Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney

Journalist, reviewer, author of the children's book The Stone Bird.

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Diary – 20 June 2013

The calendar of British summer events often involves a master class in surviving a deluge cheerfully, and recent years have tested that cheer almost to destruction. On Saturday it was the turn of the annual summer fair in Highgate, north London, home to Kate Moss and the grave of Karl Marx. The thin whisper of sun in the morning led many people to trundle hopefully to the square in straw hats and sandals, which proved a strategic error. The rain began as I was eating jerk chicken, watching the Whitethorn Ladies’ Morris Dancing group from Harrow doing their stuff on the central stage.

Saturday

Jenny McCartney

Mr Powell’s ‘talking cure’

I’m beginning to wonder where I can go this summer to get away from Jonathan Powell. Suddenly Tony Blair’s curly-haired former chief of staff is everywhere, bursting out of newspapers and Radio 4 programmes, relentlessly repeating the message that it’s good to talk to terrorists. Or, to be more specific, that it was jolly good to talk to Messrs Adams and McGuinness of the IRA — which he and Tony did during the heady days of the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ — and that now he thinks it would also be good to talk to the Taleban one day, and even perhaps Osama bin Laden himself.

Friday

Jenny McCartney

Diary – 1 April 2005

My husband and I have a week’s holiday, and we have told everyone who asks that we are going to Marrakesh. We haven’t bothered booking, of course, because we are disorganised and thus choose to believe the oft-repeated lie that there are these incredible last-minute deals on the internet. I try to buy tickets the night before we are due to depart, and there it is, the incredible last-minute deal: the price of a British Airways return flight to Marrakesh has risen to £900. We fly to Biarritz instead. Biarritz is a chic old lady who was once a rip-roaring good-time girl. The temperature is balmy but at this time of year the beach is deserted.