Of late, I have been learning some fascinating facts. For example, last week I took a trundle down to Virginia Woolf’s house in Rodmell where I met a Polish man sitting in the corner of Ginny’s crib, by the washstand. He had floppy hair and kept crossing and uncrossing his legs, so much so that I couldn’t concentrate on the Japanese version of ‘To the lighthouse’ which I’d picked up, and found myself wondering about the state of his testicles. Anyway, Stanilaus told me that Ginny was not only bi-polar but also a bit anorexic and that Leonard kept records of what she ate for breakfast and when she had her periods. Interesting! In another room, I discovered that Leonard used to rescue off-colour fish from his pond and nurse them back to rude health in a goldfish bowl that he kept in the living room. How you can tell a fish is a bit off-colour, I don’t know but obviously, Leonard was at one with nature. A couple of days later, I discovered that Roedean School for girls is awash with Chinese lesbians. And yes, it’s true, they do have a tunnel that runs from the school down to the beach to preserve the modesty of the gels when they are sea bathing. This knowledge sent me off into a nostalgic reverie involving Enid Blyton, lacrosse fields and mardy-arse girls called Gwendoline getting spanked with a hairbrush – although not wielded by a Chinese lesbian because they didn’t exist in the 1950s!
I have also been ‘acting’ again – helping train civil servants in the art of dealing with hysterical women in sweaty Middle Eastern enclaves where there’s a bit of a rumpus going on. This time, I was playing Jenny who had a fiancee called Jez who had crashed his helicopter into a mountain and was potentially dead. Stretching my acting skills to their utmost, I ran in and out of the delegates’ camps being all shouty and demanding to know what had happened to ‘my poor Jeremy’. Unfortunately, no-one could tell me if Jez had perished or was lying mortally wounded in a ditch having his eyes pecked out by ravenous desert crows. Then I ran into Bob, my boss, who I think I may have snogged at the ex-pats’ golf club Christmas party and held some residual lust for but who was now being hunted by the local militia and would, at some point, be forced to pull his trousers down and have an AK47 rough up his vitals. At the ‘morgue’ – an army tent full of shop dummies in body bags – manned by an individual of non-specific sex dressed in a burkha and Doctor Marten’s, I had a blazing row with a man purporting to be Jez’s son and then forced my way past the male/female mortician into the tent where my poor Jeremy lay with his eyes intact but missing everything past his belly button. I wailed at his truncated corpse and kissed his plastic head over and over. This, I now realise would not have happened in reality as in the blistering heat, he would have stunk to high heaven and I would have been gagging for England. With full-blown civil war only a whisper away, I then had to get out of the country. This involved more running into camps, falling over guy ropes and generally being a bit off my head. Finally, the head of the secret police shut me up with his truncheon and I fell over for the final time – never to get up no more……