Diary

Eight years ago, in the course of doing some research into literacy teaching in London, I visited many primary schools. One thing that struck me — and I didn’t of course mention it in the pamphlet I wrote on the subject — was how many primary school teachers were severely obese. One isn’t supposed even to notice it. But it’s been worrying me ever since. Obesity inevitably involves lower energy levels, less mobility, reduced staying power — all weaknesses which, however talented a teacher may be, are likely to impair his or her ability to cope with young children. What’s more, teachers are role models. I feel great sympathy for obese people, but I would be troubled if my young child were being taught by a seriously obese teacher.

When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I land in the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky, I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who did not like Trump at first, but would vote twice for his re-election if he could, because of the jobs boom and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired salesman who tutors kids from poor backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess that makes me a conservative,’ he says. I had to lecture in semi-darkness in Louisville, after a power cut plunged most of the university into darkness.

Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves force themselves into the cold, like early morning runners, head down, braving the rain, than they are over, looking dusty and tired, turning yellow, spent. I know how they feel. My chief complaint is cramp. I don’t think anyone is researching cramp. It’s not life-threatening and so of no interest to big pharma or the medics. But it sure as hell interests me. Leaping up five times a night yelping as thigh, calf and foot take turns is torture.

The Hastingses have idyllic lives but, like most seventysomethings, we find ourselves in ever-closer proximity to mortality. We hold season tickets for hospital and care-home visits, funerals and memorial services. Prostates are a staple of dinner-party conversation. We have not got quite as far as the 94-year-old contemporary of the painter Raoul Millais, who quavered in the churchyard after the two had bidden farewell to a friend: ‘Hardly worth you and I going home from here, is it, Raoul?’ But we are mindful of La Rochefoucauld’s observation that compassion represents the intelligent anticipation of one’s own troubles to come.

People are still asking ‘So, how was your summer’ and mine was nice as far as it went: I didn’t ‘go away’ but spent long weeks rambling on Exmoor in the drizzle, baking scones and making and remaking beds for the various guests who came and went, supplying them with endless free hot meals. Then I was sacked on the spot by the new incoming editor of my paper. I always regard it as a badge of honour to be sacked. It’s business. In fact, most national newspaper editors have sacked me and then forgotten and tried to rehire me at least once, so I try never to take it personally (just as my then boyfriend Ivo dumped me in an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill but was so blotto he had no memory of the occasion and we married a few months later).

I begin my 87-day reading tour of the US, UK and Canada on a BA flight that will take me to Edinburgh for the book festival. I catch up on my Ab Fab and Peppa Pig and eat some back bacon. I land around 10 p.m. and take a walk through the city. I love Scotland! The young people seem so ebullient: ‘Feck this. Feck that. Feck you.’ I stumble around the old town and new town taking in the endless adverts for all the plays. Should this much art exist in any one city? I guess so. I mean, why not? Probably it’s OK. I wake up with a twofold mission in mind. Haggis and whisky. Look, I love haggis. It’s Scottish, but there’s something desperately Eastern European about it, something sultry, sickly and taboo.

Down here near Nice, you find most locals unsurprised by the catastrophic Genoa bridge collapse. The Italian border is only a few miles away but most people will find any excuse not to cross it — including my wife and me. In fact, these days we don’t go there at all. We haven’t done for years. Friends find this strange. After all, Italy’s closeness is one of the reasons we bought the place. So why do I fight shy of motoring through the long autostrada tunnel that runs under the pre-Alps, linking Menton to Ventimiglia? Because it’s bloody dangerous. Not on the scrupulously maintained French side, brightly lit with clearly marked carriageways. But the moment you flash over the border into subterranean Italy, everything goes pear-shaped.

Taking my new stand-up show Girl on Girl to the Edinburgh festival this year and playing at the prestigious venue the Gilded Balloon, was hand on heart the most stressful thing I have ever done — and I lived through the Ed Stone. My nerves were off the scale. Will anyone come to see the show? Will it be a massive disaster? Is this a very public and expensive cry for help? Why don’t I just go on a yoga retreat? These are all the things which swirl round your head seconds before you go on stage. Stand-up is one of the hardest things you can do. It’s just you — there’s no one to hide behind and you live or die by your wit, words and performance.

The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity over their intentions. ‘See you later,’ they say blithely on departing in the morning, a comment that could equally well mean after lunch, or sometime in the second half of the year. Our programming for disappointment is so deep that even during the recent weeks of sunshine it’s been hard to feel completely safe in making future plans. Supper tomorrow in the garden? A picnic next weekend? Is that hubristic? Should we have a plan B? Of course when the days have turned out to be glorious, just as when the nightmare lover is at their most charming, the experience is hugely enhanced by the fact that we can’t rely upon it.

The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there were masses in France. I read that there was a national shortage, bird people were doing surveys and panicking. In the 1970s and 1980s, swifts wheeled round every church tower, dashed through the streets screaming. Not now. I could have wept. Possibly I did. Why had the French ones not crossed the Channel? Was this yet another thing to be blamed on Brexit? Then, one July evening, there they were a few, then dozens, soaring, diving, swooping, crossbows in the blue sky. I have abandoned work, reading, watering, even drinking my wine, to sit watching these most beloved hirundines. Gaze while you can. Neglect everything. These are not birds, they are angels.

It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else that history had thrown at them in the past thousand years. Through the great west doors, which had been left open for ventilation, I could glimpse the ruins of the adjacent Norman castle, bleached white by the intense sunshine. In front of me were the serried ranks of prep school pupils at their speech day and I was presenting the prizes. The boys were in blazers; the girls in boaters and the staff were gowned. The head opined sensibly and the dean prayed. The organ thundered; the choir sang exquisitely and the soloist soared with that fragile, plangent beauty of the boy treble. It was quintessential England.