Any Human Heart

Hot crumpets with butter and jam – what could be more ambrosial? The day I can’t enjoy these pleasures will signal some kind of death of the soul.

And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living – and will live – and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. Yo

and for the first time in my life wished I had a television set. Perhaps I should have gone next door to Kwaku’s.2 But in the end I prefer my imagination.

These final acts in a writer’s life usually go unrecorded because the reality is too shaming, too sad, too banal. But, on the contrary, it seems to me to be even more important now, after everything that has gone before, to set down the facts as I experience them.

Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years’ time, if we’re still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years’ time I’ll be in my mid sixties and

Now I’m here in New York it’s as if the blinds that had been lowered on my life have all been lifted. Sunlight floods the house.

I’m simply not equipped, temperamentally, to stay at home and live a circumscribed, rural, English life. I absolutely need variety and surprise; I have to have the city in my life – I’m essentially urban by nature – and also the prospect and reality of travel. Otherwise I’ll desiccate and die.

At one moment she leant forward to refill my teacup and her shawl ends fell apart and I found myself eyeing her figure, the fullness of her curves – for God’s sake, why am I writing like some romantic novelist? This journal is for ultimate frankness, total honesty. I stared covertly at her breasts and her haunches and tried to imagine her naked.

Why do we urge ourselves on in this way, us journal-keepers? Do we fear the constant threat of backslide in us, the urge to tinker and cover up? Are there aspects of our lives – things we do, feel and think – that we daren’t confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record? Anyway, I’m sure I vowed to tell the truth, t