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diaryDiariesA weeklong electronic journal.2NA=1154&NC=1192&DI=4098&PS=58313&PI=7315diaryfalsefalsespacernotembeddeddiaryHer Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of JordanHer Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of JordanQueen Rania of Jordan in New York.Rania Al Abdullah0I've met many celebrities this week, but the message that will stick with me most came from a little Indian girl.Woke up this morning, and the first thing I did was phone my son Hashem to see how he was feeling. He was napping, and I didn't get much out of him, but it was still comforting to hear his sleepy little voice. I can't wait to give him a big cuddle.nonotruenonotochyperlinkno200892423004PMWednesdaySepSeptember149/24/2008 6:30:04 PM633578634040000000200892610610PMFridaySepSeptember139/26/2008 5:06:10 PM633580311700000000diaryMaking Lipstick JungleMaking Lipstick JungleLipstick Jungle:A bad day on set.Andrew McCarthy0A bad day on set.Dec. 10, 2007—I find that in acting, one out of every 10 days is a breeze, a joy. Everything feels easy, carefree. I am in a zone where I don't really have to do too much, I'm relaxed and aware, and every choice seems inspired, and everything falls into place, and happy accidents occur left and right.nonotruenonotochyperlinkno20082453427PMMondayFebFebruary172/4/2008 10:34:27 PM633377432670000000200828121109PMFridayFebFebruary122/8/2008 5:11:09 PM633380694690000000diaryAt Home in ShanghaiAt Home in ShanghaiAt home in Shanghai.Deborah Fallows0Some tips on how to get by in China.I'm keeping my guard up even along my familiar path to school. I turned off busy Nanjing Xi Lu onto Qinghai Lu, which is a big sidewalk but is nonetheless overrun with bikes, scooters, and the occasional Buick (luxury car of choice) with tinted windows. Passing a fast-food restaurant and watching preparations for the lunch crowd, I had an epiphany: China is dangerous.nonotruenonotochyperlinkno2006111315906PMMondayNovNovember1311/13/2006 6:59:06 PM6329902314600000002006111711200PMFridayNovNovember1311/17/2006 6:12:00 PM632993659200000000diaryAdoption Approved!Eric WeinerA weeklong journal of a hopeful father-to-be.Eric Weiner0A weeklong journal of a hopeful father-to-be.Today is the big day—our court hearing. The judge will decide whether or not to approve the adoption. Not that long ago, these hearings were a mere formality, handshakes and smiles all around. But we've been warned to expect a real grilling.nonotruenonotochyperlinkno2005121912458PMMondayDecDecember1312/19/2005 6:24:58 PM6327059549800000002005122770514PMTuesdayDecDecember1912/28/2005 12:05:14 AM632713071140000000diaryA Visit With an Author, Activist, and Dickens FanTamara ChalabiA weeklong journal of a writer in Iraq.Tamara Chalabi0A weeklong journal of a writer in Iraq.The waiting game began when the last ballot box filled up. Waiting doesn't seem to be something people do well or enjoy. There is a tension in the air that rises in crescendo with every complaint about ballot-rigging.nonotruenonotochyperlinkno2005121213134PMMondayDecDecember1312/12/2005 6:31:34 PM63269991094000000020051216120827PMFridayDecDecember1212/16/2005 5:08:27 PM632703317070000000200311442731PMTuesdayJanJanuary161/14/2003 9:27:31 PM631781584510000000200311442731PMTuesdayJanJanuary161/14/2003 9:27:31 PM631781584510000000falsetruefalsefalsefalsefalsetrue20011018111443PMThursdayOctOctober2310/19/2001 3:14:43 AM6313904368300000002001103090133AMTuesdayOctOctober910/30/2001 1:01:33 PM631400292930000000By xAlexander ChancellorxChancellor, AlexanderAlexanderChancellorfalse12Alexander Chancellor is a columnist for the Guardian.611chancellor@dial.pipex.com011-44-207-602-8686011-44-171-602-8686#1 Souldern RdLondonW14-0JEEngland213144720011018111443PMThursdayOctOctober2310/19/2001 3:14:43 AM63139043683000000020011018105413PMThursdayOctOctober2210/19/2001 2:54:13 AM63139042453000000011for one week1998113092600AMMondayNovNovember911/30/1998 2:26:00 PM630480147600000000336820011018111443PMThursdayOctOctober2310/19/2001 3:14:43 AM6313904368300000002001101875152PMThursdayOctOctober1910/18/2001 11:51:52 PM631390315120000000Alexander Chancellor writes "International Papers" for Slate.DayOfWeekxEntry05        Well, the sun has finally come out, and the weekend starts tomorrow, so things aren't quite as bad as they have been. The only thing that is depressing me is my teeth. Anyone who has ever had dental problems will know how bad they are for morale. During the past few weeks I have had two back teeth extracted--one at the bottom and one at the top--and my dentist is in the process of having bridges made to cover the gaps. On Wednesday of next week, the first of these two bridges will be put in place, so that I will be able to chew my turkey at Christmas. But the whole business of going to the dentist gets me down. I belong to that minority of the British population who suffer from "dental phobia," people who are terrified in advance of the pain they expect the dentist to inflict.        