I needed an occasion before I could perform and even put on my suit for A-levels (or the Higher School Certificate as it was then). Rupert gets some testing kits from the pharmacy and I go through the procedure of a cotton wool stick up one nostril and the same up the other and then a quarter of an hour or so while we wait for the result. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. I stayed two or three times at the Pensione Accademia which was still off-limits to package holidays and had something of an English vicarage about it. According to another leaked message, Hancock rejected this, telling an aide that such a move “muddies the waters”.

House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Alan Bennett review

UK: Rishi Sunak hosts talks with Kamala Harris, vice-president of the US, at No 10, followed by a private dinner; Harris also delivers a policy speech on the future of AI at the US embassy in London; Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, speaks at the annual conference of the King’s Fund, a health think tank; start of Movember, the moustache-growing charity event held during November each year to raise funds and awareness for men’s health. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham once said that the power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law. Then there’s the intimate singing of the garden robins — their tunes have a melancholy note at this time of year. Lynn Wagenknecht [owner of the Odeon restaurant in New York] texts from New York saying there is dancing in the street and holds up the phone to let us hear the rejoicing. Sir, William Hague (Oct 31) correctly notes the dangers of the manipulative and persuasive capabilities of AI as a critical area for future regulation.

The last joke he told me, only a week or two before his death, concerned a couple walking down the street when they spot someone across the road.

House Arrest (Pandemic Diaries) Hardcover 5 May 2022

I never met the queen except once as part of an assembly line and I’m glad as I would have been cripplingly shy. Spanning a year, as ever, it begins in March 2020 and ends in March 2021, describing the beginning and the middle – if not quite the end – of the Covid-19 pandemic, with never-before-published entries from the first months of this year. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. Both Hancock and a serving health minister insisted that what the Telegraph billed as the key revelation – that advice to test everyone entering a care home for Covid at the start of the pandemic – was presented misleadingly and ignored other evidence. The Vonnegut link is one of the hundreds of intriguing facts in a new biography of the band, Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse (Palazzo Editions), written by John Aizlewood, a music expert and editor of Q magazine in its heyday.As always, I found Alan Bennett's writing style and social observations delightful, poignant and amusing but the book is so short that I felt a real sense of disappointment when I reached the end of his reflections, leaving me with a feeling of having been 'cheated'! Perhaps to be expected as the author gets older, many of the entries sparked various reminiscences in him, which were interesting. Normally, he eschews clichés, so I was shocked to find him saying that Victoria Wood’s performance of Let’s Do It was “the stuff of legend”.