Diary – 21 July 2012

A few years back, Julian Maclaren-Ross was a forgotten writer. Today his wonderful books, such as Of Love and Hunger, are back in print, and on Monday, along with his biographer Paul Willetts, I took part in a centenary celebration of his life, with film of the man himself and of many of his contemporaries, most of them now dead: Alan Ross, Joan Wyndham, John Heath-Stubbs. J.M-R., a renowned Fitzrovian bore, was, as a friend of his put it, ‘better on the page than on the pavement’. True of so many writers one knows.

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One perk of taking my one-woman show round the country, if you can call it a perk, is the glimpses I get of the north of England. Crikey, it really is grim up there. Accrington, South Shields, Middlesbrough… in most towns all the shops are boarded up and covered with graffiti and the streets are lined with obese young men, lounging around with equally obese dogs, because there’s nothing to do. Occasionally someone putters by on a mobility scooter. A carer might accompany a dilapidated group of the super-elderly to a broken-down day centre housed in some decaying, pillared Victorian building, once a sign of the town’s huge wealth, with the words ‘Labour, Thrift, Dignity and Diligence’ carved into the crumbling pediment. It makes you want to weep. ‘Have any Westminster politicians come up here?’ I asked one local. ‘Do they know what’s going on?’ Well, apparently they do make visits — but invariably they’re taken to the brightly lit new art gallery, one of those white elephants that are now a sure sign of a town in distress. How people survive up there I have no idea. We may whine about being made prisoners of our own homes during the coming Olympics, but in London we live in a prosperous bubble.