Alan Bennett head-butted me on the nose the other day.
The night before leaving for Leeds, I decided to listen to the latest spoken word CD, "Hymn", by that city's favourite playwright son. Its cover features, like most of his CDs, a head-and-shoulders portrait of the author. It was on a pile of albums on a high shelf, and I couldn't be bothered to get a chair to reach. So I jumped up, basketball style, to grab it, but only succeeded in dislodging it enough for the CD to topple off the pile towards me. Being the world's worst sportsman, I failed to catch it with my open hands and instead inadvertently blocked its fall with the bridge of my nose.
So I spent Leeds and the rest of the week with a big red bruise on my nose. Sometimes a predilection for wearing heavy make-up has its practical uses too. I've been kicked by strangers at bus stops, but this is first time since school I've been hit full in the face. And by such a distinguished giant of modern literature, too.
It was the sort of thing that happens in some of Mr Bennett's less recent plays, the ones featuring jokey references to writers such as "Me, I'm Afraid Of Virginia Woolf". In "Forty Years On", one character delivers an extremely silly monologue about the Bloomsbury Set, and Virginia Woolf in particular : "I was distantly related to the Woolfs via an alsatian cousin".
Morrissey fans will recognise that the first song on his first solo album took its title, "Alsatian Cousin", from this same quote.
This Saturday teatime, there's a documentary TV series called "Art That Shook The World". Last week it was "Pet Sounds". This week it's Orlando.
Okay, it's about the Woolf book, not my former band who, indeed, did their amusing best to shake the world. Still essential viewing, though.