My last dentist, Peter, was called "painless Pete" by his patients because he had never been known to hurt anyone--not even Jerry Hall, who was one of his clients. But I turned out to be the exception. I once lay in the chair watching him come out in beads of sweat while his reputation crumbled away before him as I failed to respond to an anesthetic. He gave me shot after shot of the stuff, but still the pain I felt was acute. In the end, out of compassion, I did my very best to pretend that the pain had gone away, although it hadn't really. Soon afterward Peter retired early from the dental profession and is now running a couple of London restaurants. His successor is a nice man and probably an excellent dentist (one has to believe that one's dentist is excellent), but I don't show so much consideration for his feelings when he hurts me.        Apparently, a lot of people with "dental phobia" refuse any treatment unless they are made unconscious beforehand. If I don't demand this, it is because, when I was a child, the only general anesthetic used was gas, and I have nightmare memories of it. An anesthetist would place a mask over one's nose and mouth, and one would slowly sink into oblivion. It felt as if one was an animal being put down. On one occasion, when I was 14 or 15 years old, I woke up in the middle of whatever the dentist was doing to me and saw his panicky expression as he slammed the mask back on my face to send me under again. I find it surprising that, according to opinion polls, seven out of 10 people "have no problems whatsoever" about going to the dentist and that, of these, nearly one in two are "perfectly happy" to go.        In Britain today, three-quarters of the adult population say they would rather have an aching tooth filled than extracted, but until recently this was not so. The British have notoriously bad teeth, and most of them used to assume that they would lose all their teeth by the time the were old. So many decided to get the business over with and have them all removed and replaced by false ones while they were still young. It was even common for people to be given this revolting procedure as a wedding present. Times have changed, but even today a majority of Britons over the age of 65 have no teeth of their own. I suppose that, as I approach my 60s, I should consider myself lucky that so far I have only lost four. 24199812433000AMFridayDecDecember312/4/1998 8:30:00 AM630483390000000000199812433000AMFridayDecDecember312/4/1998 8:30:00 AM630483390000000000xEntry04        They say that in New York the temperature was in the 60s when they put up the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center today. They say that in the Northeast of the United States this has been the warmest year ever, warmer even than 1921, which broke all previous records. God, how I envy the people over there! Here in London the weather has been vilely cold and damp for as many days as I can remember, and there is no suggestion that it is ever going to get any better. A professor at Birmingham University, Dr. John Thornes, has studied the weather forecasts of the television meteorologists and has announced that they get them right less than half of the time. Anyone, he explains, can do much better than that by simply predicting that tomorrow's weather will be exactly the same as today's. If you do that, you achieve an accuracy rate of about 77 percent. On that principle, the present disgusting weather in London may very well go on forever.        Because of this, I have hardly left the house at all this week and have spent practically all my time moping in front of my Macintosh computer, occasionally glancing through the window to see a new shriveled, dead quince fall off one of the three quince trees that my wife once planted outside. In previous years, the nice woman in the house opposite had always picked the quinces when they were ripe to make them into quince jelly and quince jam, and then presented us with several jars of the delicious stuff. But this year she has just let the quinces rot. I expect that she, too, has been depressed by the weather.        I mention that I have a Macintosh computer because it is important in this class-ridden country to make it clear where one stands in the social hierarchy. Having a Macintosh reveals that one is somewhere near the top. To stress this point, I have just purchased a second Macintosh, an iMac, for use by my new assistant, who comes in three times a week to read through the international papers on the Web for my Slate column of that name. She can't read Japanese or Arabic or Russian or Finnish any better than I can, but I feel that her mere presence here in my basement in front of the iMac significantly enhances my social status.        In the meantime, I have been writing a 3,000 word essay for a new Penguin book about journalism that is being edited by a friend of mine. Various journalists were given different aspects of our wretched trade to pronounce upon, and my brief was to write about "how to survive" in it. I agreed to do so without realizing how insulting this proposal actually was. The clear implication is that there is some reason other than merit for why I have been in work for so long and, on thinking about it, I fear that that there may be.        