Basil can’t believe Southwold and immediately christens it Pleasantville. It certainly does seem to have exactly the same sort of people wearing exactly the same sort of clothes (no shell-suits here) as it did when I met H here 40 years ago.

Running with the horns after me goes well – we even film in the churchyard, only a few yards away from Mum and Dad’s grave. However, whilst making one spectacular leap through the crowd into the High Street I feel a muscle pull at the top of my right thigh. Very irritating as there is a lot more running to do. Whilst crew lunch at the Lord Nelson, I sit up in Room 19 with a bag of ice on my thigh.

In the afternoon we break off from the running to shoot me reading Hemingway in a deckchair opening sequence on the beach. The sun is out and children build sandcastles and run into the sea, but the east wind is sharp and quite cold. The camera is on the end of a remote control rig. It takes forever to get a fairly simple move right. Nineteen takes eventually.

The pain in my leg is increasing. Much talk over dinner in the Swan as to whether it’s a groin or thigh injury. The word ‘groyne’ appears all over the beach, causing much amusement – especially one which warns: ‘Beware, Derelict Groynes’.

A walk round the old haunts after dinner – up Godyll Road and across the Common. The way I went on the night Mother died. Sit on the seat that bears her name, outside the Red Cross hut.

To Shaftesbury Avenue to see ‘Lady in the Van’. Beautiful image at the beginning. The window of A’s house, elongated at night against a black background, A’s face peering anxiously out into the night. An unforgettable image of Alan, private, internal man with an insatiable appetite for, and instinctive sympathy about, whatever’s happening outside.

It also creates an ominous tension which is very effective. The play never really delivers on a dramatic and emotional level. It’s a feast of surreal humour, with Maggie in fine form as the Lady, and a sort of discussion on the Alan-ness of Alan, by two men playing Bennett (a clever, very well-executed
idea).

Champagne in a very hot little room at the interval, then escorted backstage to see Maggie – who promptly produced another bottle for us all. She looked well – had freed herself from the bodystocking which Alan had warned me about this morning (‘She sits there, with her legs apart. I think she forgets she’s not dressed’). She was in her most enchanting form. Fluffing around with her hair – always one of Mag’s most eye-catching features. She hugs Rachel – and cannot believe she is the shy six-year-old on the ‘Missionary’ set.

Peeping from her dressing gown on an elegant lower leg is a bloody gash of make-up against a half-scrubbed black background. (‘I think she makes herself far dirtier than Miss Shepherd ever was,’ Alan tells me later.) She agrees it’s athletic – physically gruelling, but she looks so much stronger than when I last saw her.

I hear Terry G’s appearance in ‘On the Ropes’ with J. Humphrys trailed and though I start with it on in the background I end up listening through the whole half-hour, so good is TG’s storytelling of the ‘Munchausen’ and ‘Quixote’ fiascos. The great thing about TG is that he, as he admits, thrives on conflict and chaos, he likes to have his own war zone around him (which is why his working methods and aims are so diff erent from my own) and he keeps going back to ‘Quixote’ because he sees himself as Quixote. Well-told and revealing.

Drive over to Ace Editing to see first assembly of ‘Sahara with’. The location is the unprepossessing light-industrial side of the West Coast Main Line. I rather like the fact that our exotic African adventures are being put together in such unexotic surroundings. Bamako to Scrubs Lane.

Dakar is a bit of a mess. It’s shapeless and stutters along through a series of performances – the band at the club, the modelling display, the wrestling. But they all work in their own right. The train journey is fi ne (with damaged foggy stock shots removed).

After Bamako some strong sequences draw me in – Dogon, Djenné, the boat trip and right up to Timbuktu, this feels like the best of the old travel shows. No new tricks, no new gimmicks, just new people and new places well observed. I think this will be the heart of the series and I’m pleasantly reassured – no, to hell with it, fucking delighted.

We all follow Alex, our editor, in convoy through faceless streets at the back of Willesden Junction to the Grand Junction Pub beside the canal. ‘Hello Mike,’ says a man on a bar stool, cheerfully. ‘What you doing in ’ere? This is a sad place.’ Yes it is pretty rough, scrawny, scraggy faces, long hair, red eyes, no one chic or smart. I like it. Couldn’t think of a better place to be after a viewing like that. Back in the real world.

