Barry Humphries

Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can’t bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century. I had afternoon tea with her and Denis once in their chintzy flat at No. 10, where she expressed a great interest in Rupert Murdoch, whom she rather admired. My father-in-law, Stephen Spender, was also a Maggie fan and once, after he had delivered a speech about Henry Moore at Westminster Abbey, she repeated the whole speech back to him at the party afterwards word for word. Tragically her prodigious memory failed her in the end.

Whenever, in an idle moment, I dip into one of my own books, I am almost immediately consumed by an unstoppable fou rire. It is immodest of me to make this confession, but I find my own work irresistibly funny. It pleases me to know that other more illustrious authors whom I admire are also deeply amused by their own books. Kafka, Max Brod tells us, always exploded with laughter while reading aloud from his own desolate tales. Ronald Firbank cackled uncontrollably while writing his orchidaceous novels and D.H. Lawrence, not famous for his sense of humour, laughed often and not seldom inexplicably at his own writings. Even the saurian countenance of Samuel Beckett was creased with laughter as the author contemplated his own sardonic playlets.

Last week I headed to Maribor in Slovenia for a music festival featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of maestro Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist. I even briefly performed a couple of Edith Sitwell poems to music by William Walton, but my efforts were at the beginning and end of a long programme featuring the New York avant-garde of the Sixties, including a work by John Cage which contained a long movement of complete silence disturbed only by the sound of the audience leaving. I think I once read that Cage believed there to be three different kinds of silence required by his music: the silence of expectation, the silence of appreciation and the silence of paralytic boredom. I’m not sure about the last.

I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic. I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic. But it was the first time that my not inconsiderable achievements as a music-hall artiste had been publicly described as ‘a body of work’.

Los Angeles I have just spent a hippocentric few days on a horse ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. I was the guest of my friend Monty Roberts, the inventor of horse whispering. Monty first developed ‘Join-Up’ to stop the cycle of violence typically accepted in traditional horse-breaking. His methods still infuriate traditionalists who believe that cruelty is the only way to domesticate horses. I have never been in the least horsey, having taken a flyer as a boy when a nag that was supposed to be almost comatose took off and launched me over a fence. I was so grateful to find myself intact after this misadventure that I decided, then and there, never to risk my skeleton again in hazardous athletic practices.

Only the most venerable and knowledgeable London cab driver has heard of Belsize Circus, a roundabout near the slums of Kilburn Heights where I have my lodgings. During the second world war many bombs fell nearby but, as was the case with most of London, the worst damage by far was wrought after the war by local councils and town-planners. This morning I saw a massive new building arising on the site of an innocuous petrol station. It is already so transcendentally hideous it could only have been enthusiastically approved by Camden Council. It claims to have been put up by something called the Notting Hill Housing Association and is emblazoned in huge rainbow letters with ejaculations like ‘Hello! Affordable! Smile! Unusual and curious!

When will the Americans withdraw? I don’t mind how long they stay in Mesopotamia but it’s high time they got out of Grosvenor Square. They’ve been muttering about relocating their embassy, but will it happen? Mayfair, my favourite English village, is ruined by their barricades, tank traps and miles of concrete Toblerone. Grosvenor Square and surrounding streets are becoming impenetrable and it looks as though there are going to be more hideous constructions and obstructions judging by the builders’ sheds and huts that are proliferating in this once tranquil square. Perhaps they should relocate to the old BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane. That is also an area more convenient for terrorists, who would find Mayfair a bit of a schlep.

SydneyI am here to announce a new stage show. When last here I was having breakfast in a harbourside café with a composer friend and I was just telling him about a particularly vile freelance paparazzo who haunted the area. Suddenly I saw the glint of a telephoto lens across the street. It was him! Emerging from the restaurant at a brisk pace I saw the wretch jogging towards me, grey ponytail threshing and camera rampant. He got so close I could smell the morning drink on his breath. The spirits of Russell Crowe, Sean Penn and Kate Moss suddenly inhabited me, and in trying to brush aside the intrusive Nikon, my knuckles accidentally collided with the photographer’s pulpy jowl, causing his trendy wire-rimmed spectacles to skitter on to the road.

When the gifted Australian actor Russell Crowe threw a telephone at an American hotel desk clerk, I sent him a letter of congratulation. As one might expect in a wonderful but barmy country like America, the desk clerk became an overnight millionaire. I have just completed a 15-week theatre tour of the US, so I have been in a lot of hotels and been tempted in nearly all of them to maim, and possibly even disembowel, arrogant illegal aliens loitering behind computer screens at the front desk, or impersonating waiters, or gender non-specific ‘servers’, as waiters quaintly prefer to be called.

If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about.