December 30 2000
Our last day in Beauvais and, leaving the best till last, we visit the cathedral. It's a fantastic monument to the fallibility of architects and the vanity of bishops, who wanted to build a gigantic cathedral in this small town but only achieved a third of it - a chancel broken off at the transept. The building soars over the town, a crown of stone supported by slim fingers which reach towards heaven, defying the laws of gravity. But gravity triumphed over the rest of the cathedral: a spire was built above the transept, taller by about 50ft than the spire of Salisbury cathedral and, too high and too wide, and it collapsed on Ascension Day 1573 just as the congregation emerged from the church.
Beauvais cathedral might have ended up like other gross fantasies, as clumsy as Bokassa's half-completed cathedral in the Central African Republic or as ugly as Ceausescu's palace in Bucharest, but it has the splendour of a great (if unfinished) symphony: unresolved chords continue to resonate, a monument not to earthly ambition but to spiritual inspiration - what we would now call "a work of art". Edith Wharton described it, in a book about motoring through France that a friend sent me for Christmas, as the "Kubla Khan" of architecture.
She drove - well, of course she didn't drive - her chauffeur drove her and her occasional travelling companion, Henry James, from fine restaurant to fine restaurant, from hotel to hotel (their luggage sent ahead), fastidiously weeding out the inferior ones: "a brief peep into the hotel promptly quenched the impulse to spend a night there". When they were travelling through the north of France it was unblemished by war: "so green, so full and close in texture". The same area was described by Scott Fitzgerald 16 years later in Tender Is the Night: "Great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks, and rotten leather... And suddenly round the bend the white caps of a great sea of graves."
December 31
"The motor-car has restored the romance of travel," said Wharton. Sitting in a traffic jam on the M25 I feel that something might have been lost in the near-century since her love affair with the car.
Back in England, it's a relief to find that the media appears to have found nothing more to celebrate this New Year's Eve than Arthur C Clarke's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last year the press, desperate as ever for topics to fill their glut of supplements, clutched at the celebration of the millennium like alkies topping up their Special Brew with a dose of meths. Articles spewed forth about the best person, politician, religious leader, building, book, film, play or song of the last 1,000 years. I remember only two statistics: the man of the millennium was Shakespeare, and the best song of the last 1,000 years was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. As Max Miller would have said: "Go on, lady, make something of that!"
The incessant invocation of the millennium's "significance" was like totalitarian propaganda, and as the clock moved towards midnight I felt like a dissident standing in Red Square while convoys of weapons and marching troops paraded to demonstrate the enduring glories of communism. The Dome was the Lenin's Tomb of millennium ideology. Now, only a year later, I wish that the politicians responsible for initiating and perpetuating it, as in the aftermath of the velvet revolution, showed some shame, but shame and politics are strangers to each other. At least it may have given some politicians pause before criticising managers of arts organisations for not knowing how to manage "public attractions".
January 1 2001
New Year's Day. For me, making new year resolutions is like going to confession - a meaningless ritual intended to show piety and to assuage guilt at doing nothing positive to improve your life. This year I promise myself less drink and more exercise, both on St Augustine's terms - not yet. Yesterday's snow has disappeared and my wife and I walk in the footsteps of our local poet, the "Super Tramp" WH Davies, whose "What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare?" is currently featured in a TV commercial for Center Parcs leisure centres.
I've spent much of the past year working as a writer, and for someone used to working with a group of people and, until three years ago, being responsible for a theatre the size of a small town, the solitude is hard to bear. "A writer is a maker, not a man of action," said Auden, scorning biographies of writers as "always superfluous and usually in bad taste". These days, a truthful account of my life is as follows: "Went to the country. Went for a walk. Saw a yellow wagtail. Wrote diary for the Guardian. Wrote rewrites for screenplay. Er, that's it."
January 2
The screenplay I've been writing (with Charles Wood) is about love and old age. It's based on John Bayley's books about his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her Alzheimer's disease.
My mother got Alzheimer's in her 50s, so I have enough experience of observing it and warily examining my own memory from time to time. At a certain age, bits start to drop off and you begin to think: "Have I got this or that?" I once had a brain scan after a car accident; the good news was that I didn't have any sign of incipient Alzheimer's, but the bad was that I had a spot that might have been the beginnings of Parkinson's.
"The disease will probably start with a spasm in your arm which will become a tremor," said the doctor. So there's rarely a spasm in my arm that goes unaccompanied by a spasm of anxiety, and rarely a forgotten word or name that doesn't invoke a flicker of unease.
I lean towards thinking of happiness as an absence of unhappiness, or agreeing with Tennessee Williams when asked for a definition of it: "Er_ insensitivity, I guess." So I was chastened when I read a piece in the Observer by John Diamond, who has cancer and yet was celebrating his reasons to be cheerful. His ability to be thankful for what he regards as his good fortune is as admirable as his courage in dealing with his bad fortune. He makes me feel that not to try to be happy is an unforgivable self-indulgence. Now there's a new year resolution.
January 3
I am giving up writing about myself: I'm giving up this diary, or it's giving me up, at least on a weekly basis. After 11 weeks of it I'm beginning to understand the weariness of the columnists who drop their opinions like cowpats week after week, those ones who live down to the German philosopher Karl Kraus's description of journalists: "They write because they have nothing to say, and they have something to say because they write." At the same time my admiration has increased for those few regular columnists who manage to keep it up week after week: Miles Kington and Craig Brown, for instance. Perhaps they have a lively correspondence with their readers, who constantly suggest topics for them to write about. I've had two responses to my column. One letter demanded that I invite Jesus into my life before it was too late; the other referred to my "special, beautiful soul" and was keen to induct me into the Hindu faith. I begin to see the God Shiva beckoning.
