Scent of a woman

I would love to be able to identify the perfume a woman is wearing instantly, the way Frank Slade does.

"Mmm, Fleur de Rocaille," I'd go and she'd be so impressed she would leave her husband, who makes millions in the bond market but neglects her needs, and come away with me to have my babies.

Unfortunately I have the same problem with perfume as I do with classical music. I recognise lots but the names elude me. There are only three scents I can identify with certainty. And one of them is engine oil.

It's what my dad smelled of, so I still like it. Then there's Chanel No 5, my mum's favourite fragrance. And Coco, also by Chanel, a spicy scent my sister used in her thirties.

So when I join my former colleague Gabrielle at the corner table in Café Andaluz, I am pretty sure the expensive perfume that wafts my way is Coco. But just as I'm about to do a Frank Slade and say so, the doubts assail me. 

What if it isn't? Instead of sounding sophisticated I'll just seem crass. Plus Gabrielle and I have never had the sort of sub-sexual relationship in which I complement her perfume and she likes my after-shave. What we have is entirely professional and based on mutual admiration. I admire her enormously and so does she.

I'm kidding. Gabrielle is a modest, soft-spoken, slightly-built sort of person, all of which is surprising for someone in her position. I always pictured newspaper editors as large, loud and abrasive - the sort of guys, if you came up short on a story, who would chew three legs off a chair before beating you to death with the fourth.

Gabrielle is nothing like that. Nor does she resemble my previous female boss, who survived in the hard male world of engineering by being extra smart and wearing tight, red skirts around an ample bum. If the brains didn't give her the upper hand at a tough meeting, the body would.

Gabrielle follows a third way. Her combination of charm, intelligence and hard work won everybody over. Except maybe me. She and I travelled the same road mostly but there were a couple of bumps along the way. In the end she used a word about me I couldn't forgive. She said I was sensitive.

See, in the West of Scotland it's fine for women to be sensitive. It means they like Dolly Parton songs and don't beat their men up more than once a week. But when it comes to guys, sensitive is a euphemism.

It means soft, effeminate and temperamental. Gabrielle let slip once that I was one of those writers who had to be "handled carefully". I guess she had a point. I blame Albert Einstein. 

I'll spare you too many details, but I wrote a piece about science education that included a footnote linking to an explanation of an aspect of relativity I'd written for young learners. It got praise and I was pleased with it. 

A few days later, faster than light neutrinos filled the media and folk were lining up to say relativity was busted. Gabrielle suggested deleting my footnote. I told her relativity was a bedrock of modern physics and had survived so many tests this one was almost certainly wrong. And even if it wasn't, E = mc ² would survive unscathed. 

But my footnote did not appear and when I emailed to ask why, she replied that someone on television had said something different to me. "Tough decision," she added, which I read as sarcasm and my head exploded. 

I seethed and simmered, called a meeting and asked why it was so obvious that the opinion of some random TV punter, filtered through her non-scientist ears, was much better than mine. The expression in her eyes, even before she spoke, told me I'd got it wrong. 

"It was a scientist from CERN," she said. "I really meant it was a tough decision. I never do sarcasm. Ever."

I believed her and apologised. But from then on I had a label on my forehead that said "Fragile, handle with care." 

You know what it's like when you've got it wrong with somebody. It makes you nervous. So I sit down, we order a selection of Andaluz tapas and I suppress the urge to mention her scent. 

And what do you know? She mentions mine. "It's Lynx, isn't it?" she says. "My son used to wear it when he was sixteen."

"You like it?" I say.

"It's lovely," she tells me.


Footnote. Another of Frank Slade's skills is dancing the tango. Here's me doing it, with my sensitive side showing, as seen by my niece.

Use it or lose it

One of my regular readers told me the other day that there's a lot of sex in my writing, and I was reminded of the man who goes to a psychiatrist and is given the Rorschach test. 

Asked to say what he sees in a series of ink-blots, the guy finds female body parts or couples copulating in every one. So the doc soon brings the test to an end. 

"It's not hard to tell what your problem is," he says. "You're obsessed by sex."

"I'm obsessed?" the guy says. "You're the one with all the dirty pictures."

So I'm quite sure the title of this piece will mislead that reader into thinking it's about sex too. It's not. It's about writing. And what brought it on was reading Gregor Steele's description of his own excellent blog as "vanity writing."

