Coming home through LAX late last year a steely eyed guardian of your gates peered suspiciously at my Green Card and, as is now sadly customary for we poor semi-citizens of your great and growing empire,  finger printed me and photographed my eyeballs.

“How long have you been a Green Card Holder?” he asked suspiciously, though his screen could surely have told him that and much much more.

“Oh  I have had it for ages” I said “More than twenty years.”

“Then why aren’t you an American?”  

“Erm.  Er…Well…”

I was flustered.   I was bothered.  Was this a proper line of questioning?   Of course you must never complain to a Customs Officer, or they’ll have you bent over in a back room snapping on their rubber gloves ready to poke around in your rectum.  Why is it arseholes always choose the arse for punishment?   I sometimes wonder if  those alien abductions when sophisticated beings from another planet descend in glistening saucers to perpetrate anal penetrations on poor witless rednecks is not actually some Alien Customs program.  Or maybe an extra-terrestrial pro gay marriage program.  Do the rednecks say as they feel the alien probe on their little redneck buttocks “Why aren’t you an American?”  

What should I say?  What is the right thing to say?  My thoughts were racing but somewhere deep inside me outrage was simmering.   Enough was enough.

“Because sir I am an Englishman.  Born and raised in England under the bombs of Hitler.  A member of one of its most prestigious Universities dating back to 1498. A man who watched England win the World Cup at Wembley in 1966 and Man U lift the European trophy in 1968.  An Englishman, a proud Elizabethan, heir to the traditions of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wilde, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Dickens, a graduate of Cambridge University, a pre-baby bubble boomer, a survivor of the Sixties and a member of one of the most famous comedy groups in the world.

“Is it not enough I live in your fair country and pay taxes to your bankrupt system, ruined by the systemic avoidance of tax by your greedy corporations, who claim rights hitherto reserved for citizens and earn exemptions for themselves thereby bankrupting California, because you must not shackle business, oh no, better to shackle your schools and social systems than threaten one bonus payment to another billionaire.  Now you wish me to put my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to a series of greedy, gay bashing, racist, Republican retards who deny evolution, and the rights of women and would return America to the dark ages of Puritan New England?

“The French do not shrug at me sardonically and ask me why I am not French. The Norwegians do not stop me on their shores and insist I wear thick knitwear and a large red anorak.  The Swedes don’t demand I marry a pale blonde and retire into the countryside suffering from Ibsen and ennui. The Australians don’t force me into baggy pants to stand on planks with orange sunscreen hurtling across their shark-infested waters singing Advance Australia Fair.

“No, sir, enough, sir, I am a tax payer, a member of your Academy, a Grammy winner, a Tony winner, a father of an American, a lover of America, married to an American wife with an American child but not, sir, an American!”

Did I say any of that?

Are you kidding me?  I fear the alien anal probe.

“Good question” I replied.

“Eric is in the country finishing a novel.

 He’s not a writer, he’s just a very slow reader.”          

                                                                        Ancient Barry Cryer joke.

Why do I keep my Reader’s Diary so assiduously when I eschew all other tasks?

Good question.   But who’s asking?    I am.  Aha!   Who are you?  I am me.

Who are we talking to when we talk to ourselves?

I think all writers talk to themselves.  That is why they write.  That is why I write anyway: to find out what I think.  To discover that hidden voice inside yourself is the great joy of writing.  Oh look what I think!  Writing is a search for the undiscovered self.  But writers also write because they read.  Would it be possible to find a writer who did not?  Someone who hadn’t come to writing first through the joy of reading?  I doubt it.  They wouldn’t be much of a writer. Reading opens up the realm of the mind, reading connects you intimately with the voices of hundreds of great thinkers, and reading keeps you honest.

I love books and I love reading and a long time ago on my first computer I began to list the books in my London library for a game we were working on.  So I have an incomplete list of books from before 1992,  and then from 1993 I listed books as I read them.  Even in those days I was getting to the age when I would be half way through an Elmore Leonard and have a sudden feeling that I knew what was about to happen.  Keeping a list was a simple and efficient aide memoir, made possible by the computer age.  I began to add brief comments for myself, so I could recall what I thought about a particular book and often I included notes on where I was when I was reading something.  (Hence this summer’s sub heading:  Reading Jane Austen in Venice.)   Occasionally I would rant at some poor author, or the title would be followed by a cryptic “Chucked it!”  I am an intolerant reader, forgiving in public but ruthless in the study.

