Smiling in Slow Motion

JUNE

JUNE Sunday 2 Warm. The wind died away. HB slept away the morning. I painted the garden, all the flowers start to bloom. After lunch he built a bath for the bees swarming around the kitchen drain so they can drink elsewhere. At teatime John Vere Brown arrived with friends. He seemed well, in spite of his recent heart attack. While he took photos we went up to El Ray and talked to Pat in the garden she's growing. It's years since her railwaycarriage home was accidentally blown up by a film company - she still hasn't received any compensation, so she lives in the ruined remains of the place with dogs, cats, and her husband Albert. HB threw sticks for the dogs. We admired the night-scented stock and mignonette. Home later to read Frances Spalding's biography of John Minton - fairly conventional writing: 'Congenital homosexual' andthe sailors - aren't there one too many of them by the end? The Colony Club must have looked like a scene from South Pacific. Sad drunk generation: Minton, Keith Vaughan, Francis Bacon, my dear friend Robert Medley, all tanked up, squirming and screaming in the glass museum case. Turned in at eleven. The rain that was meant to blow in blew away. Poor dry garden. Monday 3 Frost has set in, the wind blows incessantly, whining round the eaves,even the refuse collectors have given up. HB cleans the kitchen looking like a French Revolutionary in his Jacobin hat, which he calls 'a National Health woolly knitted diaphragm'. I water the roses, the wind blows colder, the empty bus passes. Very quiet, no telephone calls. We are forgotten. 12 JUNE Anna Pavord came to write up the garden for the Independent and left me sea lavender and sweet rocket. 'Simply the finest iris in all England' flowered to keep HBhappy - he thinks I'm moonstruck. Californian poppies blazing away. Turned the bee bath into a lichen garden, shut the house up and drove back to London. Supper at Poon's restaurant and then off to see the screaming lambs film that has received so much praise. Anthony Hopkins put the frighteners on the audience, but the rest not up to it, the plot falls to pieces and the murderer is a tedious Gothic transvestite. Coffee at the Presto, which kept open for us. HB attacked my spots with Clearasil. Dreamt the night away. Tuesday 4 Naples Yellow has disappeared off the shelves at Rowney's. Sound dub in the gloom of De Lane Lea studios as the sun shines down outside; here the voices run back and forth: snoozad snoozsat or rather kcab dna htrof. Ken Butler sits beside me out of breath - he escaped from a mob in the south of India into the edit suite. Steven Waddington - myEdward has got a part with Danny Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. He had never flown before and arrived in LA with a videotape of Edward II. The BBC wants the beginning with the boys fucking recut. Reptilian highs: Ken says in Bombay the 'in' crowd get bitten by a snake for a four-day high with a thirty per cent chance of death. There's nothing like this in Dungeness - must be pretty dull down there. Simon Turner is going to build a castle in front of the playback screen with scavenged bits and pieces, everyone will contribute something to it. He will complete it with a moat of vodka. Royal College of Arts opening this evening, students as attractive as the work was dull, sculpture more interesting than painting, but all a pale imitation of the past. 13 SMILING IN SLOW MOTION Rushed to the cinema with Mike O'Pray, Richard Hamilton, Paul Huxley, to see a student's graduation film, all of us looking rather old, cheerful smiles. Ken studied at the RCA; he said the tutors treated you as if they were giving you their own money, rather than a grant - it's the same for me with the film-funding bodies. Supper at D'Aquise, Polish beer and sausages. HB's friend Camilla, in Bloomsbury batik dress, described her holiday in Leningrad - waving packets of Marlboro on street corners to stop cars and get lifts all over the city. HB says we should sell up, defect and live like tsars. It would be so cold we would have to spend everything...