It's an easy mistake to make. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," Samuel Johnson said, which makes Gregor and me both blockheads at times, although we have earned a fair bit of money from writing, over the years.

Johnson was always smart but sometimes wrong. So here, for Gregor and anyone else who thinks writing blogs makes us blockheads, is a piece I wrote in summer, to remind myself why I write every day:

"I've tried all the usual remedies this morning - coffee, yoga, calisthenics, pacing up and down, deep breaths, shallow breaths, Talisker, Glenlivet, kicking the cat and banging my head against the bathroom wall.

I now have a sore head, less whisky and a cat that's out to get me*. What I don't have is the first line of the article on education I’m committed to writing for tomorrow - and if you don't have a first line you've got nothing.

(Which reminds me for no good reason of a Jock Stein comment on a Scotland-England game, in which the auld enemy was struggling badly. "England have lots of guys who can run around all day," Stein said. "But if all you've got are guys who can run around, you've got nothing.")

Some writers are happy to breeze along without a first line they like, confident that once the whole thing's written the elusive line will write itself. I can't do that. I breeze along for a while then get a maddening itch in my head. If I ignore it and keep on breezing it just gets worse.

It's a queasy, uneasy, exposed sort of feeling, like the one you get when you sleep through the alarm and rush out with no underpants on. (Come on, you must have done.) A sense of space where there should be restriction, of airy freedom where constraint ought to be.

You think you're making progress, the sensation is saying, but one more mistake son, and you'll be out there flapping around in the sunshine.

On the few occasions I've tried to write without a good first line, or get through the day with no underwear, I've always given up and gone right back to the start.

So here I am, trying out first sentences by the dozen, all of which could come from the pages of "What I did on my holidays" by Annabelle, aged 6¾.

The problem is that last week’s southern sun has sent my writing brain to sleep. A planned week of working in London became transformed somehow into lazy days of picking plums, tending vines and rides on combine harvesters. 

Take it easy, they said. It's good to recharge your batteries, they reassured me. You're going to be twice as creative when you get home, like fields that have lain fallow, they whispered in my ear.

So I went along with them. I believed their blandishments. And here I sit on a dreich Sunday in Scotland, relaxed, suntanned and fallower than I've ever been. 

Green fields all around me but not a crop in sight. Weeds, grass and birdshit as far as the eye can see.

I have learned my lesson, fellow writers, and so should you. The world is full of people who want to write but don't. Soon after you stop writing you stop being a writer. 

Fallow is for fields, friends. Keep on writing.

*Note to animal-lovers, of which I am one. No cats were harmed in researching this piece. I don't have a cat and if I did I wouldn't kick it. I might give it a dirty look once in a while, but cats like that. It makes them feel they're doing their job.

Advice on writing from those who should know.

Sam Shepard at the Citizens

True West, an extended snapshot of what can happen to estranged brothers who spend too much time together, is an unsettling play that has clear themes, dramatic tension and flashes of broad humour, even slapstick, but little narrative arc or plot resolution.

So the characters live on in your head, long after the actors have left the stage, like the unresolved itch of something you intended to do.

But tonight it could be different. Tonight we might get the full story from the man himself - playwright, musician and Hollywood actor, Sam Shepard.

Most of the audience at the Citizen's Theatre stay on for his question and answer session after the play, but a few head home, leaving vacant seats in the stalls. So with the usher's permission we abseil down from the upper circle, in time to see the rangy 70-year-old amble onstage in blue jeans and dark coat, and take a seat beside the play's director Phillip Breen. 

Shepard has the wary look of someone facing a Glasgow audience for the first time, and his initial answers are monosyllabic. A question about writing clearly relaxes him and he starts to open up.

"You don't necessarily have a lot of motivation or predestination about where you're going," he says. "You just start. Characters, situations and places appear, but there is never a lot of thinking about it. That takes place as you're writing."

Vivid images of the origins of the play we've just watched remain in his mind, three decades later, he says. "The sound of crickets and coyotes, the presence of the desert. Los Angeles is the weirdest place in the world. 

"Why do we plant a city in the middle of the desert like that? It's like gobbled up by demons."

A powerful presence in True West, the desert is where one brother lives and the other yearns to go, hoping its demons will restore a grip on reality weakened by years of writing for a living. 

