September 12, 2002 (Thursday),
Key West (Florida)

PRAISE comes in from website readers for my Radical's Diary about September 11. [Joe Sobran and the prime minister of Canada have now said much the same thing.] I appear to have hit the right note.

I send this query to [one of those] who helped at Cincinnati:

Do you think we should keep the dinner function at Mike Fink's next year, and lower our registration price accordingly, having a dinner at the hotel instead? At nearly $11,000 the banquet works out pricey, particularly with so many freeloaders. It is a nice event, but there are the long waits before and after... It does make our function a bit more special, but it adds massively to the entry cost.

A PACKET of mail comes from London, including a hostile letter from Walter Frentz's loathsome son Hanns-Peter, who is trying to screw further payment from me for the brilliant official colour photographs which his father took as Adolf Hitler's war photographer. I reply to him sharply:

I do not accept your statements about applicable German copyright law, nor do I accept that an agreement which you state you have reached with your father in January 2001 can replace, let alone override, the contractual agreements which I reached with your father, and paid for, thirty years earlier about the use of his photographs in publishing and promoting my books.

May I state that I have also learned of remarks about myself which have been attributed to you by the German newspapers, and -- quite apart from your leftwing politics which I find detestable -- it is therefore unlikely that I will correspond with you amicably further about these matters.

I was distressed to learn that thanks to your negligence these official wartime photographs which your father had properly looked after for half a century had allegedly been stolen within a very short while of coming under your control, and I am sure that your father, whom I deeply respect, will not have been very pleased about their loss either.

The poor repro quality of those that have appeared since Hanns-Peter took over shows he is no artist, just a lazy son motivated by greed and perhaps silent fury that his father -- born Aug. 21, 1907 -- has survived so long.

(right) Jessica has been
computer-savvy since 3.

I PHONE little Jessica in London for a chat, saying I know they've just this minute gone on line with our America Online account, as AOL has booted me off it at this end, 6,000 miles away. She says, "Yes, I am doing homework, and I am checking something up."

"What is the subject?" I ask.

"The Lemons," I hear her briefly say, anxious to get back to the Internet. Probably the Encyclopedia Britannica online.

Lemons? I inform her that they come from the part of the world I am in, Florida; and the country is full of them, and that they are called citrus fruits. That disposes of my duties as a father for the day.

Later Benté comes on the line from London. I remark: "I hear Jessica's writing a paper on lemons," I begin. "Not lemons," says Benté: "Normans." The Norman Conquest. 1066 and all that.

I fear it is too late, and that she will by now have revealed in her paper the little-known fact that the Normans actually originated in Florida, where their sexuality is still in some doubt, as they are referred to as "citrus fruits". Mr Justice Gray and Professor Richard ("Skunk") Evans will be able to hit upon a further example of my deliberately distorting history.

Frentz's photos of Himmler and Hitler