Chaps only in the long bar!

I have been neglecting my brain recently and am in dire need of mental stimulation. Last night I decided to address matters by trotting down to the South Bank for a talk about Literature.

Never being one to pass up the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, I had selected a discussion on ‘the urban experience in queer fiction,’ or why gays and lezzers come to cities. I thought there might be some nice ladies there for me to talk to. Always multi-tasking, me.

Imagine my despair when, on arrival at the Purcell Rooms, in full make-up and plunging top, all I could see was gay men. I think I spotted a woman but I can’t be sure of it. It was the first time I’ve been to an event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and not had to queue for the toilets.

My spirits sank. I groaned inside.

But then I began to rather enjoy myself. There was an octogenarian lesbian writer, a senior police chief, two Welshmen talking about life in the valleys, the gentlest muscle Mary you’d ever hope to meet, an ex-punk who looked like an accountant, a sexy blonde novelist and a biographer in possession of one of the finest bosoms I’ve seen in a very long time.

There was an interval. I decided to celebrate Bastille Day with a thimbleful of fine Bordeaux.

The evening improved even further. It ended around midnight with Lady V clapping her hands above her head as a hip hop artist rapped about homophobia to the tune of – would you believe it – that fine disco classic Ring My Bell. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did.

Come to my bosom!

What better way to resume normal service than to hurl oneself back into familial duty?

Fortified by my travels on The Continent (good times, Marjorie, happy days!), I packed a light picnic hamper and took the 12.45 Express from Paddington to the dreaming spires of Oxford.


Whereupon I paid a visit to Isla Marie Anne, born last Sunday morning, just as her spinster aunt was to be found diving semi-naked into a swimming pool full of known homosexuals, somewhere in the south of Italy.

Come to my bosom!, I shrieked in auntish fashion, smirking as I remembered the last time I had uttered the command. Young Isla seeming almost as perplexed as the previous recipient of my attentions, began to wail in somewhat tiresome fashion.


Retiring to a deckchair I assembled a still life with the doll that I had brought the new arrival and other sundry objects found to hand, as taught at my art summer school in Florence by Miss Charlotte Bartlett, circa 1928.