Diary

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.

Happy 190th birthday, dear Spectator. And in what fine health you are, at such an advanced age. This was hardly inevitable when I joined the magazine, as deputy editor, in 1987. It was just about to mark its 160th year of unbroken losses, a corporate world record which I don’t see being matched by any other business. It was around the second year of my editorship that it began to make a profit. The then chief executive, Luis Dominguez, declared to an amazed board that this unprecedented achievement should be revealed to the world, in the form of a press release. To his evident consternation, I urged them not to agree to this.

In this gloriously sunny week, the cavalry horses are off on their summer break to Bodney, Norfolk. They can be seen prancing across Holkham beach, scattering oyster catchers, pushchairs, Cath Kidston picnics and naturists. Everybody loves to see the horses, some plunging into the sea, others shying gingerly from the spray. I am especially keen, having watched some of them Trooping the Colour a couple of weeks ago. Charles Moore has already noted approvingly that, when Field Marshal Guthrie took a tumble, his horse stood immaculately still. It is a slightly equine-centric view of the episode, but not heartless, since Guthrie is on the mend.

I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the US constitution, but what preoccupies me and the nation’s allotment-holders at the moment is news that the RHS is warning of a ‘bumper year for slugs’. The slimy little bastards not only ate every single lettuce seedling I planted last year, but they have taken to invading my kitchen in the night and dying extravagantly, and in a way that makes a stain, on hard-to-clean surfaces. The RHS is currently conducting trials on five different alleged slug repellents — copper tape, horticultural grit, pine bark, wool pellets and broken eggshells — to see if any of them actually works.

By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises you any more. Striving gives way to coping. Drop a pencil and it rolls under the sofa. What you have to do is think about the best way to find it and pick it up. Problem. Do you get down on your knees and reach in under, which of course means you will have to get up again, or do you simply push the sofa away? Such problems don’t really bother you. You cope with it. You don’t reflect on growing decrepitude. It has been so slow coming, you have hardly noticed. Push the sofa away. Bend slowly, pick it up. Done. Straighten up. No one was watching. That’s good. Even an unwelcome medical diagnosis does not surprise you. You cope because you have to.

Monday morning. Sitting in Ed the physio’s waiting room. He is theatreland’s go-to man for fractured bones and torn muscles — essentially, an MOT garage for weary actors. A herd of cast members from The Lion King hobble in; the expression ‘suffering for your art’ comes to mind. I hurt my knee playing on all fours, but as a dog rather than a big cat. Since training at Laban, I had always wanted to do absurdist theatre, and when a role in Auden and Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin came up, I thought my prayers had been answered. But what a challenge! On stage for two hours every night, wearing a boiler suit, dog head, and gas mask. No more dog parts for me.