You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. In today's episode, Alan Bennett reads his diary for 2021.

Diary for 2021 by Alan Bennett.

31st of December 2020. My year ends when Rupert takes me up to a depot in Peckwater Street in Camden,

which has been kitted out as a vaccination centre. Though neither of us quite knows where it is,

we realise we must be getting close from the number of 80-year-olds and carers making their way off

the Kentish Town Road, all on the same errand. Rupert isn't allowed in, and I go fairly

briskly through a series of waiting rooms before reaching the vaccination room.

It's busy, but quiet, and notable considering the presence of so many

aged patients for the absence of chuntering. Everyone, not surprisingly, seems in good humour.

My only complaint is that since I'm isolating with my partner, it would seem sensible to vaccinate him too, but then not all the staff at the centre been vaccinated either.

15th of January 2021.

Channel 8, London Live, can be relied on for 1940s films, many of them rubbish.

Today it's the Chiltern Hundreds, which isn't rubbish, but a well-plotted light comedy written by

William Douglas Hume, with the legendary A. Matthews, Cecil Parker,

and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the

Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles, including Katharina in The Taming of the True,

"'my voice had broken at long last, and this was the first male role I was allowed to play.

"'I say I know the play well, but in those days I just used to learn my own part,

"'and that not very well, plus a rough acquaintance

with my cues, and no sense at all of the plot or direction of the play. I don't think I ever

understood what the Taming of the True was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare, and who played

Beecham in the Chiltern Hundreds, was John Scaife,

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