Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Will you miss me when I’m gone?

My wife is merrily planning for life after my death

My wife is looking forward to my death. I don’t mean she is eager for my departure: she is simply anticipating it with a not-altogether-flattering degree of enthusiasm. Since the first lockdown, we have got into the happy habit of taking a daily walk together. We aim for 10,000 steps and we take them in assorted directions in the vicinity of our house. As we walk, we talk, and most of my wife’s chatter runs along the lines of where she might move to, the moment I die.

‘I couldn’t stay in the house – it’s too big,’ she says, ‘and it’s full of your clutter. That little workman’s cottage looks nice – what do you think?’ She regularly stops outside estate agents and surveys the properties on offer. ‘I’ll still want stairs. Stairs are good exercise. I like the look of this one – just two-up, two-down, and not too far from the shops.’

When I remind her that my mother lived to the age of 96 – so I could be around another quarter of a century – she simply laughs and says, ‘Yes, but your father died at 71 and look at your posture. There’s no hope. I’ve got to think ahead. You know it makes sense.’

In truth, I hope I do go first because I wouldn’t be a good widower. It’s bleak being left on your own, as I have been reminded reading volume three of Roy Strong’s diaries.

In 1971, when Roy was 35 and the wunderkind director of the National Portrait Gallery, he married the theatre and opera designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, 41. Despite some people’s assuming from his camp manner that Strong was gay, it was, as he puts it in the diary, ‘a full marriage’ in every sense.

When Julia died in 2003 of pancreatic cancer, Sir Roy was bereft. At 86, and no longer living in the beautiful home and garden they created together, it’s clear he still misses her every day.

I’d be lost without my wife, too – literally. I don’t know where the will is, or the fuse box. Now I come to think of it, I don’t even know where she keeps our passports. (I had a look for them just now. They aren’t in any of the obvious places.) She’s out having lunch with a widowed girlfriend. Again.

‘I’ve got to keep my friendships fresh,’ she trills, gaily. ‘Let’s face it – you could drop off the perch any time.’

Roy Strong, incidentally, is now among my all-time favourite diarists, up there with Pepys and Virginia Woolf. My other current bedside favourite is the great Arnold Bennett (1861-1937), whose woefully underrated The Old Wives’ Tale is my favourite novel and whose journals are full of mellow wit and wisdom.

Bennett understood marriage: ‘Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.’ He understood life: ‘The moment you’re born, you’re done for.’ He is full of good advice: ‘Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.’

One thing my wife won’t be doing when I’m gone is going to any Stephen Sondheim musicals. They are not her thing. She has a particular loathing for Sweeney Todd and couldn’t believe it when a Sondheim number (‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’ from Anyone Can Whistle) was one of my selection on Desert Island Discs. In the bar at the National Theatre, I once tried to introduce my wife to Sondheim. She wasn’t interested.

Sondheim was a genius and I had a particular soft spot for him because when a book of mine, The Joy of Lex, all about the fun of language, became a New York Times bestseller in 1983, he got in touch to say he wanted to turn it into a musical – with a cast of 26 singers and dancers, each one representing a different letter of the alphabet.

He was going to call the show Play on

Stephen Sondheim at 80, being applauded at the BBC Proms, July 2010

Words and got very excited about the idea of a four-part-harmony opening number, featuring four of the longest words in the language: floccinaucinihilipilification (it means ‘the act of estimating as worthless’ and dates from 1741), praetertranssubstantiationslistically (an adverb used in Mark McShane’s 1963 novel Untimely Ripped), pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s the name of a miner’s lung disease and was deliberately coined to be the longest word in the dictionary) and – wait for it – at 100 letters, bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk (from the third paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake).

As my wife could have told you, the show never happened. I wish it had.

Eat your heart out, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Sondheim was the real deal.

Gyles’s memoir, Odd Boy Out (Michael Joseph), is out now