Dictator's wife Asma al-Assad - thin, as approved by US Vogue's Anna Wintour

Asma al-Assad

A faint sneery rustle of controversy over US Vogue's embarrassingly timed profile of Syria's first lady, Asma al-Assad, 35. As Middle Eastern and north African regimes topple all about its borders and beyond, and Syria itself beats down rioters and restricts internet access, here comes a piece of scented puffery which lauds the wife of President Bashar al-Assad, who won 97% of the vote in the 2000 election.

You can't buy that kind of charisma. Or may be you can.

Apparently, the first lady is the nation's Mother Theresa. Wisely, she leaves the jewels at home while ministering to the dirt poor. She's a strange kind of saintly figure, however. The Vogue piece recounts how she cruelly tells a bunch of children that their school is to be closed down. As infantile blubs start up she reveals she's only joking - 'I just wanted to see how much you care about Massar,' she says of her charity.

It's a very telling anecdote. Living saints should not be overly conscious of the favours they do unto others. Note to the first lady's PRs.

As for Vogue, oh dearie dear. Yet another cock up. Why they ran the interview is revealed in the opening lines. She is 'glamorous, young, and very chic... a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.' Yes, she is thin: this will have endeared the first lady to editor Anna Wintour who most certainly would not have commissioned the profile had the subject resembled the late Golda Meir or some other aged gargoyle. We all know about Anna's obsession with thin.

If only she had read the astrological Old Moore's Almanack, which from the vantage point of January 2010 foresaw the current revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, while secular seers had their antennae up their arses. If only.

Read the profile while it's up, here

X Factor granny Sheila Vogel-Coupe nominated for SHAFTA porn award!

Sheila poses with a co-star

Madame Arcati is almost wet with joy. Her Woman of the Year, Sheila Vogel-Coupe, 82, has been nominated for a porn award hosted by Television X. Result announced on March 9. The press release reads:

"Television X Soft and Hard Adult Film and Television Awards aka The SHAFTAs, adult film awards ceremony hosted by Viv The Spiv and Linsey Dawn McKenzie. 'The X Factor' contestant Katie Waissel's 81-year-old [sic] grandmother Sheila Vogel-Coupe is nominated for Most Outrageous Scene for her role in 'Freddie's Great British Granny Bang'. Other categories incl Best Spoof Series, Best MILF Of The Year and Best Female Performer Of The Year. Guests incl Tim Westwood, Dirty Sanchez and Bez."

To watch Sheila in action, you will need to use the web address in the pic. It's not a hyper-link, OK? Please be warned you are accessing a porn site of which I deeply disapprove. Scroll down to the bottom on the site.

Benedict Cumberbatch: Frankenstein stark naked and no small talk

Benedict Cumberbatch

Dearest Madame,

I see you are once more on holiday [since ended], but this is too good not to share given your love of celebrity cock on display (apart from John Barrowman's, which has been thrust in the face of 80% of the population of the North Atlantic seaboard).

I saw Frankenstein at the National last night. A questionable adaptation (Frankenstein himself is badly drawn and there's a lot of clunking punning on Paradise Lost) saved by wonderful lighting design and Benedict Cumberbatch who played the Creature the night I saw it.

It opens with the Creature's birth, which involves TV's Sherlock Holmes gadding around the stage stark naked for around ten minutes. No attempt is made to hide his manhood, which is on full display. I can also confirm he has very firm buttocks.

He's swapping the role nightly with Jonny Lee Miller (who, as Frankenstein was cruelly exposed as the ageing matinee idol he is) so doubtless he'll be on full display as well. Double portions!

As a sidenote, I was at university with Mr Cumberbatch, who was two years above me and very much destined for greatness at the tender age of 20. He was often to be found in the kitchen at parties talking with great intensity about acting. Hopeless at smalltalk, but then you do find with the very best actors that they're unsure as to how to be themselves.

I didn't manage to sneak a photo of the penis in question (the tuts would have been deafening) but perhaps another of your readers might?

Yours, as always, C x

Dear C

Thank you for your letter. Mr Cumberbatch would make a superb Doctor Who, naked or otherwise. Your failure to describe his cock is a matter of concern.

Best wishes

Madame Arcati

Frankenstein at the National Theatre, click here for details

Duncan Fallowell: At home with his many whiffs of other worlds

During my latest absence Duncan Fallowell posted a movie on YouTube, all about his library. If you love Come Dine With Me and the latest Hello! incursion into a celebrity's home, but prefer a literary flavour to your vulgar curiosity, then this is for you: pour yourself a glass of wine, sit back and wander free through Duncan's mountain ranges of books (his 'whiffs of other worlds'). He is a marvellous guide.

