Yorkshire playwright Alan Bennett reveals health struggles and pays tribute to Settle bookshop in latest annual diaries

Bennett, 86, who is from Armley in Leeds and has a home in North Yorkshire, annually contributes a snapshot of his daily life in the London Review of Books.

In the latest edition, he has spoken of how both reduced mobility and isolation because of the coronavirus pandemic have affected him.

It comes after he previously revealed that he needed open heart-surgery.

On August 3, he wrote: “I come downstairs in the morning and don’t go back until I go up for my bath before supper. All this has happened since I had to give up using my bike. Stairs are painful and slow, my bones audibly grinding, with my right leg and ankle worse than my left.

“I’m not sure if exercise makes it better or worse, though I can only just make it round the block every evening.

“We won’t ever get a stair lift for aesthetic reasons, but how long I will be able to continue walking is an open question and a pressing one.”

On July 10, he wrote: "Isolation, such as it is, is beginning to rob me of speech. I had to call the optician today to explain how I’d broken the strut of my glasses, and I found myself so much at a loss Rupert had to take over. He didn’t find this at all strange. I do."

He also spoke of his disappointment of a North Yorkshire bookshop closing in his September 14 entry.

He said: “The big sadness today is finding that Jane’s second-hand bookshop just off Settle Market Place has closed, and not for the duration of Covid but for good. It was a lovely shop full of unexpected treasures and absurdly cheap.

"Jane M., whose shop it was, was a friend to the lonely and the eccentric, being herself very devout, though the main influence this had on her stock was the size of the theology section."

The full, near-5,000 word piece can be read in the London Review of Books.