Lunch at J Sheekey’s with Eric, Terry and Terry G. One of the best group lunches I can remember. Eric is in town alone after some filming in Dublin (about which he’s mysterious and self-deprecating) and shopping uncontrollably, he says.

Terry J is relieved to have sent ‘Who Murdered Chaucer?’ off to Methuen at last. TG, torn between Brothers Grimm and John Cusack/Dustin Hoffman films, is in an agony of indecision.

But much laughter and silliness, largely stoked by Eric. The food is excellent – oysters and smoked haddock. He goes back to shopping and I walk across to the office to collect my bags. Sharp, slanting sunlight making the streets interesting.

A significant day – depending on how much numbers mean. From today I’m 60 years old. As work commitments spread ahead for at least two years, and I’m demanded by dozens of people and causes every week, I don’t sense any great turning point here. My eyesight began to deteriorate twelve years ago but my hearing would probably benefit from nothing more than a cleaning out of the ears and I can still haul myself over Parliament Hill and the Heath without walking.

I drive up to Hampstead Town Hall (described by Pevsner as ‘a disgrace to such an artistic and prosperous community’) to deliver the sound system [for my 60th birthday party]. Phil Daniels (the personification of a Centre Manager – the new administrocrat) lets me in. ‘Would you like the door open now?’ he asks, in a tone suggesting many years’ practice at putting in official requests. As there’s no other way of getting into the building that I can see I indicate this might be a good thing.

The Victorian tiled floor and hallway looks very fi ne and Phil’s staff (all on time and a half today) are sweeping it and one of the women is titivating the skirting board with a feather duster.

Already had some ingenious and very different presents – Bernard Heyes [editor on the ‘Hemingway Adventure’ series] mocked up a National Geographic cover – with my face replacing Sir Ed Hillary’s above the title ‘50 Years of Everest’. Helen has given me a chunky Guy Taplin boat with fish hanging
from a line and two pipe-smoking male figures looking out to sea.

Complete speech, change, and drive back up to the Town Hall by midday. Balloons in place, and soon Miriam the violinist arrives. She was an unknown quantity to me, a recommendation of Tom’s, and again I’d been occasionally fearful of how she’d work. No problems here – with her curly black locks of gypsy-like hair, upfront, American (I guess) personality and great playing skill, she helps bring the oddly clumpy Grand Staircase to life.

Miriam fiddles on the stairs, Monica’s team pop open the champagne (Taittinger from Majestic) and the white wine (Domaine St Hilaire from Anne and Jonathan).

Party Party’s banner has clearly been created by a dyslexic. Michael is spelt ‘Micheal’, and only moments before the party begins Will notices that ‘Happy Birthday’ reads ‘Happy Birtday’. Will improvises an H.

A wonderful cake, covered with souvenirs of my life – school scarves, Cloudy Bay bottles, miniature Patrick O’Brian novels, Sheffield United badge, the three cats, etc. Sits on the piano and is much admired.

Helen MC’s the speeches on the theme of reminiscence at various stages of life. Then Terry J, determined to lay my reputation for niceness, takes my life through the seven deadly sins and checks me off against each one – finding me guilty of all of them.

Then the children. Rachel is funny and quite straightforward, then, almost at the end, chokes back an attack of emotion and can’t really finish. Of course, this finds a response in other parts of the room and is really quite endearing. She’s followed by Will who is, by now, a confident speaker and very funny too, in a generously subversive way. I finish off the ‘entertainment’, and avoid anything too emotional, or any gushy tributes. In a sense the party itself is my tribute to all these good friends.

Share some happy but insistent tears with [my niece] Camilla over Angela, and how much we both wished she were here. Graham in his recollections of me in our Sheffield youth, ‘Whenever there was trouble, Michael was nowhere to be seen!’

The children’s gift to me is a series of photos, taken at the One O’Clock Club on the Heath in the same location as the famous ones that Stuart Robertson took nearly 25 years ago. Shots of them 25 years on, up against the same fence, playing on the same swings and clambering over the same obstacle course. It shows time can’t stand still, but that families can make it seem that way.

