Diary

This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi. This is my 11th trip to India and from the very beginning the signs were good. For a start, the temperature on arrival in Mumbai was a cool 22 degrees and I was told it had rained for the past two days, though I’ve actually never seen rain in Mumbai before. Because of a new eight-lane highway, we got from the airport to the Taj Hotel in the city centre in just 40 minutes, despite a minor hold-up. As the car was idling in a traffic jam, a young boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven tapped on my car window. He was holding a pile of books. I wound the window down, and he asked: ‘Would you like the latest Jeffrey Archer?

Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful music and singing whizzed by without a moment’s boredom. But there was one odd and perturbing factor, I thought. In place of a curtain, there was a huge ‘frontcloth’. It was covered with a collage of 103 faces of well-known artists. These same faces appeared again, during the finale, this time in the form of portraits held aloft by members of the cast. They included Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Weill, Billy Wilder, Richard Tauber, Oskar Kokoschka, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Lotte Lenya, Max Ernst, Marlene Dietrich.

All this fuss about Fifty Shades of Grey! I wonder how many people have actually read all three books? Sado-masochism is only half the story. When you’ve waded through the entire oeuvre, if such appalling writing can be dignified with that term, you discover that the whole story is one of redemption. The ostensibly wicked, but aptly named, Christian is actually a tormented man who was cruelly abused by his mother and re-enacts this cruelty towards his lovers. But with a good woman (and a baby), pervy dungeons vanish and love conquers all. Pure Mills & Boon. These days I don’t go to films. I watch the trailers instead and I’ve saved myself hours of misery.

Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I remember giving the room boy who had brought my case to the bandicoot-infested bedroom in Colombo a few rupees, but he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to sit on the bed and talk — about London, England, cricket, life. Three decades and a civil war later, people are aware of money, there is bottled water, and a pot of tea doesn’t take half an hour to arrive. One thing that seems unchanged is the optimism of the people. The new president, Mr Sirisena, has promised an end to the corruption of the Rajapaksa regime.

Dry January is tougher than it sounds. Well, for me anyway. It’s now been some 28 days since I’ve had a drink, and you should see what that means for my campaigning strategy. ‘Ginger beer? Lemonade?’ Pub-goers around the country can’t believe it when I walk in and whisper my order over the bar. The fact is they don’t believe I’m really doing it. ‘I’m not all spin and bluster like those other lads,’ I usually reply. ‘If I promise I’m going to do something, I’ll bloody well do it.’ Still, I can’t say it’s never going to tempt me again. Especially not given the week I’ve had. It all started in Milan.

As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival where you are most likely to be greeted by an elephant. The life of a writer is rarely glamorous, but for one week in January — should an invitation to Jaipur be forthcoming — it decidedly is. The festival is to India what a Richard Curtis film is to London: a fusion of all the fondest stereotypes that foreigners have of a place. The talks, which run the gamut from the Mahabharata to the future of the novel, are pure literary masala. The parties are visions of perfumed candles, shimmering saris and maharajas’ palaces. The last time I was in Jaipur, there was even a cricket match.

 Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles. Cynical expatriates such as myself did much the same with our newly inflated hard currency. I cleared my local posh wine shop of a thousand bucks’ worth of Burgundy, now half-price in dollar terms. A correspondent colleague raided the Moscow Apple store to the tune of two iPhones and a pair of laptops before they shut down to recalculate prices.

An embarrassing confession: in the late 1960s, I was a Trotskyite. But that period of political adolescence has its uses. It made me aware of the methods employed by extremist parties such as the Scots Nats. Trots wanted to encourage ‘the workers’ to make impossible demands, including ludicrously high wage rates, in order to bring down capitalism. But the workers were too wise to fall for that, until Arthur Scargill came along. Now, the Nats are playing a similar game, discussing the terms on which they might support Ed Miliband — as if they would like a stable government in London. That is nonsense. They want confusion and chaos in London, which would inflame the English against the Scots and convince even more Scots that the Union is collapsing.

Every year Christmas comes earlier and earlier in America. Cards, baubles and imitation trees were being sold in the big department stores in August, and the street decorations have been up in Beverly Hills since well before Halloween. From late October onwards, it’s the season of dressing up and showing off in downtown LA. Street parades are all the rage and hundreds of thousands of people saunter around in costumes, some gorgeous, most grotesque. Infants and children are usually done up as baby chicks or bunnies, which is inoffensive — but some adults go beyond the boundary of what is acceptable.

Soon after I joined the Sun as managing editor (among other things, I used to review novels for The Spectator), I read an interview with Keir Starmer, the outgoing head of the Crown Prosecution Service. What an unhealthy thing it would be, he said, if journalists had to consult with lawyers every time they pursued a story or asked a question. He was right — yet this is precisely what it is now like for most people in the business of trying to break stories in Britain. More journalists are on trial or facing prosecution here than in many banana republics around the world — as my newspaper knows to its cost. Last week, Clodagh Hartley, the Sun’s Whitehall editor, was finally cleared of paying a source within HMRC.

The most unfashionable show on television, Songs of Praise, has had a makeover. The BBC had apparently discovered that the average viewer of the show was in their mid-seventies. Quelle surprise: in the trade it is known as ‘The Resurrection Show’, because so many participants shuffle off their mortal coil before transmission. The new version was introduced by a bubbly presenter with hair dyed a fetching shade of cerise, slightly talking down to us. It ended with a cheery roomful of Salvationists and a brass band. I rather liked it, even if I had switched on wondering why publicly funded religious broadcasters were chasing the advertisers’ target demographic. Actually, I think it’s rather bold of the producers to tell us the average age of their viewers.

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetising, or even a loin of sourdough bread.

‘Please God, make me good, but not yet.’ I know the feeling. As I get older and more deeply retired, I globe-trot more and my carbon footprint is horrendous. And guilt does not result in abstinence. The brain is persuaded but the flesh is weak. Years ago I chaired Jonathon Porritt’s sustainability organisation, Forum for the Future, and I remember holding a fund-raising dinner for rich Cotswolders and hoping no one would notice my gas-guzzling old car, toasty warm house, and melon with more air-miles than flavour. I’ve tried harder since then, but it’s not easy. A couple of years ago I converted my ancient barn into an eco-friendly house with heat-exchange pump, grey water collection, massive insulation, the lot.