Enough Said

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30 September. Around the time of our visitation, there was a letter in the Guardian saying that a sovereign remedy for moles was pickled onions. (I don’t like them much either.) Shelving my own distaste we invested in a jar (organic) from the village shop and dosed the molehills. The next morning all the onions had been ejected, with the lawn so called now smelling like a ploughman’s lunch.

Taking up where Keeping On Keeping On left off, Enough Said is Alan Bennett’s fourth collection of diaries and prose. Covering the turbulent years 2016 to 2024, the diaries take us through Brexit, lockdown, the reign of Johnson, the rise of Trump and the death of the Queen. In between, Alan holidays in Paris and Venice, returns to favourite haunts in England and visits churches, antique shops and the National Gallery. He journeys by train back and forth to Yorkshire, celebrates the herons, the newts and the street fairs, and laments the scarcity of curlews, the closure of the last local bank and the deteriorating welfare state. There is the premiere of Allelujah!, the revived Talking Heads, the publication of two Sunday Times bestsellers and the filming of The Choral.

2024 is the year that Alan turns ninety; he reflects on old age and the importance of luck. He looks back to childhood and recalls an idyllic wartime month as an evacuee. There is an extended piece about HMQ and on uncovering the extraordinary albums of publisher Roger Senhouse, the last lover of Lytton Strachey, acquired for £10 in the seventies.

A book for the bedside, this is poignant, funny, contemplative Alan Bennett, as he records life both personal and political in his most distinct of voices.