Yammer
[…] I said, ‘how do I know you’re the vicar? Have you any identification?’ So he shoves a little cross round the door. I said, ‘what’s this?’ He said, ‘a cross.’ I said, ‘a cross doesn’t mean anything. Youths wear crosses nowadays, hooligans. They wear crosses in their ears.’ He said, ‘not like this. This is a real cross. A working cross. It’s the tool of my trade.’
I was still a bit dubious then I saw he had cycle clips on, so I let him in.
– Excerpt from A Lady of Letters, by Alan Bennett (performed by the wonderful Patricia Routledge)
One of my favourite antidotes to insomnia is talking books, and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues are so fine that I sometimes regret falling asleep in the middle.
Both volumes are tales of illusion and denial: self-deluded narrators unwittingly laying themselves bare, although the ones in volume 2 are decidedly more macabre – not a whiff of redemption.
‘One has to remember that joie de vivre has never been my strong point,’ explains Mr. B.
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