Barchester Towers.                               Anthony Trollope                                           March 1993

So memorable I have forgotten the title. (Irony marks needed)  Something to do with becoming Dean of somewhere.  I find him effete and I’m afraid dull.   John Major’s favourite.   Figures.   I left the book in Mustique….

May Week Was In June.                       Clive James                                                           April 1993

Clive and I!   The ego has landed.   More tales of the man who took Cambridge by storm.    It was love at first sight.   Clive James fell in love with himself at first sight.  Curiously touching, funny and pretentious at the same time.  Just like Clive.

Discreet references to friends would creep in.   Mike Nichols invariably introduced me to some new writer I would enjoy, and since the list was only for myself there was no reason not to mention this.   So, bit by bit, it became a kind of intellectual journal, a map of where my mind had been and what it had been thinking while reading.

Why did I begin to share my reading list online?

That is harder to explain.   Did I want to say “Look at clever me, look at all these books I’ve read?”   Partly I suppose.  Ego is extremely hard to deny.

I first published my reading list after I moved to California in the Nineties, when I was still running PythOnline, a quotidian task which eventually became promethean.  My ambition had been to create an amusing web site to which the Pythons could contribute and where I could vent my occasional spleen and unfold my propensity for satire.  But as the Python contributions soon dried up and I was left to deal with it solo,  the task became increasingly frustrating.   Each day there would be an ever growing mountain of Python questions to answer, and when I did attempt to answer them:

“You’re not Eric Idle” they would say.

“Yes I am” I would reply.

“No you’re not” they would insist.

“Then fuck off” I would add.

“Oh.  You are him.”

So I shared my reading list initially out of desperation to keep it real, and to provide fresh material, for soon I found I had a highly unpaid job, a monster that daily demanded new food.

There were a couple of unexpected bonuses from publishing.  First there was a small but grateful feedback from lonely readers round the world who were happy I had shared with them.  This was an encouraging step forward from fielding endless Python questions, (“Which one were you?”) and secondly, the splendid Dave Eggers, whom I had got to know when he wrote a very amusing profile for The New Yorker about the chair I wrote Spamalot on (which, yes, I have carefully preserved in plastic wrap for The Rainy Day Sale) emailed me to ask if Michael Chabon could be in touch.   What a lovely gift that was.  And yes Dave, I will always do your Reading Benefits despite being rather tired of performing.   We must encourage reading.   It is the great escape for the young.  It opens doors into the mind of ourselves and others.  It permits the solitary to communicate, even when they feel most isolated.  What possible use is it?   Every single possible use.   It defines us.  It creates us.  It involves us.

So I have been assiduously keeping my summer reading list,  it’s been a good one with new books by Martin Amis, William Boyd, Jake Arnott, and (my tip for The Booker) John Banville.

I’ll publish it shortly.   Meanwhile if you check out Reading  you’ll see where I got to so far this year before I set off on my travels…

Sunday night in the Olympic stadium was one of those extraordinary experiences, a unique moment in my life, and one that I shall never forget.

If ageing is finding newer and better ways to scare the shit out of yourself, then this was perfect:  live in front of millions of people in a highly technical show with even the Dress Rehearsal cancelled and only everything to go wrong, I had occasion to question my sanity in agreeing to doing something quite so silly quite so publicly.

About a year ago the rather brilliant director Kim Gavin and The Head of Pretty Much Everything Else took me out to lunch and asked me to do Always Look On The Bright Side of Life at the Closing Ceremony.  They took me round the completed stadium and the work site that would so brilliantly come together as a pleasure zone and asked me to keep quiet about it, as they wanted it to be a surprise.  I was happy to agree but now I can say I was very proud to have been selected for the British Show Biz Team at The Olympic Games, I am a Comedy Olympian and I was also hoping to win a Brass Medal.

