Diary – 16 February 2008

This week I have been prey to a prolonged bout of insomnia induced, I suspect, by the fact that I stay up to watch the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight and, invariably, one or the other contains an item which so disturbs me that my brain continues churning into the small hours. Despair at the way the country now seems to be heading lies just below the surface of our everyday lives like the herpes simplex virus, ready to erupt at any given moment. For insomniacs it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, as Scott Fitzgerald put it at his most manic, and I finally resort to breaking a 10mg Temazepam tablet in half and then have a panic wondering if this is the start of a new addiction (I gave up a lifelong love of cigarettes two years, two months and five days ago).

The plus side is that my sleepless nights have given me a belated opportunity to make the acquaintance of the late James Lees-Milne’s diaries. A tireless worker for National Heritage, like a lepidopterist he was adept at spearing the foibles of his huge circle of literary and aristocratic friends on to his pages, and the diaries are full of strangely riveting anecdotes, with vitriolic asides about those who crossed him. He lays bare his own complicated and somewhat pathetic love life as a bisexual, married to a bisexual wife (no surprise then that he wrote a biography of Harold Nicolson, who was bisexual and married to a bisexual wife). The diaries give off the odour of a world from a bygone age where everything is slightly musty, vaguely snobby, clubby and Pooterish. Peppered with double-barrelled names and quirky aspects of London club life, I find I cannot get enough. I ventured into Ken Livingstone’s very congested congestion zone and paid a visit to Mr Sandoe’s book emporium to purchase more volumes in the series and now I pig out on them every night.