Snippets

Alan Bennett, English playwright and author of the delightful novella, The Uncommon Reader, carried pocket notebooks from 1964 to 1990 and recently set about organizing his jottings – observations, remarks by friends, overhead snatches of conversation.

Here are a few short excerpts from a much longer collection currently appearing in the London Review of Books:

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A. I’ve been salmon fishing.
B. It’s not the season.
A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise.

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A. (reading a letter aloud) Love and Kirkegaard?
B. (snatching it away) Love and Kind Regards.

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A note from Kevin Whelan, found when cleaning out some shelves, dated Dublin 3 October ’05. It’s a poem headed ‘Getting it Off My Chest’:

I’m bruised inside
from the
punches I’ve pulled.

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Comment by the mother of the late Frith Banbury, noted British actor and stage director:

‘If only one could do it with some clean part of the body, like the elbow.’

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A. I’m working on the structure of the cell.
B. Oh yes. Whether it has bars on the windows, that kind of thing?

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