It's a play born out of Shepard's own struggles with the script of what turned out to be a cinematic masterpiece, Breen explains on the Citizens website. "One can just hear the conversations with potential producers of Paris, Texas and Shepard's own self doubt in some of True West's most blistering dialogue: "'In this business we make movies. American Movies. Leave the films to the French.'"

Shepard is less analytic about the products of his creative efforts, but chats fluently about the process. Asked which brother in the play is based on himself, he says "Everything you write is based on yourself, no matter how much writers want to deny it. I've read over and over that Shakespeare is the one playwright who stays out of his material.

"Bullshit. Every character that Shakespeare wrote is himself. Yes?"

An appealing feature of his interactions with the audience is this element of dialogue. He poses questions as well as answering them. "Does that make sense?" "Do you know the man?" "Have you been to Minnesotta?"

Shepard ranges over writing and acting, his early days in Hollywood and his thoughts on Meryl Streep, with whom he recently acted. "She comes in and it's like a leopard let loose in the room. You have no idea what's going to happen next."

He even chats about Patti Smith, his former lover and still a friend, he says, whom he recently accompanied on the banjo, when she recorded Smells Like Teen Spirit.

With the thoughtful, engaging air of a guest at your dinner table, Shepard makes the effort to answer every question put to him. But there are aspects of any work of the imagination that can't be pinned down, even by the one person you might expect to know. 

As the session draws to a close, a woman in the audience asks what happens to the two brothers we have just spent an evening with, after the curtain has fallen on True West.

Sam Shepard shakes his head. "I have no idea," he says.

Ringo's Revenge

Photo by Shona Howat

When you write about real people you need to be really sensitive sometimes.

Mention individuals only when they do or say something extraordinary and you risk not only upsetting them but also violating Kant's categorical imperative, which is always a risk for a writer.

So when Chuck tells me he wants a chat, as he sits on the sofa with little Sally - who's contemplating the world she recently entered and, by the look on her face, judging it all right so far - I take him seriously.

"What seems to be the trouble, laddie?" I say.

"I want more," he says.

"More what?" I say.

"More lines. A bigger part. The last post I was in I only got one lousy line."

"But it was the most important line in the piece," I tell him. "In fact it was the single most important thing anyone's said in all the posts I've written so far. That's impressive."

He nods, clearly realising it's a good point, so I press my advantage. "You're like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now," I tell him. "Small part but enormous impact."

"That was a good film," he says.

"Let's hear you deliver one of his lines," I say.

"Which one?" he says.

"I dunno. How about: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes."

"Uh, uh," he says, wagging his finger at me. "Rule Number 1."

"Sorry," I say. "'No swearing in front of little Sally.' I forgot."

"So you're telling me I'm the Marlon Brando of your blog?" he says, the scepticism audible in his tone.

"Yes," I say.

"Nah, that's ridiculous." he says. "I'm not buying it. I still want more lines."

Sally breaks wind loudly, opens startled blue eyes, gives me a huge smile and promptly falls asleep again.

"Sorry Chuck," I say. "I've lost the thread. She is gorgeous, isn't she?"

"Everyone says she looks like me," he says.

"Don't you believe them," I say. "She's gorgeous."

"So what do you think then?" he says. "Can you beef up my part?"

I shake my head. "I don't see how. You're a major character in your own life, but I only see you every few weeks."

"I have interesting opinions though," he says.

"What about?" I say.

"Life, love," he says. "Music."

"You're a good singer; I'll give you that," I say. "But you don't have musical opinions I want aired on my blog."

"Why not?" he says.

"For one thing you refuse to grasp how good Ringo is and how much influence he's had on every rock group since. Which is strange since one of the most obvious is your favourite band Oasis. They even used his son Zak on drums for years. And they still sucked."

"You're off on one again," he says. "Oasis was a great band."

"I don't think so," I say. "And neither did their leader. 'Any Tom, Dick or Harry can be in Oasis,' Noel Gallagher said. 'Just so he's got the right haircut.'"*

"Yeah, well you shouldn't listen to Noel," he says.

"But I should listen to you?" I say.

"Of course," he says and goes quiet. So I take the opportunity to study little Sal again. She's blowing bubbles in her sleep now and looks like she might be teething. But she should be too young for that.

"I've got it," he says.

"What?" I say.

"I know how you can give me a bigger part in your blog and make it appeal to people who don't have zimmers, bus passes and hair growing out their ears."

"Go on then."

