Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 4 August 2006

MONDAY
Have learnt important lesson: Never meet your heroes, or, in the case of former prime ministers from Brixton, don’t even speak to them on phone. Had to call for quote on Lottery proposals. Norma answered. Lot of sighing. Then clunking as phone dropped and long silence before a voice said, ‘Sir John Major KG here, hello, yes.’ I explained that I just needed two sentences. He said, ‘This will necessarily take a not inconsiderable period to organise. In my judgment, you should remain at the end of the telephone during what I hope will be a reasonably brief interlude.’ Cue muffled sound of things being dropped, paper crackling, pens that didn’t work furiously scratching on notepads. Then he read out a statement which involved words I’ve never even heard of before, like ‘gradgrind’ and ‘rumpus’.

Couldn’t tell him it was not inconsiderably useless, so I said thank you very much.