Waiting to go on was surreal, I was following The Spice Girls, and with the sound track in my ears and having to sing live and people also yelling in my ear I could only go forward and hope.   I could hear nothing else.   Not the crowd, not anyone, so when immediately I finished someone asked me “Are you happy?”  I could only say “I’m happy it’s over.” But with hundreds of emails from all round the world I now know it worked and the reviews were magnificent and it was all worth it, and yes reading the comments of my friends made me very happy indeed.

The magnificent Timothy Spall confessed that with seconds to go, crouched in a chair at the top of Big Ben with a homburg hat ready to be Churchill he was absolutely terrified.  Posh said she was scared stiff, they hadn’t performed in a while, but the Spice Ladies all looked exquisite and I got hugs from almost all of them.  I got to watch David Beckham playing with his kid, very sweet, I got to hang with my new pal Russell Brand (who stars in Dick), I got nice hugs from Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry, to whom I said “Now we know who we are:  we are the sort of people who will turn out for nothing!”  I had a nice hello from Ray Davies in a golf cart, a big squeeze from the adorable Annie Lennox, bristling with bonhomie and normality, greetings from Brian May and the Queen boys, and Nick Mason whom I have known since 1979, who said he was moved by the whole thing (me too) and a lovely hug from the adorable and extremely beautiful Naomi Campbell.  We did a crap movie together in the nineties and I found her delightful, then and now.

So though we did not get the dress rehearsal we had been promised – it was amazing they erected the stage in time anyway – by show time there was only one thing to do, fingers crossed and go for it.  After all it’s not every day you get to follow The Spice Girls.   Hiding under the stage awaiting my cue with eight of the most exquisite scantily dressed models, all wearing angel wings, I asked a stage hand who was staring at them open mouthed, “Is this Heaven?”

“Oh yes” he said.

“Funny they don’t look like virgins to me”  I said.

Odd how a gag can calm you down before you face the storm and suddenly I could hear my pal Jeff singing Mr. Blue Sky, which was my cue to crouch down in the hole waiting to emerge.

And in a blur it was over.

In fact the only downer of the whole experience was the usual attempt by The Daily Mail to create a war between us Pythons, and in particular between me and John Cleese.  One thing you can say about The Daily Mail is they never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.  This morning I was amazed to read the hoary old lie about Pythons at war with each other trotted out yet again, with a series of old “quotes” this time “written” (perhaps “made up” is a better word) by a an old ex-girlfriend of Terry Gilliam’s called Glenys Roberts, a woman who might easily have been made up by Private Eye.  They tried this on last December announcing a war between myself and John Cleese and I wrote at once to John, assuring him I love him, and have always been grateful for the many laughs he has given me throughout my life.  He replied warmly and we have been on very good terms ever since.   Now on the occasion of his marriage they try again.   So I have written to him again, congratulating him on his marriage and wishing him great happiness.  Lest there be any mistake.  I like John Cleese.  He is very, very funny.   He has been working incredibly hard over the last few years, and I wish him well for the rest of his life.   I like the rest of the Pythons.   We get on very well.  I do not like The Daily Mail.   I can only urge you to laugh at them.   Best yet, ignore them.   And of course “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.”

Today is a red letter day.   Some of us have waited a long time for the creeps and scumbags who worked for The News of the World to face the ugly music they created.

Let’s face it, The News of the World with their God given right to hound and bully people, was always a nasty rag: in the Fifties exposing sex amongst the middle classes and the endless naughty vicars who in those more innocent days had sex only with young women.  Of course they hounded gays, but they were asking for it weren’t they?   Often they hounded people to death.

Early on they discovered just how cheap it is to bribe policemen, Detective ranks particularly,  and in the Sixties they happily collaborated with the Metropolitan Police busting pop stars for possessing grass and helping to plant drug evidence to ensure conviction for The Stones and some Beatles.

