Published: 3 February, 2012

DIARY was under the impression sport was supposed to be made more, not less, accessible in this Olympic year.

After all, isn’t that what we Londoners deserve?

We’ve certainly paid for it through our taxes and the inconvenience of enduring road closures while infrastructure is updated.

So it is shameful that the organisers of the annual British 10k run through Westminster have hiked the entry price up and attempt to justify this increase with references to the Olympics.

“The website bangs on about there being huge demand this year due to the Olympics and the fact that the 10k takes place just before it,” one runner who has entered every year since 2005 told Diary.

In previous years the price for a guaranteed place in the event ranged between £29.50 and £34.50.

This year it’s a whopping £50.

A spokesman for the organisers said: “We are investing in many areas to make it a special occasion, like getting Heather Small from M-People to sing Proud on the start line due to her association with our official charity, the Special Olympics.”

So that’s all right then!

My brushes with Freud

A MOTHER and her daughter may often clash.

But less so it is said for a father and daughter.

For some reason – perhaps unfathomable – there is usually something special in their relationship.

Freud would have been able to explain it.

But it was the great-grand-daughter of Freud himself who made Diary think of all that.

Jane McAdam Freud this week explained how, when her father, the great painter, Lucian Freud, knew he was “on his last legs” he agreed to sit for her as a sculptor.

“In his last six months I saw a lot of him and sketched him and did a  clay model of him,” she said.

“I wanted to sculpt him 10 years ago but he said that should be left as a memento mori.

So, when he knew he was going to die, I was able to fulfil his wish.”

She talked about the time she went to live with her mother after they had split up when she was eight.

She didn’t see her father for another 23 years.

It wasn’t until she was much older that she began to want to be with him – by then she had become an established artist in her own right.
Ms McAdam Freud is still beginning to work through the grief of losing him more than six months ago.

Looking back and thinking of all those lost years when they were apart must give a certain piquancy to her thoughts.

When Diary spoke to her at home on Tuesday afternoon she was busy working on another work about her father which is to be placed next to the sculpted head unveiled at the Freud Museum in Hampstead last week.

She said that her father’s head at the museum will be exhibited at the Gazelli Art House in Dover Street, Mayfair which has a much bigger space to show it in.

Other works by her of her father will also be exhibited there from April 25 to May 24.

Warming up for Games: Chariots of Fire on stage

READERS will know Councillor Robert Davis as City Hall’s deputy leader and the civil partner of the late Sir Simon Milton, a former leader of the council.

But how many know that the long-serving councillor and practising solicitor counts several film credits among his achievements?

Diary was reminded of this on hearing that a stage production of the Oscar-winning 1981 hit Chariots of Fire will be playing at the Hampstead Theatre in Swiss Cottage in the run-up to the Olympics.

The flick told the true stories of athletes Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish Christian, who refused to race on a Sunday, and Harold Abrahams, an English Jew battling prejudice.

A young Davis had a speaking part in one of the scenes shot at Cambridge University, where he was a student at the time.

Cllr Davis has also appeared in Spice World: The Movie, in which he played himself.

Actor Viggo Mortensen

was at the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, on Wednesday to discuss his new film, A Dangerous Method, in which he plays the father of psychoanalysis. He told Diary he had spent two years popping into the museum and visiting other haunts of Sigmund Freud. But, despite his research – which included becoming well versed in Freudian thought – he praised director David Cronenberg and the crew for making him really look the part. “I’m afraid I do not look like Sigmund Freud at any age,” he said. “But I got some help with make-up, some work on my nose, eyes and I put on a few pounds.”