"Well you said I was a good singer. How about I record something and you put it on your blog? A bit of audio would spice it up, make it more interesting to the YouTube generation."

Sally seems to be shaking her head in her sleep and I can't say the idea appeals to me either. 

"How about I make you more interesting instead," I say. "I could turn you into a closet homosexual."

"Don't you dare," he says. "I'm a happily married man."

"What about wearing pink knickers and a bra at the weekend?" I say. "Plenty of married men do that. Doesn't make them less manly."

"No!" he says, getting up to go and reaching down for little Sally, who seems amused. "Don't write anything like that. I'll let you have a recording."

"You'll need to be quick," I say. "You got me thinking now. I could make you a criminal mastermind, who fools everyone with his just-a-regular-guy routine, but ..."

"No!" he is shouting now. "I work in the sheriff court. Listen I'm off. I'll be back soon with that recording. Don't do anything."

"I just hope you can sing faster than I can write," I say.

He turns around and his mouth opens.

"Uh, uh," I say, wagging my finger at him. "Rule Number 1."


* Peter Green. Man of the World. BBC4 Documentary, 2012 (Noel Gallagher speaking at the 6 minute mark).

Sex and chocolate biscuits

The tables on the pavement, as we drive past, tempt us to stop and try Montgomery's in Radnor street. But the menu offers little hope of solid Scottish sustenance.

"We got bagels, waffles, croissants, muffins, panini, pastries and gateaux," I read aloud from the menu. "With an 'x'. Clearly a cultured cafe. But I see no sign of eggs."

"You want to ask?" my son says. "I like it out here in the sun so I'm prepared to be flexible."

"For a change," I smile, getting up and heading for the counter at the far end of the high-ceilinged interior.

"Ask if they've any gluten-free food too," my sister calls after me.

"No," the well-aproned guy behind the counter replies to both questions, in an accent that tells me croissants were not prominent at breakfast, when he was a boy.

Cheese panini, assorted coffees and chocolate crispy biscuits keep everyone happy and we settle down to chat in the sunshine.

"You spoke to anyone yet about your feedback art ideas?" I ask my son.

"Nah," he says. "Still trying to work them out."

"I guess someone might steal them if you talk about them too soon," Sis says.

"That's not how it works," he tells her. "You share. You throw out ideas and people pick up on them. It's a great atmosphere at Art School."

"Sounds like my attitude to food," I say, reaching over, breaking off a piece of his panini and popping it in my mouth. "Food's communal. So is art, you're telling me."

"So is anything creative," he says. "It's a very human trait. Watch what someone's doing, copy and adapt it. Music's the same. 'I like that wee riff so I'll pick it up.' All this copyright just lines lawyers' pockets."

"Don't musicians need copyright to make money?" I say.

"Maybe the really rich ones," he says. "But I've a lot of pals who are musicians. They all share stuff."

"Do they earn much?" I ask.

"Not sure any musicians do. I guess the Stones get by. But Stu Kidd is a really good musician - plays with several Glasgow outfits. He makes a living teaching music. Dave Towers is a great saxophonist. He sells insurance."

"Some creative people make it pay," I say. "I've been earning a living from writing for 15 years."

"Yeah, but that's journalism. It's hard to make ends meet doing the pure thing. You sold your novel yet?"

"No," I say.

"There you are then," he says

"What sells books, I think, is coming to the end of a chapter and there's a puzzle," Sis says. "Dan Brown is good at that. Even if you don't like the story it keeps you reading."

"I was thinking of churning out a sex novel bestseller," I say. "To fund the writing I want to do."

My son chokes on his coffee. "What do you know about sex?" he says.

"I knew enough to make you."

"Anyone can do that. Look around - kids everywhere. Just because you can procreate doesn't mean you can write a bestselling sex novel."

"Listen laddie, I was young in the 1960s. We invented sex."

"Yeah but in those days it was five minutes, boys on top, roll over for a cigarette. People won't read that now. You got to stretch them. Tell them stuff they'd never think of themselves."

"We discovered the clitoris."

"That's like saying you discovered Auchinleck. It's on the main road. You can't miss it. What about the G-spot?"

"I've heard of it," I say.

"Not good enough," he says. "You got to be able to find it in the dark with handcuffs on. You have to play tunes on it with your fingertips. Can you perform an F sharp chord progression on a woman's body?"

"You're making that up," I say.

