mansion nestles improbably in the manchineel trees by the sand, and slither into the azure bath which is the Caribbean Sea. As ever, the beaches are empty; next to a beach hut, a man wearing a tea cosy loafs by a sign saying ‘No loafing’.

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