A Londoner's Diary

ondon? What's that? I have a house in London, but I haven't been there much in the past few weeks. Like every other denizen of 'the big pie' or whatever London is, I get off out of it in the summer.

I go to Suffolk. Is it becoming too much like the Hamptons? How should I know? I have never been to the Hamptons. But beautifully honed Walberswick is a media mini-break essential now. The annual fete looks like a preview of the Edinburgh Television Festival.

I used to go on holiday in Suffolk when it was considered dull. I liked it dull. I still like my bit of South Suffolk, near Ipswich, because Ipswich is considered much too dull by those on their way to exciting Aldeburghian Suffolk. I don't think the people who go to these groovy nodes ever leave for the actual countryside in case they miss some treasure hunt or barbecue, but I silently grind my teeth when newly promoted executive producers tell me that they're going to 'somewhere called Orford' for the summer. Hah! You should have been there when Orford was so dull you had to get on the bus to go to Ipswich for fun.

But, dear me, the East must be the place to do business in the sultry months. I am organising a grand Charity Challenge for the Hackney Empire in the autumn. Alan Sugar will set 15 separate teams a task and then reconvene at the end of 30 days to award prizes and make acerbic assessments. It's good for teams and companies and raises money for a worthy cause. But we had to postpone it because nobody can find anybody to make any bloody decisions in bloody August.

They're all crabbing in Walberswick.

I was at the Empire for Eddie Izzard's triumphant show in July for Mo Mowlam's charity. She came on stage and was so ill she stumbled and fell, but still funny, practical and strong. How quickly people go.

Because everybody takes August off, I can feel lighthearted about doing f*** all myself. I interrupt Suffolk to go to Copenhagen to sail a boat. In a few hours I am sailing in the Oresund. I predict that Venn, a placid island where Tycho Brahe revolutionised astronomy, will soon become like Walberswick.

There are huge winds, though. Bits pop off the boat and it has to go back to the menders.

However, I do feel oddly guilty about leaving London, because I want to demonstrate that I can take it. I live very centrally. The 7/ 7 bombs went off two blocks away.

The first I knew about it was when my son George rang to find out if we were all right. I thought he was ringing about my operation. One of the second, fake ones went off at our nearest Tube. This time I was away, so I missed being strong and determined and gutsy, as all Londoners were supposed to be. I felt especially guilty that I hadn't gone to gawp at the sardine-tin bus in Russell Square. This is because it was 'history'.

If my grandchildren ask me, do I tell them, 'Yes, it went off just around the corner, but, no, I never saw it or noticed it, really.' Ihave just made a film about Arthur Ransome who covered the Russian Revolution for the Daily News, married Trotsky's secretary and was investigated for treachery. Not many people know about this side of the Swallows and Amazons author. As a war correspondent, it was his job to get to the street revolutions of the Soviets, and he trotted about with a spring in his step. His friends disapproved of his enthusiasm.

I wonder how many ordinary Russians noticed some banging going on, but carried on regardless, until they found the Bolsheviks were about to line them up for shooting. History sweeps by two blocks away. We really should go and have a look at it rather than demonstrate our gutsy natures by going to Suffolk as normal.

Now I'm back, the wind turns chilly and everything gets busy again. The only time anybody can meet is over breakfast. Seven in the morning is still pretty early in Portobello and out in the streets the breezy meet the unhealthy.

Earnest businessmen in stringy shorts and big-shouldered delivery men barge shadowy, bearded thin people off the pavement. It's difficult to work out whether these shambling freaks are on their way home or off to sell expensive shoes for a living. Perhaps both, except, of course, that the shops don't open in Notting Hill until 11am.

I have to buy shirts and socks and the only place open is the combined cafe and clothing emporium. It's open for breakfast meetings. Every cafe in Notting Hill is packed with well-scrubbed men with beady eyes clutching folders and tapping their feet. But downstairs at just past nine there are three of us hurriedly shopping before the meetings start. Jigsaw and Paul Smith ought to try early opening for pre-breakfast-meeting emergency clothing purchases.

They would throng with joggers.

Frankly I have quite enough shirts already, but an edict has come from my next job which starts on Monday. (A documentary version of Three Men in a Boat, with Rory McGrath and Dara O'Briain. Griff in a skiff. Three berks in a punt.) I must take three matching pairs of trousers and three matching shirts so that I can be filmed for any part of the film at any part of the week.

This is all very well, but the audience will assume that I never changed my clothes over the entire seven days. Even on my own real boat I manage to wear a clean shirt every day, not stretch three over a week. It's another example of the demands of documentary television. 'Reality' they call it. A period drama set on the Zambesi and directed by David Lynch would be less contrived.

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