Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd start to fidget after a while. She's such a comfort.

The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.

I ask Laurie if it's possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I've never produced a movie.

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.

Jane reminds us that God is in his heaven, the monarch on his throne and the pelvis firmly beneath the ribcage. Apparently rock and roll liberated the pelvis and it hasn't been the same since.

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.

(On period costume posture coaching:)"We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.

Edward finds Elinor crying for her dead father, offers her his handkerchief and their love story commences. Ang [Lee] very anxious that we think about what we want to do. I'm very anxious not to do anything and certainly not to think about it.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.