Excerpt: Stephen Fry on Doing Drugs at Buckingham Palace

On substances:

The Line-up
* Buckingham Palace
* Windsor Castle
* Sandringham House
* The House of the Lords
* The House of the Commons ...

I take this opportunity to apologize unreservedly to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignorable premises above and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished surfaces that could have been added to this list of shame. You may wish to have me struck off, banned, blackballed or in any other way punished for past crimes; surely now is the time to reach for the phone, the police, or the club secretary. There is no getting away from it. I am confessing to breaking the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs. I have bought, you might say, gorgeous palaces, noble properties, and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute ...

On HIV:

A perfectly accidental advantage of this celibacy and my loathing of gay clubs and pubs was that at precisely the same time I emerged from University HIV emerged into the world too, although the first name I ever heard it given was GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency. By the decade's end I would have sat at the bedsides of many friends and attended the funerals of more. There is no virtue in my having survived the swathe of death that AIDS cut through a whole generation of gay men and intravenous drug users any more than I am prepared to say there was any vice in the infection and deaths of those who did succumb. Once the facts were out, it was pretty dumb to be caught by the virus, it must be admitted, but my fiercest feelings at the time were for the hysterical untruths and myths perpetuated by the tabloid newspapers. I began to involve myself in Britain's first AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, and have worked with them ever since.

From More Fool Me: A Memoir (c) 2015 Stephen Fry. Published by the Overlook Press, www.overlookpress.com. All rights reserved.