Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

We're taking the unusual step today of devoting our post to a "Diarist of the day". As readers of this blog will know, the main post of the day is followed by an entry from a diarist who wrote something on this particular date. Well, today's example is so splendid that it deserves the main billing rather than footnote status. The diarist is Alan Clark.

The late Alan Clark was handsome, talented and a Tory. He revelled in shocking his colleagues by saying and doing outrageous things. A self-confessed philanderer, Clark once admitted finding Margaret Thatcher "attractive" but added: "I didn't want to jump on her." His wife, Caroline Jane, stoically endured his infidelities for 40 years. After the details of his seduction of a South African judge's wife and two daughters made the headlines, she said: "If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers." Alan Clark on...

Eton...
"An early introduction to human cruelty, treachery and extreme physical hardship". Whereas Oxford was simply "a waste of time and petrol".

Style...
When told that New York City Mafia boss John Gotti wore $2,000 suits, he said: "I didn't know it was possible to buy one so cheaply."

Witty, flamboyant and scandalous, Alan Clark was also a diarist in the tradition of Samuel Pepys. Like Pepys, his style was superb and, like Pepys, he had that extraordinary ability to turn any incident into an observation on humanity. Here's his diary entry for 17 June 1990:

"This morning I killed the heron. He had been raiding the moat, starting in the early hours, then getting bolder and bolder, taking eight or nine fish, carp, nishikoi, exotica, every day. I had risen very early before five, with the intention of getting a magpie who has been pillaging all the nests along the beech hedge. But returned empty-handed. They are clever birds, and sense one's presence. Suddenly Jane [his wife] spotted the heron from the casement window in my bathroom. I ran down and took the 4.10 off the slab, cocked the hammer. He was just opposite the steps, took off clumsily and I fired, being sickened to see him fall back in the water, struggle vainly to get up the bank, one wing useless. I reloaded, went round to the opposite bank. Tom beat me to it and gamely made at him, but the great bird, head feathers bristling and eyes aglare, made a curious high-pitched menacing sound, his great beak jabbing fiercely at the Jack Russell. 'Get Tom out of the way', I screamed. I closed the range to about twenty feet and took aim. I did not want to mutilate that beautiful head, so drew a bead on his shoulder. The execution. For a split second he seemed to have absorbed the shot; then very slowly his head arched round and took refuge inside his wing, half under water. He was motionless, dead. I was already sobbing as I went back up the steps: 'Sodding fish, why should I kill that beautiful creature just for the sodding fish?' I cursed and blubbed up in my bedroom as I changed into jeans and a T-shirt. I was near a nervous breakdown. Yet if it had been a burglar or a vandal I wouldn't have given a toss. It's human beings that are the vermin."