Barry Humphries has died at the age of 89. This was his last diary for The Spectator in our 2022 Christmas issue.

F.Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve started with books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me.

I kneel on the floor of my book room with a large cardboard box at my side. Do I really need all those George Meredith novels? Edgar Saltus is harder, but will I miss those duplicates of Purple and Fine Women and The Pace That Kills with the variant dust-wrapper and the misprint on page 43? My shelf of the works of Philip Thicknesse, that querulous 18th-century gentleman, contains nearly all of his 24 books, and if I were forced to sell them I could never sacrifice The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, which contains valuable information on the exorcism of gallstones, and an account of Mrs Mary Toft of Godalming who claimed that she gave birth to 15 rabbits; an assertion Thicknesse plausibly supports. Whatever the demands for space in my book room, I cannot banish my Marmaduke Pickthall, or a single one of my 15 copies of the first edition of The Wooing of Jezebel Pettyfer, which Meredith praised with the mysterious disclaimer: ‘It ought never to have been written.’ Not seldom, when I surrender a book to a rascally dealer, I return to his shop and buy it back.

CDs breed prolifically, or did. Now the young have never heard of them, and nor have their parents, who have also never heard of 78s. But should I keep all those symphonies by Siegfried Wagner? Or the chamber music of Charles Koechlin, some of which is still trapped in its cellophane carapace? And the DVDs. My Sacha Guitry movies, bought in Paris, have to stay, but my much-played series of films starring Chucky, the malevolent doll, may have to be deaccessioned.

Clothes also multiply in bulging wardrobes, and when I have wrestled enough with that pesky top button on a pair of favourite pants, I am learning to cast the garment aside. In New York two decades ago, I bought on a caprice a blue ‘unstructured’ suit by the designer Issey Miyake. It never worked or justified its price. I call it my ‘Issey Mistake’ and you’ll find it soon in the charity shop.

Once at a party at the Garrick, I encountered a member in a really beautiful suit. When, in breach of an ancient and rarely enforced club rule, I complimented him on his excellent taste, he laughed and told me he’d picked it up for nothing at an Oxfam shop. Opening his jacket, he displayed the label stitched in his inside pocket. There was the tailor’s name, and beneath it, my own. That beautiful cashmere suit had once been mine. I was tempted to reclaim it on the spot.

Very recently a kind friend from New York asked us to dinner at Claridge’s. It has been magnificently enlarged and redecorated, but not, thank God, ‘re-imagined’. The dining room, however, came as a shock. Who were these people, sulky of visage, lounging at tables in tracksuits and T-shirts? The service was impeccable, but my fellow diners looked like they were on their way back from the gym. Later, ruthlessly going through my wardrobe, I came upon a grubby T-shirt and a pair of torn denim shorts. As I flung them into the rubbish box, I had second thoughts. ‘Hang on Barry!’ a voice said. ‘Don’t chuck those away. Someone might invite you to Claridge’s.’

Last week I took a look at the Cézanne show at that most inhospitable picture gallery, Tate Modern. I’ve never got the point of Cézanne. Those bathers are woeful: badly drawn, uncomfortably arranged, and grotesquely overpraised. After he died, a few painters in Paris decided his mistakes and infelicities were virtues and that dead-end movement Cubism was born. English second-raters like Roger Fry puffed up his reputation to the level of Modern Master, so that even today you can see baffled art lovers standing in front of his pictures struggling to feel the ‘significant form’, which is rumoured to reside in these very ordinary paintings.

Off to Australia for Christmas. I will avoid church on the big day. Last year at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, the bishop called the hymns ‘songs’, invited applause, and addressed the congregation as ‘boys and girls’ as if he were making the announcements on a Virgin aeroplane. The prayers and the order of service were unrecognisable and had been tweaked so they could offend no one – except God.

I remembered as a kid having to stay awake until 11 p.m. when it was dark enough for Carols by Candlelight, and, at least two weeks before Christmas day, finding where Santa had hidden my presents. Clearing out my parents’ house years ago, I discovered a cache of obsolete silver sixpences still bearing the rock-hard residue of Christmas pudding. Decimalisation has long since killed that delightful tradition. However, my client Dame Edna still observes the ritual using expired credit cards. Another year looms and I consider myself blessed and indeed grateful that I have lost no faculty you need to hear about. So far, no waiter or maître d’ has uttered the words I dread to hear: ‘Would sir like his Dover sole puréed?’