You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

The London Review has published Alan Bennett's diary every year since 1984.

Here he reads extracts from his diary for 2011,

which appears in full in the issue of the LRB dated 5th January 2012.

6th of January 2011.

The alterations we've been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian, who's unsmiling but

an excellent carpenter, a Nugène, much jollier and from New Zealand, who supervised it all.

Walking round the job this evening, Rupert is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath

a crudely made wooden cross.

He takes this to be the work of Max, who, scarcely out of his teens, already has two children,

and is, I imagine, Catholic.

Rupert, whose feelings about religion are more uncompromising than mine, finds the cross disturbing,

and is determined to ask Eugene to tell Max to take it down.

I'm less exercised by it, seeing it as some sort of dedication,

the sort of thing, though more crude, that a medieval workman might have put up at the completion of a job.

We are both of us wrong, as when Eugene is approached, he explained it's not across at all,

but a makeshift coat hanger is rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.

Fifteenth of April.

Seeing a banana skin on the pavement

reminds me how, when I first read the dandy and the beano,

the presence of a banana skin meant that inevitably it was going to be slipped on.

No matter that at that time, in the early 1940s, few children had seen,

...