Diary – 10 August 2017

No sympathy from me for the Brits stuck in the European heatwave. I’ve never understood people who go abroad for their holidays at this time of year. OK, as this week shows, you’re not absolutely nailed on for sunshine back home. But it’s probably going to be at least pleasant, and certainly won’t tip over into the furnace-like conditions of Italy and Greece. Even France gets too hot. Why not stay and explore all those places in Britain you keep meaning to visit, and take your foreign sun in January, when you really need it? If funds or holiday allowance permit only one trip per year, copy the family I heard of whose summer break entailed getting out their passports, leaving them by the back door and walking into the garden where their sun-loungers awaited. The symbolism is all you need. No expense, no four-hour wait at the airport, no peeling yourself off the sweat-soaked bedsheets.

I’m also delighted to report a new member of the ‘Venice is crap’ club. My friend Jane, just back, says that even without the heat and mosquitoes she wouldn’t have liked the place: it’s too pretty-pretty. I used to worry that my dislike of the city was simply me being an uncultured oik, but John Pearson (biographer of everyone from Ian Fleming to the Krays, and as cultured as they come) tells me he agrees. Venice isn’t a real place: hardly anyone lives there now, and those that do are only there to cater for tourists. It’s a theme park, not a city. If Disney were going to do Venice, they would do Venice.

RIP Robert Hardy, whose Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small was a highlight of my childhood Sunday evenings.