Good riddance to 2024

00:00 11:37

Robert Bathurst has narrated this article for you to listen to.

January. When the assisted dying bill comes in, I’ll be first in the queue. Non-stop nosebleeds, Covid-esque symptoms, leg cramps, a cough resistant to antibiotics, and unremunerated press interviews for my Burton/Taylor book. In the old days I’d be in New York, running amok with publicity handmaidens, going on television and racking up bills in the Gramercy Park Hotel. Now everything is done from the back-bedroom here in Hastings, where I dwell in the slum district, my window overlooking immigrants doing their laundry.

Paul Bailey went to the trouble of getting his name removed from my acknowledgements. That’s real hatred

February. First anniversary of my myocardial infarction, when I collapsed in Morrisons car park. A good place to try to drop dead, as there are people about and the girl in the pharmacy knew how to use the defibrillator. Air ambulance helicopter to hospital, the works. My rib smashed from the vigorous CPR. No time to recuperate, either, as I had the proofs of my book to sort out, ‘sensitivity awareness’ editors to combat, the usual nonsense. The trouble I had getting ‘booby-doohs’ into print, my designation for Sophia Loren’s big knockers.

Griff Rhys Jones invited me to lunch with his pals in the Golden Dragon, Gerrard Street. Everyone said they’d see me later at Gyles Brandreth’s party. This was unlikely as I hadn’t been invited to Gyles Brandreth’s party. First thing next morning, Gyles Brandreth was on the phone. He’d assumed it was a well-orchestrated practical joke: ‘You weren’t there because you hadn’t been invited.’ I thanked him for the clarification. Well, you have to laugh. He does a great deal for charity, and when a raffle prize was dinner with Gyles Brandreth, an old lady enquired: ‘If I win, can I go by myself twice?’ Or was that Nicholas Parsons? Same difference.

March. Stansted for Austria. I hate travel. I hate leaving the house. I make an exception for Austria, where I have a house, well, birdcage-sized flatlet, in the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl. Took the train to Vienna, where I sat in the bar car giving the apricot schnapps a hammering. Der Rosenkavalier at the Staatsoper, supper at the Sacher, lunch at Café Landtmann. I should have been wearing a top hat and a coat with an astrakhan collar, like Anton Walbrook in a Michael Powell movie.

April. My mother’s 90th birthday party in Thornhill, Cardiff, conveniently near the crematorium. Took the children on a grand tour of the sacred sites – the family farm, long since lost to creditors; the big red brick Edwardian villa in Bedwas where I grew up, long since turned into a care home; Bassaleg Comprehensive School, where I was unfeasibly precocious, now of course a ‘ysgol’ with a meaningless motto about ‘credo a pherthyn’, believing and belonging.

May. In Normandy I learnt a new word – cambriolage. We’d had a break-in, but they must have been sarcastic burglars because they didn’t steal anything, save earrings my wife never wore anyway and a set of Magdalen cufflinks I’d not have been seen dead in. The gendarmes are now looking out for a gypsy wearing Magdalen cufflinks. I hope he’s seen dead in them.

June. To Margate. We are frequently in Margate, looking after the grandchild, who was born on the Tuesday after I’d had my heart do on the Sunday. I don’t know what people mean when they go on about Margate’s resurgence as a cultural hotspot. The Nayland Rock Hotel and shelter, where ‘The Waste Land’ was composed, are derelict. There is spray-paint graffiti everywhere. Parks and gardens are not maintained. Fountains don’t work. The council has no money to run anything because everything goes on housing illegal immigrants and paying through the nose for special needs education.

July. Newport is worse. I broke the journey here on my way to a literary festival in Pembrokeshire. All the Victorian and Edwardian buildings and shopfronts crumbling. The Westgate Hotel, scene of hunt balls and masonic dinners, shuttered up for decades, the wrought-iron balustrades weed-choked, rusting. Unrecognisable from the bustling town of my childhood.

Made a detour to Pontrhydyfen, the Burton birthplace. It’s a quaint village, with steep hills and viaducts, not at all the deprived place of legend. Found the grave of Burton’s parents, where there is also a memorial slab to Burton himself, ‘Seren Cymru ar Byd’ – Star of Wales and the World. I found that rather moving.

August. Pembrokeshire (when we got there – Christ, what a distance) was lovely. Haverfordwest reasonably unspoilt. Plenty of Georgian buildings about. And nobody speaks Welsh, always a plus.

September. News reached me that my Burton/Taylor book is on view and discussed by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, before one of them takes a suicide pill, in the new Almodóvar film, The Room Next Door. It makes me seem like a Smirnoff bottle in a Bond film. My suspicion is that the red cover appealed to Pedro’s fabled colour sense.

October. An abdominal aortic aneurysm is the latest. A further referral to a vascular chap in Eastbourne. A friend who is in Casualty asked the medical adviser on set, a surgeon, if the family of a private patient receives a refund, should the patient croak on the table. ‘Yes, if we haven’t got the money off them first.’

November. I hear ‘literary’ novelist Paul Bailey has died, aged 87, at the end of last month. He went to the trouble of getting his agent to contact Quercus/Hachette to have his name removed from my acknowledgements. That’s real hatred. Yet he was the person who’d told me what Burton was like, on stage at the Old Vic in the 1950s.

December. Hopes raised. Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who has had success with Rivals on Disney+, has acquired my rights for a six-parter about Burton and Taylor. No one from his company has been in touch with me and maybe it’ll all fizzle, as these things do, but it ought to be very lurid if made. My HBO Peter Sellers film was recently shown in Poland and I received 4p in royalties. How far will that stretch in Lodz?