Diary – 3 October 2009

A week to enjoy the autumn sunshine by the sea. Gluttony is no longer fashionable but what better way to celebrate my birthday on Monday than to spend a few hours at the Royal Native Oyster restaurant in Whitstable? Sitting by the Kent beach, I confess to consuming 24 oysters, a crab, a lobster, two bottles of Pouilly Fumé, a plum crumble and Irish coffee. Thankfully my wife was more modest. All her entreaties for restraint were answered by my description of Samuel Pepys’s vastly superior daily consumption as described in Claire Tomalin’s wonderful biography. Inevitably, I later collapsed on the shingle rereading that day’s lead entry in the Times’s ‘Happy Birthday’ column. ‘I can’t believe you’re writing about my birthday and not Brigitte Bardot’s,’ I had told Russell Twisk the previous week at the Garrick. Naturally, I was thrilled, more so when I returned home and read a congratulatory email from a famous friend lamenting, ‘yours had a photo, which is more than I’ve ever achieved.’