Travelling to Work Quotes

“Frank Muir is affable. ‘We’re all fag ends in the gutter of life,’ he replies cheerfully to my observation that the timing of success is quite unpredictable … ‘One realises that all those things like talent, looks, skill and hard work really don’t get you anywhere.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“You’re not a has-been, you’re a has-now.’ I like that.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“I mumble something, Terry J bravely launches into a school reminiscence. TG, with consummate timing, kicks over the urn with Graham’s ashes in. From then on, we’re invincible.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“My room, my books, my house, the garden, my interest in everything around me renewed by absence. This little world suddenly special, no longer commonplace … something to relish. It’s a remarkable feeling and one which I count as paradoxically one of the great pleasures of travel. The almost sensuous delight in the ordinary and commonplace.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Lots of traffic heading into town. One dirty, smoke-belching van makes me so angry that if I’d been alongside I think I would have had a go at the driver. I’d rather see pollution wardens than parking wardens but I suppose there’s no money in pollution prevention.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“George Martin makes a paternal appearance. (I don’t have the cheek to ask him if he’d seen himself described in a magazine article recently as ‘the Michael Palin of rock’!) He says the studio conversion cost about £15 million. ‘Half the money was Japanese, so I feel I’d done my bit to pay them back for the Burma Railway,’ he says, elegantly.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“But I’m a nostalgic with a fascination for the future.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“A minicab with a disagreeable old driver. He began to talk about the IRA – ‘The only way to deal with that lot is to line them up and shoot them,’ he maintained. For the first time in a long while I was driven to uncontrollable anger and found myself telling this man old enough to be my father that his solution was ridiculous, dangerous and didn’t solve anything. ‘That’s what we used to do in Malaysia,’ he went on doggedly, but he didn’t really have the courage of his own bigotry and I felt oddly embarrassed, not by what I said, but by showing up what was not aggression so much as ignorance.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Mostly very ordinary, but I do buy an original Ken Livingstone watercolour of Thatcher in a coffin with a Struwwelpeter-like Heseltine looming over her. Painted the day she resigned! Outbid someone at £110.00.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Note that patients in hospital in 1830 were prescribed eight pints of beer a day.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Beryl leaves to have her verruca attended to yet again. Someone had told her that banana was good for ridding oneself of verrucas, so she’d slept with a banana in her bed feeling rather silly, before being told it was only the skin.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Unfortunately the interview she had lined up with a homeless girl cannot now be done, as the girl killed herself yesterday. She was the third suicide in a week at this hostel. Apparently when one goes, there is often a ‘domino’ effect.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“Thursday, October 19th After breakfast, round to Ma’s by 9.15. Her Telegraph bears the headline ‘Palin for Prime Minister’ on the arts page.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)

“I find that her hearing is quite a lot worse and that she has suffered a loss of confidence in herself, which it will be very hard to replace.”
― Michael Palin, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988–1998 (Volume 3)