Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Perhaps the Archbishop will intervene in this grave matter
In anticipation of hitting my three score years and ten (God willing, I will turn seventy on 8th March), I am getting ahead of the curve and looking into the matter of my gravestone. I am a traditionalist. In the fullness of time I want to be laid to rest in a proper Church of England graveyard, beneath a classy headstone that will look the business and stand the test of time.
I plan to keep the wording on the headstone simple: my name and dates will do. If there is to be any further inscription, having recently played the Ghost in a production of Hamlet, I am currently favouring one of the Ghost’s most haunting lines: ‘Remember me.’ Shakespeare has been one of the great loves of my life. My cats have been one of the others, and I thought it might be nice to have one of them immortalised on the headstone too – but that may prove a problem.
Through the Lettering and Commemorative Arts Trust (which has a helpful website: www. memorialsbyartists.co.uk) I discovered a wonderful engraver, Eric Marland. He put a cat on a headstone recently, but was obliged to carve the pussy on the portion of the headstone that was to be buried under ground. ‘There seems to be a problem with having cats on gravestones,’ Eric explained. ‘Association with witchcraft etc.’
Eric shared with me the instructive letter he had received on the matter from the Diocese of Ely: ‘The engraving of animals on headstones is somewhat vexing. Members of the Diocesan Advisory Committee are quite pragmatic and take the view that if a creature is mentioned in the Bible or has a recognised association with a saint, then it may appear on a headstone. Thus otters, dogs, cranes, quail, stags, lions, foxes and many others are acceptable. Griffins as symbols of the incarnation are, but dragons are not.’
Cats don’t feature in the Bible and Saint Gertrude of Nivelles (for some, the ‘patron saint of cats’) is, apparently, not a proper saint and, anyway, associated with mice rather than cats. I am thinking of appealing to the General Synod or the Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, if he is ready to let a divorcee marry in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, surely he will allow me a pussycat on my gravestone?
Have you noticed how, nowadays, nobody dies? They ‘pass away’ or – worse – they simply ‘pass’, as if they can’t think of an answer on Mastermind. I have no objections to euphemisms as such. This one I loathe simply because it feels so namby-pamby. When Robert Mugabe goes, for example, I don’t want the newsreader to tell me that he has passed away. I want to hear that he has popped his clogs at last, fallen off the perch, pegged out, given up the ghost and gone to his just reward. Or better still (to use the euphemism I once heard the talkshow host Rush Limbaugh use when announcing the death of another dictator): ‘He has assumed room temperature.’
According to the results of a survey emailed to me by a fellow member of the Queen’s English Society, the three sweetest-sounding words in the English language are mellifluous, serendipity and discombobulate. These days, the three sweetest-sounding words in the Brandreth lexicon are ‘delete, delete, delete’.
I can’t take any more emails. Seriously, I can’t. As I write this, there are upwards of 400 of them glowering at me from the in-box. Every morning, first thing, I eliminate the trash – the obvious ads, the special offers, the appeals from alumni associations that pretend they want me to be part of their ‘community’ but actually only want my cash – but I am still left with scores of messages and I have no idea how to sort the wheat from the chaff. My friend Merlin Holland is as much a victim as I am – more so because he is the grandson of Oscar Wilde and the recipient of thousands of emailed enquiries from Wilde scholars and enthusiasts desperate for his input. Merlin tells me he is thinking of having an automatic reply to emails simply quoting what Oscar once said to W B Yeats: ‘I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a bad habit of answering letters.’
I like an anniversary. I ended 2017 taking part in programmes celebrating fifty years of my favourite radio show, Just A Minute. I began 2018 marking the demise of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols. They broke up forty years ago, on 14th January 1978. I am proud to say I met their lead singer, Johnny Rotten, in his prime. We were checking into the Midland Hotel, Manchester, at the same time and boldly I shook his hand and said, ‘Exciting to meet you, Mr Rotten.’ He replied: ‘F*** off.’
The 27th of January marks the sixtieth anniversary of the broadcast of what some regard as the best-ever edition of The Goon Show: an episode entitled The Curse of Frankenstein. Over the years I met all the Goons, and Harry Secombe gave me his last interview. It was a telephone interview, broadcast live one Sunday afternoon in April 2001. I was in the LBC radio studio in London. Sir Harry was at his home, standing on the landing. As we concluded our conversation, he emitted one of his famous squeals of excitement and the line went dead. It transpired that he’d ended our chat with an exuberant step backwards and fallen down the stairs. He died three days later. He was a lovely man, big-hearted and hugely gifted, but am I alone in finding the Goons not remotely funny?