Madame Arcati. Lady Colin Campbell to sue? Nicky Haslam snogged by a paedo?

Yes, I am back. My announcement last week of this blog's cessation was a rehearsal of death: I think it most important sometimes to live through an experience for a better understanding of oneself and others, don't you think? I now have a better sense of what it will be like when I am no longer here: I felt your pain, your loss; while I felt utterly free. It's a kind of Method living. Immersing oneself in the alternative visceral as a preparation for the real thing: for the imagination is no substitute. Thank you for taking part in my experiment. You did not disappoint me. Bitches. Now I have things to report ....

Lady Colin Campbell

I do hope Lady Colin Campbell - she allows me to call her Georgie - is not about to sue the estimable ES Magazine, the supplement to the London Evening Standard. In its briefing report on the mega-rich Lily Safra - who effectively injuncted Georgie's marvellous novel Empress Bianca on the grounds of possible libel - it describes Lady Colin as the "transsexual novelist". Oh dear, dear. No! Georgie is not a transsexual and over the years has collected quite a tidy sum in court pay-outs and other settlements. Georgie was merely born with some tiny biological anomaly now sorted out: she's all woman I can tell you.

But I beg Georgie not to sue ES. It is generally peopled by immature, inexperienced know-nothings who have rich daddies and mummies and they're employed just for their contacts and for their aura which the commoners hope is contagious. Show pity on these pathetic specimens who think only of dosh and what's posh. Settle for an apology and show how big you can be, Georgie. See, I have a heart.

Nicky Haslam

Now to Nicky Haslam. In the September edition of Vanity Fair, in which he grants a lengthy, deeply comic interview about his life, it is claimed that his memoirs, Redeeming Features, will be published by Knopf in October 2009. Is this really true? There's nothing to this effect on Amazon.com. Weidenfeld still claims on Amazon to be publishing Writing On The Wall in October (as a US import from the UK). I am very confused. Perhaps a know-all could advise. But Redeeming Features must exist because the VF writer appears to have read it.

In the interview Nicky portrays himself as a post-War Dorian Gray, a "devastatingly beautiful" young man who seduced, or was seduced by, Lord Henry Woottons all over the place. Early photos do not entirely bear out his self-appraisal: to be frank, the arrangement of his jaw, in particular, puts in mind more a fresh-faced Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall - the mouth area seemingly paralysed by a million strangulated vowels.

Perhaps his most troubling anecdote has to do with a certain tutor he had as a child who used to "gently" snog him. No age is given for this initiation but he must have been pre-pubertal. "The physical nature never went beyond kissing" claims Nicky. Yet is it too much to conjecture that the tutor might have experienced an erection while kissing the little boy and walked out of Nicky's house with a tent in his crotch before a bout of furious wanking? I think Rebekah Wade may need to take a retrospective interest in this abuse. But among the upper classes such an aberration is plainly tolerated while the tabloids strike poses of horror.

Nicky has never much cared for sex: he is I think a romantic. But do read the interview. It's far superior to that embarrassing Madonna interview VF ran earlier in the year. The writer of that must have thought he was in the running for the Pulitzer now that Norman's dead. There's too much big literary cockedness about.

The Future
I shall not be updating as regularly as before; I may opt for occasional longer reports such as this if only to piss off internet surfers looking for nugget prose. Such busy loafers annoy me.