With the coming of Murdoch the scene changed.  Suddenly he had five newspapers and they could change Governments.  “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” in the famous phrase of Baron Acton¸ but I prefer the finer quote from Stanley Baldwin attacking Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere (the leading press barons of his day) in a phrase suggested by his cousin  Rudyard Kipling:  “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”

During the Seventies there were legendary tales of fearless News of the World reporters bribing and sexually entrapping celebs and politicians in pubs and clubs and hotel rooms.   I once watched two young ladies making out in the Gents at a London club attempting to seduce a famous footballer friend of mine, who shall remain blameless, as he rolled his eyes and mentioned the name of the Publicist who was paying these girls to entrap anyone who wandered in for a quiet piss. How English is all this?  Hypocritical.  Devious.  Yes, very English.  The pursuit of unhappiness seems to be the watchword of the British Press, who are even more depressing than the English weather.

I first became aware of the devious dark arts of The News of the Screws in the early Eighties when a certain Mr. Jagger, a vocalist and avid cricket fan, invited me to stay with him and watch the Barbados Test Match.  On the first morning in the Pavilion our lovely American ladies were taught the rules of cricket by the legendary Geoffrey Boycott.  As we left him he was gently touching various parts of their bodies. “You can’t be out LBW here, you can’t be out LBW here,” his hands becoming ever more explicit.  I think finally they learned that Tits Before Wicket was not out.

As we made our excuses and left him to his fascinating lecture he looked up at me and said “’Ow come you and Mick have such lovely girls?”

“Well Geoffrey,” I said “There’s more ways than one of opening for England.”

At the time the English cricket team were being heavily beaten by a very strong West Indian side, and were obviously fairly glum about it, not only being thrashed on the field, but thrashed in the newspapers next day by the hacks, who, sozzled on rum, bum and expenses and sizzled by the sun had nothing much to do but lie around hotel pools and watch cricket.  (That’s a job?  Ed.)

Young, fit, healthy, athletic men on tour have been known to attempt to enjoy themselves, and  one of the greatest all-rounders ever to play for England had caught the attentions of the Press, penis envy being their number one vice.   This young man was having a problem with The News of The World, and was suing them for suggesting that he was having sex and drugs, not particularly surprising since everybody else in the Seventies was.  His error of course was to sue.  It’s often a bad idea to sue for what you might have been doing, (did Oscar die in vain?) but in his case the whole might of the Paper turned on him to expose his case.

At a break in play at the Barbados Oval, Mr. Jagger, who always has his ear very firmly to the ground, warned this young man that there was an entrapment plan in place.  A minor British film star whose name no one remembers had been paid by The News of the World to set him up and seduce him.  The classic honey trap.

“Oh I know all about her” he said.  “That’s no problem.”

Later that night, several of the players resorted to Mick and Jerry’s rented villa in the hills.  Accompanying the bowler was a girl I knew a little, a former Miss Barbados, quite young and certainly very attractive.  She told me she had brought white powder with her, but I was not interested in losing my brain cells although I could not help noticing that there some guests who appeared to have a lot of sinus problems and were forced to make frequent bathroom visits, which meant they talked a lot of nonsense very fast whenever they came out of the loo.  Mick and I shook our heads.  He is a wise man, and sees all.  Since I was with my goddess Tania I retired early to talk about the cricket, and to help her understand more about the LBW rules….

Next day it was blazoned all over the The News of the World, “My night with an English cricketer, sex, drugs etc. etc..”   She had turned him in.  She was a second string attack.  I think she got $15,000.    Collapse of his case of course.

Having witnessed this at first hand I was unsure what to do.  I was actually shocked.   Naïve and foolish, I know,  but the whole story intrigued me.  I am not a journalist.  It didn’t seem appropriate to write to the newspapers, so I wrote a musical.  Silly really, but it was about Sex, Royalty and Cricket, and was done on Radio Four with lovely songs by John Du Prez. I played a sinister journalist called Pile, and Gary Wilmott played a hotel owner called Nelson, “We turn a blind eye to most things.”   It didn’t stop the world, but it started a career.

Of course in hindsight those days now seem so naïve.  If you read Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman you will see just how sinister and deeply corrupting the whole thing became, further involving the Police and Politicians and Phone Tapping.  I recommend you do….the book is an eye opener.

And watch more cricket.  It’s good for you.