Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...

In The London Review of Books, Alan Bennett- the English author and playwright (including the delightfully subversive An Uncommon Reader) has been excerpting his diaries from last year.

Here's a sample (links added by Waldo):

8 May. Cheered this morning when Daniel, the young man from Detroit who lives opposite, wishes me a happy 80th birthday for Friday, saying he’d read the stuff in the papers about the BBC interview I did with Nicholas Hytner, the ‘shocking’ revelation that I don’t read much contemporary English fiction and all the tired old stuff about treason that I’ve been saying since 1988 and A Question of Attribution. ‘It’s great,’ says Daniel (who’s off to Cuba next week), ‘that you can still piss people off however old you are.’