The most obvious reason that springs to mind is nepotism. I don't think I have ever got a job in my life except through some family contact or other; and if I am still getting free-lance work now at the age of almost 59, this is probably because one or two of the callow young men I once employed as contributors to the Spectator when I edited it many years ago (thanks to my godmother's son having bought it) are now gray-haired editors of national newspapers and take a perverse pleasure in patronizing their former patron.        Whatever the reason, I find that I now have far too much work to do. My insecurity as a free-lance journalist means I find it hard to turn down any offer that is made to me, and by the end of Friday I will have written 15 pieces this week--the Penguin thing, five columns for the conservative Daily Telegraph, one for the liberal Guardian, one restaurant review for the Independent on Sunday, and two "International Papers" columns and five "Diary" entries for Slate. This is something you should understand about British journalists. We may be drunk and irresponsible, in the manner beautifully described by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities, but we are, in our odd way, extremely hard-working.        No time, therefore, to do any Christmas shopping except by mail order or in cyberspace, though I have already shopped for my grandchildren in New York, buying them the most old-fashioned toys I could find. Here, as in America, the most popular toy by far this Christmas is the Furby, which is creating long queues at the major London stores. Having read the manufacturer's promotional material and a description of it in Slate's "Culturebox," I am certain that I have done the right thing by investing instead in a couple of completely noninteractive teddy bears, which don't even know how to burp. 24199812333000AMThursdayDecDecember312/3/1998 8:30:00 AM630482526000000000199812333000AMThursdayDecDecember312/3/1998 8:30:00 AM630482526000000000xEntry03        I am trying to get myself a job as a restaurant critic because it is now too expensive to go out for a meal in "Cool Britannia" unless somebody else is paying. Naturally, every other journalist in the country wants to be a restaurant critic too, and for the same reason. But I have had at least some success by persuading one newspaper, the Independent on Sunday, to give me a try, albeit on a noncommittal basis. I know next to nothing about cooking, but in Fleet Street that is not seen as a serious disadvantage. The fact is that, although London now considers itself one of the gastronomic capitals of the world, the British are still fundamentally uninterested in food. Restaurant criticism is considered a branch of the entertainment industry and is usually entrusted to journalists with a reputation for being amusing.        I'm doing my best. On my first assignment to write about a grand new restaurant called Morton's in Berkeley Square, I dissected the clientele and made fun of the French waiters without saying a lot about the food. This went down sufficiently well with the paper for it to give me a second assignment; and on its instructions I went last night to a newly opened restaurant called Lanes in the Four Seasons Hotel at Hyde Park Corner, taking with me a friend who knows a lot about cookery, hoping she might endow my article with a semblance of culinary expertise.        I haven't written the piece yet, but it will not be very favorable. There is usually something rather depressing about restaurants in hotels, and this one was especially grim. This wasn't the fault of the waiters, who were both friendly and efficient, as well as being Italian, which I like. (Every restaurant I go to seems to be under the control of some national mafia or other.) Despite the fact that they had their first names pinned to their breast pockets on brass plaques, they managed to be quite jolly and informal. Even the food was fairly good, if a little boring and bland.        No, the problem was the décor and the clientele. The Four Seasons Hotel has been done up with the kind of heavy opulence that I assume was intended to appeal to the rich Arabs in whom London abounds; but there were no Arabs in the restaurant at all. The diners were nearly all elderly Caucasian gentlemen who looked as if they might have been Americans staying in the hotel or perhaps British businessmen on corporate expenses. Anyway, they were not the kind of customers that a "hot" restaurant wants to attract.        And the Four Season suffers from a problem that afflicts practically all modern luxury hotels in London, which is that they seem to be modeled on American ones but fail to achieve any of their glamour or exuberance. The Metropolitan Hotel opposite the Four Seasons, which houses London's version of the celebrated Nobu restaurants of Los Angeles and New York City, is done up in the minimalist style of, say, the Royalton in New York City but seems by comparison rather poky and mean; while the Four Seasons itself has the shiny marble floors and glass sculptures that one associates with mainstream American hotels but is wholly lacking in festive feeling.        The idea that the British are now "cool" is a PR-generated fantasy, and certainly we are much better when we are not trying to be. But, alas, our traditions are under attack from every direction. The latest target is the traditional British pub, following a judicial decision that a new giant bar in the lively Covent Garden district of London should be granted an alcohol license only on condition that its customers are served their drinks sitting down. The theory is that people who stand up when they drink get more aggressive than those who are seated and tend to start punching each other at closing time.        