A day out... Alan Bennet

Was this you then:

"29 May. A biker delivers some proofs from PFD, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did. [...]

I don’t quite spill all this out to the waiting courier, who is a graduate of UCL and shouldn’t have to be biking round London delivering letters this cold wet May afternoon."

From his diary, 2007.

I bet it was. I claim my £5.

Fucking hell; I've just checked in the LRB archives and it's true! I remember that day so well; we used to deliver to AB a lot and my controller, knowing I was an admirer, used to try and save those jobs for me. So there I was, on my way, thinking, I've got to think of something interesting to say, something to ask that he won't be expecting. And I thought about Cyril Connolly. There's no chance, I reasoned, that any courier will ever have asked him about Cyril Connolly.
So I did and we chatted briefly about CC (Cyril Connolly, that is, not Chris Crash). What, with typical modesty, he doesn't mention in his diary is that he had a look on his bookshelves to see if he had a certain book about CC that he wanted, very generously, to give me; sadly it was at his house in Yorkshire.
The time he called me a "poor sod" was a previous occasion when it was pissing down and I stood on his doorstep dripping and a little tongue tied.
Anyway since the CC incident I have often joked about him relating this unexpected conversation in his diary; never, ever, imagining that he would. I know it's pathetic and gushing and risible but to have made it in to AB's diary is as satisfying an experience as I have ever had; admittedly there is not much competition.
Thanks Jonty; I thought I had read all of AB's published diaries but somehow it slipped by.

This is the best thing I have ever read and makes me very happy. Fact.