"I'm not," he says. "Have you taken part in a mozzarella sandwich? Can you do the chocolate chip muffin?"

"You're reading that off the bloody menu," I say.

"I am," he says. "But I'll guarantee people are doing them to each other right now, somewhere nearby. Face it chief, you can't write a modern sex novel. Not unless you get someone else to do the research and write up what they tell you."

I raise my cappuccino to my lips and study him in silence.

"Not a chance," he says.

I start to turn towards my sister. "Don't even think about it," she says.

"Oh bugger," I say. "You're right, of course. It's going to have to be the crime novel then. Does either of you know any bank robbers?"

Brain drain

Wouldn't it be nice if brains came with a detailed set of instructions? Been using mine for longer than I care to mention, but I still have no idea what it's doing, most of the time.

I mean you buy anything these day, from a motor-car to a packet of cereal, and it comes with a manual in 40 languages. "Verser les corn flakes dans l'assiette, et puis le lait sur ​​les corn flakes."

But the most complicated machine in the world arrives in a box you can't open, without even a basic set of operating rules - like don't try scratching it with a knitting-needle through your ear.

So occasionally I get mine working like a well-oiled machine, but often it's more like the rusty old bangers you find in farmyards. And that's strange because if my pals were struggling at school I'd often pretend I hadn't got it either. Made them feel better and got on the teachers' tits at the same time, which was always a bonus.

Nowadays I do the opposite, using nods and smiles, as people speak, to conceal the fact that they could be talking Swahili, for all the sense it makes to me. In an earlier post I mentioned that my son and sister's chat often goes over my head. But I have to admit it's not just theirs.

Instead of ageing gracefully into the wise, fatherly figure I've been aiming for all these years, I seem to have matured into a moron, although I think that's one of the words you can't use now, because it's offensive.

It's a word, incidentally that comes from the Greek moros, which meant dull. Sharp was oxys, which is where oxymoron - sharp-dull, a contradiction in terms - comes from.

See, I know stuff. I just don't understand anything, anymore.

So when Diane sends an email that stretches to several pages and makes only sporadic sense to me, I panic at first, then phone a friend, a trusty translator, fluent in both Diane and Douglas.

"Explain it to me, Rachel," I beg, phone in one hand, small Highland Park in the other.

"Which part don't you get?" she asks.

"See where it says 'Hi'." I say.

"Yes," she says.

"I get that," I tell her. "Then the next sentence goes on for three lines and my brain goes blooey."

So she talks me patiently through the email, explaining the acronyms, reminding me of stuff I'm supposed to know, but have misplaced somewhere in the crinkles of my cortex, and after an hour a little light shines in the darkness.

"She wants my ideas for a proposal on engaging with science researchers?" I say.

"Yes," Rachel says.

"Why didn't she say so?"

"She did."

"Not to me she didn't," I say and a stray thought strikes. Maybe my brain isn't the problem. Maybe it's everyone else's.

"Let me run something past you," I say, sipping the sweet, slightly-peated malt.

"Will it take long?" Rachel asks. "I have dinner to cook in six hours."

"I'll give you the condensed version," I say. "Chat forums, blogs and emails have taught people to do a brain dump when they want to communicate. Quantity is what counts online. So where a newspaper article is tightly edited, anything online is a baggy, bloated bunch of bollocks.

"That means editing has been transferred from the writer's brain to the reader's, and mine just can't be arsed. What do you think?"

There's a pause before she speaks. "It sounds to me like another version of the two billion people are wrong and Douglas is right theory," she says, gently. "And what are the chances of that being true?"

"Roughly two billion to one against," I say, swallowing the last of the whisky. "But that's not zero, is it?"

Cycles

"See that bicycle wheel behind you," my son says, as we share a companionable coffee in the kitchen, the only space in his new flat not already silted up by art in progress or the tools he makes it with.

"I do," I tell him. "A fine-looking wheel, if incongruous in a kitchen. Is it concept art?"

"No, it's a bicycle wheel."

"It's just that I once saw a teaspoon painted pink in a picture frame," I tell him. "I was told that art is whatever an artist says is art."

He sips from his mug and makes a little moue. "What do you think of this stuff?" he asks, reaching for the packet and reading aloud: "'Brimming with Latin spirit, this is the perfect convivial coffee.'"

He tosses it on the table, spilling dark beans on the cream surface. "What does that mean?" he demands. "It's a daft phrase from a bad writer. 'Brimming with Latin spirit' my arse. It's just coffee."

"But a perfectly pleasant coffee," I tell him. "Give the guy a break. Words in the mind of a writer are like objects in an artist's hands."

He looks at me suspiciously. "Did you write it?" he asks. "Have you been bought by the marketing moguls?"

"Not yet," I tell him. "But I've written similar stuff. Words have sounds, sense and clouds of connotation. Good writers use all those. It's not just about meaning. What if I asked for the meaning of those decaying apples inside coffee-stirrer scaffolding you've got in the lounge?"

He flashes the smile that's warmed me since I first saw it thirty years ago. "I'd say it shows that creation and decay are complementary aspects of a single essence," he tells me. "But I'd know that's postmodern at best and probably bollocks. Art is process and ambiguity, not products and precise meaning."

"So is writing," I say. "Just not so much.

"But there has to be a core of connection," he insists. "Words need a hard wire to earth or those fluffy clouds will float them away."

"Unlike that bicycle wheel," I say.

"Exactly," he says. "That's about as grounded as you get. But it also carries a modicum of metaphorical meaning."

I drain the dregs, place the mug on the table and stand up ready to go. "Which is what?" I ask. "Without spokes there is no centre? Rubber makes the world go round? Enlighten me, oh wise one."

"Choose your own cheesy cliché," he tells me. "For me it's circles. My mum sends me five texts at three in the morning complaining I never talk to her. Which is annoying, so I don't answer. So she sends me five more texts, which is annoying so ... Everything moves in circles."

"Except rockets, arrows, bullets, planes, trains, automobiles, pawns, knights and bishops." I say, as he collects our coffee mugs and places them in the stainless-steel sink.

"Except those," he agrees, flashing the self-deprecating smile again. "But next time around they probably will."

Ball game

Drove past a roadside sign the other day that reminded me how I got started writing for a living. "It's cancer that should be scared now," the sign read and I couldn't help thinking of a piece on testicular cancer I wrote 15 years ago and didn't get published.

"Cancer is serious," my writing tutor assured me. "It is not a suitable subject for humour."

"Well I think it is, my po-faced pedagogue," I told him. "Those are precisely the subjects we should be laughing at." 

Or I would have done if I'd had the nerve. If we laugh only at trivial aspects  of life, it'll be like an evening with Michael McIntyre that lasts 70 years.

"Whole point of humour is to raise your spirits," I say later to Susan. "So you can be funny about anything - death, disease, divorce, religion, suspicious lumps on your balls you don't think were there before but aren't sure as it's a while since you felt them."

"For once I agree with you," she says.

"So would you like the job?" I ask.

"What job?" she says.

"Making me laugh and feeling my testicles once a month for little lumps that shouldn't be there. Ideally not at the same time."

"What do I get out of it?" she says.

"The pleasure of seeing me happy, relaxed and free from fear."

"I'd rather have ten quid a time."

"That's five quid a testicle. Seems steep."

"You can't put a price on peace of mind," she tells me. "It's my best offer. If you don't like it do it yourself."

"I can't," I admit. "It makes me squeamish. I get this stringy stuff between my finger and thumb that feels like frog spawn. The idea of frog spawn in my scrotum makes me sick."

"What a wuss," Susan says. "I might be talking myself out of a job here, but you needn't worry about that. It's your epididymis."

"My whaty whatymis?"

"Your epididymis. It's normal. You've got two. They transport sperm from the testicles on their first faltering steps into the big wide world."

"I always wondered how that happened," I say. "Well that's a weight off my mind. I can do the job myself now, thanks. I don't need you."

"You sure?" she says.

"What haven't you told me?"

"Nothing," she says and starts whistling, a sure sign that she's lying.

"Let me have it," I say and she does.

"Well the epididymis is long."

"How long?"

"If you ran out of string to wrap your Christmas parcels, you'd have more than enough in your scrotum."

"So what we talking about - couple of feet? I don't do many presents."

"Try twenty."

"Twenty feet!"

"Each. Forty feet in all."

"That's horrible. I can't touch that. I'd rather have the frog spawn," I say, reaching into my back pocket and pulling out a twenty pound note. "Here's two months in advance."

"That'll do nicely," she says, shoving the note down her blouse. "Do you want extras?"

"Now you're talking," I say. "What are your rates?"

"For another fiver," she says, "I'll warm my hands first."