Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Fifty years down, and another half-century still to go
Today I did something I haven’t done for years. I went out for lunch. It’s a Monday; so I felt bad about it. The lunch was delicious (watercress soup, double-baked cheese soufflé, raspberry crème brûlée), but the effect predictable. I came back home and fell fast asleep. That’s not good on a Monday. The working week is for working, not quaffing and sluicing.
As we are reminded in the Book of Proverbs, ‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond and want like an armed man.’
I have been working for more than fifty years and plan to go on doing so, both because I can’t think what else to do with my time and because I need the money.
I could be here for a while yet. My mother lived to be 96. My role model, Nicholas Parsons, is in his 95th year. My hero the Duke of Edinburgh turns 97 on 10th June. I recall meeting a Frenchwoman called Jeanne Calment who was 100, and she told me she had once met Vincent van Gogh. (Yes, I have shaken the hand that shook the hand that held the brush that painted those irises.)
Jeanne went on to live to the age of 122 years and 164 days. If I come anywhere near her record, I have another half-century of work ahead of me. I don’t mind. I don’t play golf. I’ve watched too much TV already. And in my experience, Noël Coward was right: ‘Work is more fun than fun.’
My lunch venue, by the way, was the Beefsteak Club in Irving Street, just off London’s Leicester Square.
My host was my friend Hugo Vickers, writer and historian, who was kindly waiting in the street for me, because the Beefsteak, like all the traditional gentlemen’s clubs in London, doesn’t put its name on its front door. At least, Hugo knew the way in. When another of my grand friends, the lovely Lord James Douglas-hamilton, entertained me to lunch at Pratt’s, off St James’s, he, too, was waiting for me in the street.
Being a touch more eccentric than Hugo, however, Lord James was unable to find his club’s front door. We wandered up and down the street together until another club member turned up and showed us the way in.
Hugo reminded me that when the late Duke of Devonshire was asked, ‘Do you belong to Pratt’s?’, he replied, ‘No. Pratt’s belongs to me.’
I told Hugo that I had once asked the Duke, a man of the world and no fool, if he had any guidance in the matter of mistresses.
‘Well, the French have their strengths,’ he told me. ‘They’re very sophisticated. And the Italians are very agreeable – great fun, in fact. But if you want my advice, stick to English women. They know the rules.’
I have my work cut out this summer. I am returning to the Edinburgh Fringe in August with a new one-man show called Break a Leg!
It’s me on stage for an hour, telling stories and evoking some favourite performers of stage and screen, especially leading ladies, from Celia Johnson and Margaret Rutherford to Judi Dench and Kourtney Kardashian. The challenge, frankly, hasn’t been writing the script: it’s been learning the lines.
I’m nearly there – as I should be. Recent research from the department of neurobiology at Columbia University has established that new brain cells grow as quickly when you are in your seventies as when you are in your twenties. Remembering things, it seems, does not have to get more difficult as you grow older. According to the scientists at Columbia, gradual mental decline ‘is not the inevitable process many of us think it is’.
The researchers made their discovery after counting the number of new cells growing in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes memories and emotions. They found that around 700 brain cells were created each day, even in the oldest people they studied, and that there was no difference in the hippocampus in young and old brains. Now you know that, what’s your excuse?
I write a bit, perform a bit and do a bit of broadcasting, but most of my income these days comes from hosting different industry awards ceremonies. The other night, I was honouring the unsung heroes and heroines who work in catering, providing meals in prisons and hospitals, schools and care homes. The prize I was most pleased to present was to the chef who struggled with the challenge of creating appetising meals for dementia sufferers who have lost all interest in what they eat and so, often, unless helped, don’t eat at all.
The chef had hit on the idea of creating meals that the people in his care home might have enjoyed when they were children. His greatest success was the pudding he came up with: small sticks of bright pink candyfloss. When they saw it being brought in to the dining room, the old folk looked up and began to laugh and applaud. Better still, several of them asked for more.
At home I still have a landline. I’ve no idea why. Whenever the telephone rings, I know it will be either Barry Cryer or Nicholas Parsons. Only people in their eighties and nineties make calls on a landline nowadays. The world is changing fast. What it will be like in 2070, when I am 122, heaven knows.
Gyles Brandreth is appearing at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 1st-26th August