How I cut down to only drinking one bottle of booze a day and eating red meat just seven
In 2015 Louis de Bernieres, the much-loved author of huge bestsellers such as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Red Dog, started a Facebook page. He treated it as a daily blog, and soon gained a wide and devoted audience.
And then in 2024, Facebook abruptly shut it down, for ‘breaching community standards’. It was impossible to discover the offence.
This is what happens, he notes, when we hand over the world ‘to inhuman humans whose ambition is to replace everyone except themselves with artificial “intelligence” that has the natural intelligence of a turd.’
de Bernieres’s facebook musings show him to be a ‘real, and very likeable, human being’
Now he has published his ten years of online musings, and they have all the same charm of his fictional writings: the whimsy and bubbling humour, the melancholy, the generous humanity, and some good sharp opinions to give it salt.
Perhaps he gets his opinionated streak from his mother. ‘During the war my mother controlled submarines in the Indian Ocean, so when people like Germaine Greer popped up in the Seventies, my mother would just sniff, and say “What does she think she’s ever done?”’
He is rather jealous of Greer, though, for having students wanting her banned from Cardiff University ‘for saying that people who have had their willies cut off are not women’. Why haven’t any students tried to ban him yet?
But he draws some consolation from being fired as patron of the British Mandolin and Guitar Federation for daring to make a small joke about Scottish independence. He’s disarmingly honest. After one boozy lunch in London, he has ‘to go and sleep on a bench on Green Park in order to recover in time for a party at the Colombian ambassador’s residence’.
With the literary lunches, exotic travels and a nice life in rural Norfolk, he looks every inch the successful writer. But ‘I would like to reassure all of you that, despite appearances to the contrary, I am often a miserable old git, with entire weeks of feeling extremely melancholy’.
This is not one of those boringly curated Instagram pages showing nothing but holidays, bikinis and perfect figures. Here’s a real, and very likeable, human being. He signs off one blog by saying he’s alone in the house ‘apart from the cats’, and is now off ‘to see what’s in the fridge that hasn’t gone mouldy’.
As well as being richly entertained and amused, any reader will also appreciate this real-world touch, as one of our best-known novelists negotiates his way through school runs, leaky roofs, shopping trips into Norwich, where he enjoys looking at pretty girls (a shocking admission!) and ‘futilely trying to cut my toenails with industrial shears’. Not to mention the doctor’s.
‘My cholesterol and blood sugar levels have gone up again, despite cutting back on booze to only one bottle day and having red meat only seven times a week,’ he notes indignantly.
It really is a delightful, funny, warm-hearted read – too good for Facebook.