The children’s gesture means as much to me as any of the presents. I think partly because it’s a recognition of the fact that they had a childhood happy enough to remember and celebrate (I can’t imagine Angela and myself doing the same for our parents) and partly because, though different, they all support, nurture, advise, tease, irritate and seem generally fond of – each other!

As a final treat we watch ‘East of Ipswich’ on BBC Four. Just H and myself. Both sexagenarians now. And still up at midnight!

Various errands including taking some of H’s garden clearings to the recycling centre. As I tip my bags into an enormous skip a man next to me says ‘You could make a garden out of all this.’ One of the staff comes up to ask me to move my car and seeing it’s me softens his approach. ‘Do you know Ken Loach?’ he asks. I mutter something about having met him a few times. ‘Well, he’s over there.’ And there indeed is Ken, heading for the garden waste.

‘A great leveller, this place,’ he says as we mount the platform and talk about the Cannes Film Festival – he’s got to go for a day next week – and the difficulty he’s having making a party political broadcast for the Stop the War Party. It’s not just that no one will give them any airtime, but that getting it right is so difficult – everyone has their own ideas of what should be said and how it should be said.

We’re deep in conversation when he looks up anxiously. ‘I’ve got my grandson in the car,’ he says and rushes – well, Ken doesn’t rush, he disappears – in a hurry. Britain’s best, most honest, most prolific director drives off in what looks like a Ford Fiesta.

Begin reading ‘Quartermaine’s Terms’. It seems a touch passé at first – jokes about people forgetting names, light banter, no one listening to anyone else, but the writing is always easy to read and listen to. It’s intelligent and funny. And the end is very moving, done with an unsentimental and deceptively light touch.

Yes, I can see myself making a good St John Quartermaine. Much more tempting than the Sibleyras plays. I suppose because ‘QT’ is so essentially English. I enjoy all the nuances that make it more than just wit.

Picked up at 5.20 by Mike G and Steve [Abbott] and by six we’re outside the Grosvenor. Meet the grave-faced Frenchman who owns Orion, through Hachette and Lagardère (weapons, I think). He says he has a copy of ‘Himalaya’ ‘always in front of me in my office’. Why there’s no French edition is discussed, but not resolved.

‘Himalaya’, up for Book of the Year, picks up an early win, for the less than illustrious TV and Film Book of the Year, sponsored by Channel 4. Much joy around the clump of Orion tables and I’m up on the podium for the second time in a week, to collect my Nibbie from Carol Vorderman and Richard Whiteley. Book of the Year goes to ‘The Da Vinci Code’, which has sold zillions and, though no one seems to have a good word for it, has been read on a massive scale.

A manly hug with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, whose motorbike diary was also in the film, TV category. They are both good, down-to-earth enthusiasts. Ewan seems to have resisted all the blandishments of stardom and approaches everything with a positive delight in the hand life’s dealt him – or so it seems.

Ion T, who is at our table, joins me in the car home. The Diaries and their publication sort of hang in the air. Ion being discreet but, I hope, enthusiastic.

Despite irresolution and indecision sweeping over me again I sleep well and have not much changed my mind over the South America idea. If anything I’ve hardened my attitude. Have called a meeting of Steve, J-P and Rog at No 34.

J-P arrives, full of beans. ‘A good omen,’ he enthuses, producing the Footprint guides to Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, ‘3 for 2 at the local Waterstones!’ I explain my doubts straight away and there is little or no attempt on anyone’s part to try and change my mind. Rog agrees that South America could be seen as escapist after ‘Himalaya’, and tho’ J-P puts up an alternative argument, I think the point is taken that there are fewer opportunities for human contacts, and a Latin-American homogeneity which could wear thin after six shows.

Then, out of a good discussion, comes a shaft of light. Roger, I think, mentions Europe and this leads me on to suggesting not the well-trodden territory of Western Europe, but the less well-known, but newly liberated East. New Europe – now there’s an idea. Closer to home both physically and politically. New countries, old religions and traditions. Dense and complex and full of people to talk to.

The clouds have moved on, the sun’s out, home – via Stanfords once again, this time to collect maps with Moldova and Bosnia Herzegovina on.