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Messrs Bond and Bearryman are throwing, and have been kind enough to have invited me to, the Tighten Up Christmas Dinner tonight. Bondy having been my host and Hugh a fellow guest at last Sunday's Bacchanalia, I think I can expect something of a ribbing. I remember very little of its later stages and have little idea of what hi jinks occurred between mid afternoon and my waking up in the hotel at the Winning Post next morning. It seems likely that I may have well have lived up to the Kerouac paean to madness that I invoked before I set off.

The cup of Bernard Shaw's wants having been dashed from my lips, I have decided to adopt, for today at least, D.H. Lawrence's - as cribbed from The New Yorker:

The real way of living is to answer to one's wants. Not "I want to light up with my intelligence as many things as possible" but "For the living of my full flame-I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look abeastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man." Instead of that . . . we talk about some sort of ideas. I'm like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence.