Interlude IV

29/07/07

Still reading Michael Palin's diaries. I wasn't entirely sure I would get through them at first (it's quite a tome), but now I can't put them down. It's fascinating, and not just for the reasons you'd expect. Obviously, it's interesting hearing the whole Python thing evolve, and the other projects he was involved with; plus people popping up unexpectedly (like 'Graham's friend Douglas' turning out to be Douglas Adams etc.). But there's a whole load of other interesting stuff just to do with the time it was written. For instance, here is a man, living in London in the 1970s, and going to posh resturants. Okay. As you might expect - he had a bit of money by then.

Except that at that particular time the IRA was bombing posh resturants in London.

God, I swear it's scary how quickly we forget things. The whole 'War on Terror' business tends to make people look back and think, 'ah, if only we were back in the good old days' - except we forget that they never actually existed. Obviously I wasn't around in the 1970s, and things had died down by the time I really started paying attention to the news, but still there are things he's writing about that bring back memories. Hunger strikes. Bomb-scares. 11-minute warnings ...

I'd forgotten how familiar it all was, even to me at that age. It was on the news, it was there, and it went on for years. Even as late as 1996, I remember I was studying the Irish Question for GCSE when that bomb near Canary Wharf went off. Reading the entries got me thinking about Terry Gilliam's film 'Brazil', and all the terrorist bombings in that which seem so prescient - but he was living in London in the '70s as well ...

There was one bit I found particularly chilling - from October 29th 1975.

'Just after 9.30 this evening, when I'm getting my Chinese take-away out of the oven, and my bottle of champagne out of the fridge, prior to watching England v. Czechoslovakia all on my own, I hear the dull thud of a blast.I could be anything, but it's a measure of the times that I am certain it was a bomb.'

In that case, it was an Italian resturant in Mayfair, where eighteen people were injured - and he heard the blast in his frigging kitchen. And I think, there was never a time when everything was okay, was there?

Yes, and on that wonderfully depressing note, I will see you in two weeks. Have fun!

...okay, okay, that's kind of harsh. Here's a funny bit:

'The American fan mail is sometimes quite extraordinary. Less restrained than the English. I received one quite steamy letter, full of declarations of love, meant for my eyes only, which ended with the note, 'I hope you're the one I mean'...'