Late lunch with Tom, Rachel, Rachel P and Archie at Pizza Express. We always enjoy these weekend lunches – the place is so efficient, uncrowded and the pizzas of consistently good quality – and I get to play with Big Archie and hold him up in the air above my head.

TG rings – he’s ‘just got to the end of 1979’. This the first reaction of his to the Diaries – which, thank heavens, he seems to like. He says that it’s clear throughout how keen John was to work more closely with me – something that hadn’t quite registered very significantly with me. Eric is in France so won’t have received the book yet and John, according to Roger Saunders, is ‘between retreats’ in France and Arizona, so he won’t have received his either. Somehow this echoes the pattern of Python that comes through in the Diaries. Terry J, Terry G and myself in one place, Eric and John, increasingly, somewhere else.

‘Tideland’ has had generally poor reviews, but Rachel, who went to a Q&A screening last Thursday, was impressed by how well Terry talks about the work – usually better than the work itself.

‘In one way,’ bemoans TG, ‘reading the Diaries was quite depressing. I’m still in the same situation I was then, looking for money to make movies.’ He said he’d hoped to get a deal for his next one in place before the ‘Tideland’ reviews came out, but had failed. But he’s so chipper in adversity that I almost long to hear of more disaster.