Diary - 31 December 2005

The other day in Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway — somewhere I usually try to avoid — I suddenly found myself engulfed by a gang of over-exuberant and oddly menacing adolescents. ‘Hey, you!’ their leader, a well-fed girl of some 12 summers in expensive sportswear, addressed me. ‘I like your umbrella — where d’you get it?’ My mumbled response to the effect that the lurid lime golfing number happened to be a present from my bookmaker failed to ease the strange tension. ‘Give it to me,’ she commanded. ‘Show some respect.’ Her male minions took up the Blairish chant: ‘Respect, respect, respect!’ I edged my way towards the exit and instinctively, like Jeeves’s cab-addicted aunt, hailed a taxi. My jeering persecutors made an elaborate ritual of handing me into the back. Through the open window, the girl said, in a chillingly throwaway tone, ‘Hope you die soon.’

I am still brooding upon esprit de l’escalier. Perhaps I should have emulated my uncle, an ADC to the penultimate Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell. When dressing for dinner in Simla his toilet was interrupted by a nationalist agitator popping his head through the window and shouting, ‘Quit India!’ ‘My dear fellow,’ replied my demob-happy uncle, ‘I’m leaving as soon as I can.’ I am ashamed to confess that, as I sat there numbly in the cab, I was wondering whether it would have made any difference if I had told the termagant that I had a stage IV cancer. But, as an Aunt Dahlia fox-hunting figure once warned me, one must ‘beware of SP — whether self-pity or starting price’. Actually, just as paranoiacs are people in full possession of all the facts, hypochondriacs are always prepared for the worst. When diagnosed, I heard myself muttering, ‘I’m not surprised.’ It’s only when well-meaning people say, ‘You are looking well, indeed one would never guess that there’s anything wrong with you!’ — in paranoid terms this translates as ‘Either snuff it or stop whingeing’ — that I become twitchy.