A Londoner's Diary

Easter, the greatest feast day in the Christian calendar, takes its name from Eastre, a pagan goddess worshipped by our Saxon ancestors. This would not have bothered the leaders of the early Church: it was the policy of the Popes to adopt pagan holidays for Christian celebrations. As a child I dreaded Easter because it meant long periods spent standing in church listening to the accounts of Christ's suffering his 'Passion' sometimes sung monotonously in Latin by a cantor. It was not just the length of these passages from the Gospels, but their gruesome nature and the idea that it was all somehow our fault.

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ can at least be watched in some comfort and I would be surprised if anyone found it dull. It is beautifully filmed and subtly scripted. Pontius Pilate is perhaps portrayed too sympathetically; and the pummelling of Jesus starts too soon. Jesus's words to Pilate at his trial should be accompanied by a look of extraordinary authority, but James Caviezel has no chance to show this because one of his eyes is closed by the swelling.

This brought to mind Sylvester Stallone in Rocky or Bruce Willis in Die Hard and suspended my belief.

However, there were moments when I was deeply moved and almost cried. Mel Gibson is a fundamentalist Catholic. By and large, I prefer his certainties to the obfuscation you get from so many modern theologians. I wish he would not use such bad language (as quoted in The New Yorker) but gather that in Australia it is not considered uncouth. The only thing in his film, it seems to me, that could possibly be construed as anti-Semitic is calling Jesus of Nazareth, in the film's title, 'the Christ'. 'Christ' means the Messiah or the Anointed-One, the claim which non-Christian Jews naturally reject and some resent.

Nor is the film Christian propaganda, but rather belongs to the long tradition of piety expressed through art. I liked the way its imagery refers deftly to the iconography of the Passion in other art forms Michelangelo's Pieta, for example, and paintings by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and above all Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece as gory as anything in The Passion of the Christ. I would have liked the film to have been longer, seeing Mary Magdalene so beautifully played by Monica Bellucci meeting Jesus after his Resurrection.

Perhaps there will be a sequel The Passion of the Christ II.

Isit on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, which meets at Somerset House around once a month. Last week our new President, Michael Holroyd, the biographer turned autobiographer, gave a party for our outgoing Chairman, Ronnie Harwood, who wrote the screenplay for The Piano, and to welcome his successor, Maggie Gee, author of The Flood.

Here was a gathering of some of Britain's most distinguished men and women of letters but, if passersby had peered through the window of Michael Holroyd's house in North Kensington, would they have been able to guess what we were?

The local residents' association? Church jumble sale volunteers? While most other professions seem to dress in an identifiable way one could tell a barrister from an architect, or a journalist from an estate agent there is no common dress code for writers, probably because we work alone.

In the view of the Royal Society of Literature, authors get too little in the way of public recognition.

The RSL itself makes Fellows and Companions of Literature and administers literary prizes most recently the Pounds 20,000 Ondaatje Prize for the best novel conveying a sense of place. But it is felt that public honours tend to go to the actors who play the roles that writers have created a case of populist politicians playing to the gallery.

Perhaps. At Michael Holroyd's party there was an OM, a CH, at least one Dame and a sprinkling of CBEs. And apparently a number of writers have declined public honours, preferring to remain, as the poet Shelley put it, 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.

Aman came up from Camberwell to Holland Park the other day to pick up our car and take it back to his garage for repairs: it had been hit by a Portuguese minicab driver on the corner of Ladbroke Road. He described himself as a Cockney, and it struck me how rare it is these days to come across the kind of old-fashioned Londoner portrayed in films such as The Lavender Hill Mob. Travelling on the 94 bus or taking a train on the Central Line, it is rare to hear a Cockney accent or see an Anglo-Saxon face. They are moving Towers of Babel, with people speaking every language under the sun. Some are tourists, some immigrants and some, perhaps, asylum seekers.

I do not regret let alone resent the large number of 'foreigners' who now in live in London: in fact, I rather like the cosmopolitan feel of our immediate locality, where there is now a French estate agents, a French patisserie, a French wine shop, an Italian restaurateur, a Greek greengrocer, American merchant bankers, Polish house cleaners and Russian builders. But it made me feel old to realise that in today's London, a Cockney is the odd man out.

Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography by Piers Paul Read is published by Simon Schuster, Pounds 20

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