![article body image]()
1st January 1924Arnold Bennett writes in his journal:
“Chelsea Arts Club Fancy Dress Ball [at the Royal Albert Hall]. Seemed to be fairly well organised on the whole, though it was impossible to get supper without standing in a crush on the stairs for a very long time. The supper was free. The light refreshments downstairs were not free. Still, one got them. All boxes occupied. 3 to 4 thousand people, I should think. Beauty of building. Commonness and poverty of most of the costumes. I was disappointed too in the female beauty. Orchestra goodish. Procession and stunts rather poor. Fantastic noises. Some drunks. I saw few friends or acquaintances. On the whole a mediocre show. I was glad to get away (
1.20am). My chauffeur seemed to me to be a much superior person to most of the revellers. In fact it struck me as being somewhat under-civilized, below the standard set by ordinary standards of style, and rather studio-ish.”
1st January 1902Alma Mahler, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, writes in her journal:
“What I have to write today is terribly sad. I called on Gustav in the afternoon. We were alone in his room. He gave me his body & I let him touch me with his hand. Stiff and upright stood his vigour. He carried me to the sofa, laid me down gently and swung himself over me. Then—just as I felt him penetrate, he lost all strength. He laid his head on my breast, shattered—and almost wept for shame. Distraught as I was, I comforted him.
“We drove home, dismayed and dejected. He grew a little more cheerful. Then I broke down, had to weep, weep on his breast. What if he were to lose—that! My poor, poor, husband!
“I can scarcely say how irritating it all was. First his intimate caresses, so close —and then no satisfaction. Words cannot express what I today have undeservedly suffered, and then to observe his torment—his unbelievable torment! My beloved!”
1st January, 1915Virginia Woolf writes in her diary:
“We were kept awake last night by New Year Bells. At first I thought they were ringing for a victory.”
1st January, 1862Edmond and Charles Goncourt write in their journal:
"New Year's Day is All Souls' Day for us. Our hearts grow chill and turn towards those who are gone. We climbed five flights to the modest rooms of our cousin Cornelie. She was soon obliged to send us away, so filled was her room with ladies, schoolboys, men young and old, all relatives or connections. She had not chairs enough to seat them nor space in which to house them. It is one of the admirable things about noble families that they do not shun poverty. In middle-class families no blood relationship survives below a certain minimum of wealth or above the fourth storey of a house."
1st January 1869Cosima Wagner, who the previous year had left her husband Hans von Bulow to live with Richard Wagner, writes in her diary:
"On Christmas Day, my 31st birthday, this notebook was to have started, I could not get it in Lucerne. And so the first day of the year will also contain the beginning of my reports to you, my children. You shall know every hour of my life, so that one day you will come to see me as I am; for, if I die young, others will be able to tell you very little about me, and if I live long, I shall probably only wish to remain silent. 1868 marks the outward turning point of my life: in this year it was granted to me to put into action what for the past five years had filled my thoughts. I must confess to you that up to the hour in which I recognised my true inner calling, my life had been a dreary, unbeautiful dream. The outward appearance was and remained calm, but inside all was bleak and dreary when there came into my life that being who swiftly led me to realise that up to now I had never lived. My love became for me a rebirth, a deliverance, a fading away of all that was trivial and bad in me, and I swore to seal it through death, pious renunciation or complete devotion. What love has done for me I shall never be able to repay."
1st January, 2000Roy Strong writes in his diary about the Millennium celebration at the Dome:
“This was quite a surreal event, a parade of the iconography of New Labour on a gigantic scale, marred for them I sure by the presence of two gigantic anomalies, the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both are timeless icons of the country’s Church and State and as such bore no relation to what was a cross between an arena pop concert and Notting Hill Carnival. The Queen looked ill at ease and the poor Archbishop, the decline of the Church of England made flesh and dwelling among us, reduced to the indignity of leading the audience of ten thousand in the Lord’s Prayer, which most didn’t know, sandwiched between two pop singers. We missed the Queen being forced to join hands for Auld Lang Syne but it was in the papers the next day. When the camera caught Blair, he had that Messianic look that always worries me.”