This is not because they get drunker standing up. Alcohol is processed at the same metabolic rate by people in any position, even standing on their heads. No, the trend toward seated-only drinking has its roots in psychology. Police in Yorkshire, in the north of England, who have been urging the local licensing authorities to adopt the practice, say that "vertical pubs" generate violence because drinkers often have to jostle for space at the bar. Maybe they are right, but the trend is depressing for those millions of British men who remain attached to the old class-divided, male-oriented culture of standing with their mates and taking turns at the bar to order rounds of beer. 24199812233000AMWednesdayDecDecember312/2/1998 8:30:00 AM630481662000000000199812233000AMWednesdayDecDecember312/2/1998 8:30:00 AM630481662000000000xEntry02        Yesterday I decided to stop smoking again. This is something I do quite often, but I tend to go back to it in moods of self-loathing, when I want to make myself as ill and disgusting as possible. Actually, I started smoking again this year for a different reason. In the spring, I went to Cuba for the first time and bought some Havana cigars very cheaply on the black market. Learning on my return to London that here they cost something like $35 each, I thought it would be absurd not to try one, and from then it was downhill all the way. But during the past few weeks I have felt a mounting urge to give up smoking once more; and while I was on holiday in New York last month, I prepared myself for the ordeal by buying a box of nicotine patches. Yesterday, just before bedtime, I decided to put one on.        It had the effect of keeping me awake until 5 a.m. and then sending me off into a most peculiar dream of which, on awaking two hours later, I could remember every detail. In my dream, I was in the middle of a violent pro-Pinochet demonstration taking place not, as one might expect, in Chile, but in Russia. People were running around all over Red Square burning the British flag and battling with Russian riot police.        I was just a quiet observer of these events, but was nevertheless suddenly arrested by a policeman and accused of having drunk a glass of wine a few hours earlier. I remonstrated that this was a preposterous charge in a country in which most people, including the president, were permanently drunk; but he replied that foreigners were subject to more stringent rules than Russians and that I would be expelled from Russia forthwith. Luckily the dream ended happily, for the policeman had a golf ball thrown at his head and fell to the ground unconscious.        It was only this morning that I read in the instructions that came with my nicotine patches that if you wore one of them at night you might "have vivid dreams and other disruptions of your sleep." So today I have resumed smoking on the grounds that thinking about Gen. Pinochet during my waking hours is already quite sufficient. The expensive North London clinic where the old torturer has been residing for the past few weeks is now insisting that he leave immediately, saying he is perfectly well and that it is a medical establishment, not a rest home for senior citizens.        But nobody else in Britain seems to want to take him in. I'm not surprised. Who would? It's amazing how much trouble a vain old ex-dictator of 83 with a stupid face is able to cause. He has divided his own country, set nation against nation, and inflicted on the British government its greatest embarrassment since it came to power early last year. He has even bestowed sudden credibility on the British House of Lords since it ruled the other day that he enjoyed no immunity from extradition to Spain. Hitherto regarded abroad (not to mention in Britain) as a Gilbert and Sullivan institution of purely comic interest, the House of Lords is now being lauded in countries such as France, Spain, and Italy as the begetter of important new principles of international law. What a pest the old boy has become!        But my immediate preoccupation is less with Pinochet than with people in London--mainly women, as it so happens--who drive large, air-conditioned, four-wheel drive, Jeep-like vehicles to convey the impression that they are grander than the rest of us and have a particular affinity with the countryside, although they never visit it. At the weekend, I drove into the back of one such vehicle in my tiny little car, and the impact left it completely unscathed. My car, on the other hand, was practically a wreck, with its hood dramatically crumpled in an artistic kind of way. Although the accident was entirely my fault, I feel there ought to be a law ensuring equal vulnerability for vehicles competing for space on our desperately congested roads.        