Monday
A couple of months ago my next-door neighbour told me the pipe bringing water into our house had a leak and was slowly flooding her front garden. I called Thames Water and a man came round. After drawing a blue arrow on the path to show where the leak was, he went back to his van to phone the helpline to get someone to come round and fix it. Ten minutes later he knocked on the door to say he hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone but had left a message and someone would ring me back. After three days of not hearing from the repair team, I tried to get hold of them myself and found myself listening to an automated message saying that owing to an unprecedented volume of calls they would be unable to answer for a while and that I could either hold or leave a message. I held for 20 minutes before giving up and leaving a message. I’ve now done this every week for eight weeks and the same thing has happened every time. I’ve tried calling first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and last thing in the afternoon and the line is always experiencing an unprecedented volume of calls. You might have thought that if you’re always that busy you might employ a few more people to answer the phone. I’m beginning to think there’s must a lone phone ringing into the void of an empty shed somewhere. Meanwhile, my neighbour’s garden is still flooded.
Tuesday
It’s nice work if you can get it. Barack and Michelle Obama have been offered a reported $60m for their autobiographies. By any standards this is a lot of money for what are likely to be fairly turgid and anodyne accounts of their time in the White House, as former presidents don’t have a great track record of writing readable memoirs. Assuming that the bulk of the sales will be heavily discounted, by my reckoning the publishers will have to flog about 45m copies worldwide before the Obamas earn out their advance. Now it’s possible that every single person in California will find they can’t do without copies, in which case everyone involved is going to be dollars in. But it sounds unlikely. The biggest-selling non-fiction book in the US last year was Paul Kalanithi’s cancer memoir When Breath Becomes Air, which spent 13 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists. And that will probably have sold at best 5m copies worldwide, so the publishers are paying through the nose for a book they are certain to lose money on.
Wednesday
History was made when the Guardian entered a team for the press gallery’s annual quiz in Westminster. There has been no boycott of the event by the Guardian in previous years, it’s just that no one has previously managed to organise five members of the politics team to be in the same place at the same time. We finished a respectable ninth out of 21 teams, comfortably ahead of the team from No 10 but behind the Daily Express, as our knowledge of Nintendo games was found wanting. Among other things. We also didn’t know who the woman was who showed her bare bum in the Athena poster. At least we weren’t alone in failing in the picture round. Teams were supposed to be able to identify various members of the Labour frontbench. There was one MP who had been chosen precisely because no one in the Labour party had been able to identify her either. Even when her name was read out, no one was any the wiser. Come the following morning, everyone I spoke to had already forgotten who she was. Take a bow, Kate Hollern, shadow minister for reserves.
Thursday
The day after Theresa May said she was giving up salt and vinegar crisps for Lent, Walker’s announced it was closing its Peterlee factory with the loss of 380 jobs. The prime minister must have been eating one hell of a lot of crisps. I don’t think I have ever given up anything for Lent, mainly because I feel I’ve already done my fair share of giving things up. Unless something goes badly wrong in the next few days, by this time next week I will have gone without alcohol and drugs for 30 years. That’s half my life. When I first gave both up, the idea of even getting through a couple of days without them seemed impossible and I used to joke with friends that if I ever made it through to the age of 60 and I was still not using then I would reward myself with a bottle of scotch and a large pile of drugs. Now that I am 60 that doesn’t seem like quite such a good idea. The death-wish blowout has now been pushed back to my 85th birthday.
Friday
The most bizarre political story of the week was also the most ignored. With little over an hour’s notice, Ukip invited me to the launch of the lobby group Fishing for Leave’s Brexit fisheries policy paper with Nigel Farage and the Tory MP Owen Paterson in a Westminster religious centre. I arrived to find a few people milling around Farage, while someone else put up a banner of a fish dressed as Britannia. The event finally got under way half an hour late as Paterson had failed to turn up on time. By then Farage had disappeared and Paterson was left alone on stage with one other person, alongside several empty chairs of other people who hadn’t turned up. Paterson didn’t look best pleased at being left to hold the fort, and having exhausted his knowledge about fish he sat down to face some questions from the few members of the press who were still there. The only real question anyone wanted to ask was: “Where’s Nigel got to?” But the hacks were in an unusually forgiving mood and dutifully racked their brains for something to ask about fish, for stories no one had any intention of writing. Eventually the whole thing dragged to a limp close, only for Nigel to reappear as everyone was leaving to announce that although he really wasn’t part of the establishment, he wouldn’t say no to being made a lord.
Digested week, digested
The Lords: the new Enemy of the People.