Causing even greater excitement in Britain this week than Jerry Hall's unprintable public insults to Mick Jagger after hearing that he is expecting a baby by a racy Brazilian model (Hall is asking for at least $80 million in a divorce settlement, the tabloids say) is the news that Michael Jackson and Madonna are both planning to send their infant children, Prince and Lourdes, when they are old enough, to exclusive English boarding schools. Nobody can imagine why they should want to do this, unless they have a fanciful notion that England alone holds the key to turning children into little ladies and gentlemen. I fear they may discover that this, alas, is no longer the case. 24199812133000AMTuesdayDecDecember312/1/1998 8:30:00 AM630480798000000000199812133000AMTuesdayDecDecember312/1/1998 8:30:00 AM630480798000000000xEntry01        I am having problems readjusting to London after a week's holiday in New York, where the sun shone, people sat out on the sidewalks drinking coffee, and there was plenty of joy in the air. Here it is cold, wet, and gloomy, and there's no joy in the air at all. This is a particularly depressing time of the year, when the Christmas decorations are switched on in Oxford Street and Regent Street. London's Christmas decorations are a disgrace--cheap and gaudy and flaunting their commercial sponsorship. New York's millions of pure little white lights are magic by comparison. If it were ever the case that the Americans were more vulgar than the British, it is certainly not so now.        Not that I am totally against London. I have a strange affection for the suburb of Hammersmith in West London, where I live and work. Maybe it's because it is uncannily quiet, and I am woken in the morning by the cooing of wood pigeons. There is also a fox that frequently takes afternoon naps in the ivy on the roof of my garden shed. There are far more foxes per acre in London than anywhere in the English countryside, because here they have almost unlimited food.        Otherwise, Hammersmith is a borough most people only know from driving through it on the way into central London from the airport--a place without interesting buildings, interesting shops, or interesting anything except for its Georgian frontage on the river Thames and for the Havelock Tavern up the road, where the food is excellent and the waitresses are highly respectable but exceptionally pretty.        I go there almost every day for lunch, when it is quiet and never full, and spread my newspapers out over one of the large tables and read them as I eat. I recently asked the manager why his waitresses, who change all the time, contrive to be so consistently pretty. He said he didn't know, that they just passed their jobs on to their friends--which may indicate that good-looking people tend to make friends with other good-looking people.        My life consists almost entirely of reading the newspapers and writing about what I find in them. I get 10 British national newspapers delivered to my doorstep each morning and purchase several foreign ones from the grocery store round the corner after they arrive there about 11 a.m. The grocery store has recently started selling newspapers from practically every foreign country in Europe, and I wonder who buys them apart from me (I need them for writing "International Papers" for Slate). I practically never see a foreigner here except for the chic French women in their smart cars delivering their children to the French infants' school nearby.        The British papers have had little in them lately apart from the crisis over Gen. Pinochet and the outing of three homosexuals in the Blair Cabinet, one of whom, Ron Davies, the secretary of state for Wales, was forced to resign after he was mugged by a man he met at a gay hangout on Clapham Common. While the British people claim in opinion polls that they have no objection to gay Cabinet ministers, there are now signs of slight disenchantment with the hitherto wildly popular Blair government.        Meanwhile, speculation mounts over who will succeed the late Ted Hughes as Britain's poet laureate, who, in contrast to the American poet laureate, holds the job for life. The conservative Daily Telegraph has decided to root for a 53-year-old woman, Wendy Cope, because she is so popular and accessible. She has already got into training for royal service by writing an "All-Purpose Poem for State Occasions," the first two verses of which go as follows: The nation rejoices or mourns As this happy or somber day dawns. Our eyes will be wet As we sit round the set [television], Neglecting our flowerbeds and lawns. As Her Majesty rides past the crowd They'll be silent or cheer very loud But whatever they do It's undoubtedly true That they'll feel patriotic and proud. 241998113033000AMMondayNovNovember311/30/1998 8:30:00 AM6304799340000000001998113033000AMMondayNovNovember311/30/1998 8:30:00 AM63047993400000000010New york cityNew york cityN10NewspapersNewspapersN10International lawInternational lawI10BritishBritishB10House of lordsHouse of lordsH10Secretary of stateSecretary of stateS10JournalistsJournalistsJ10TeethTeethT10Gilbert and sullivanGilbert and sullivanG10ChristmasChristmasC10LondonLondonL1A week in the life of Alexander Chancellor, journalist.000023falsefalsefalsefalsefalsefalsetrue2falsefalse42.0199812233000AMWednesdayDecDecember312/2/1998 8:30:00 AM630481662000000000199812633000AMSundayDecDecember312/6/1998 8:30:00 AM630485118000000000