Do writers have to be odd? Is there a God? What's invaded his bedroom? And has he ever boiled a lobster in his lobster pot?, now entombed by books. Which ancient civilisation was the most adult? 'Open a book and you're opening a door... they [books] are an expression of freedom.' I like his agnostic thoughts (mystery must be our salvation) and his reflections on the nature of respect. His best, most thoughtful film yet.

Madame Arcati and stargazing at The Lady

I am delighted to see that The Lady reports a 4.9% circulation rise year-on-year, one of only two weekly UK magazines still heading north. So what better time to return from my break to amplify the Independent on Sunday's goss news last weekend that I have been appointed The Lady's astrologer - I or the person who thinks he pulls my strings. Little does he know!

Do acquaint yourselves with the magazine's website and a cast of characters that includes a cat called Eric and office dog Coco. Not among the galère are the likes of Katie Price, Kerry Katona or Justin 'homosexuality is a choice' Bieber - relish such a rare and salubrious environment.

And if you have any sense take out a subscription if only to follow my horoscopes from March 22. The future will become one eternal present.

On blogging, this time around I shall be posting irregularly, when it suits me. But hang around. You could do a lot worse.

Madame Arcati takes extended leave: Bye for now, poppets

Madamearcati69@aol.com

Molly Parkin erotic novels reissued as ebooks - no need for blushes then

All ten of Molly Parkin's erotic novels will be republished first and exclusively as ebooks by Beautiful Books - starting February 3 with three titles:  Full Up, Love All and Up Tight.

This will please those who would otherwise conceal a titillating Parkin print version behind a copy of The God Delusion or some other comforting work of the dead.

For a flavour of Moll's life research, read a Daily Mail extract from her memoirs Welcome to Mollywood.

Daily Mail's Mac and the curious case of the gay swastika

"Isn’t that romantic, George, dear? Mr and Mr Smith would like the bridal suite"

The Daily Mail's cartoonist Mac turns his attention to the story of the Christian hoteliers fined for discriminating against a gay couple refused a bed because of some nonsense in their Bible. It may be my eyes but is that a swastika on the right forearm of the man on the left? Since the actual gay pair were not Nazi clones it's hard to see the relevance unless of course Mac is trying to make a point about the nature of anti-discrimination laws. What's missing from the cartoon is a pink triangle. But then Mac doesn't do colour.

Click the pic once for a larger version - the swastika is plain to see.

London Evening Standard's Sarah Sands: 'We need to watch unthinking age bias'

Sarah Sands

The age activist and film critic Joyce Glasser wrote to the dep ed Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard just recently. Congratulating the paper on being the first to splash on Miriam O’Reilly's ageism victory against the anti-wrinkly BBC, and on its various laudable campaigns against discrimination of any sort, Ms Glasser nonetheless drew attention to the Standard's own form of ageism - ignoring people in their 50s and 60s for their opinion poll pieces and interviews.

She wrote: "I always wonder why, in 85% of cases where there is a ‘person on the street’ poll or interview over issues (with photos) the people are in their 20s and 30s."

Much to my surprise, I can report that Ms Glasser received an intelligent and sympathetic response. Sarah Sands accepted that bias may be "unthinking". She explained that many powerful people and City movers and shakers - the major focus of newspaper coverage - are getting on a bit so "it is always nice to see some balancing young faces."

But she added: "Unthinking 'screening' in news needs to be watched and I have forwarded your email to the relevant parts of the newspaper so that everyone is more aware of their choices. I hope you see an improvement."

This is very good news indeed and I shall look forward to a greater diversity of age in the ES. Isn't it refreshing to report something positive about our newspapers for a change.

David Montgomery - the Mecom finally zap him out into space

Was it only three years ago that Madame Arcati - your free online seer - foresaw with excruciating exactitude the manner of the decline and fall of David Montgomery? This lunatic Scorpio has been in effect booted out of his alien-sounding Mecom media group: read here how I forecast his route map to the exit door at the hands of disconcerted colleagues. Even I shiver at my staggering psychic powers.

In all my years in the wretched trade called journalism I have never met a more miserable, mean and ghastly person than Mr Montgomery. I recall his second wife Heidi Kingstone lunching him and me at the Howard Hotel near the Temple tube many years ago, and all I can recall is his boast that he could calculate in an instant the required wordage for a given space in a newspaper layout.

I felt he'd missed his vocation as a Star Trek holographic interface in the form of a human male onboard the lost USS Voyager.

Richard Dennen: Crotch-gawping in the company of Prince William

Richard Dennen

"Please can we have more aristos in Tatler and stately homes," writes in Alastair, an Arcatiste with a strange fetish for Old Etonian upperclass males. "Anyone know anything about Richard Dennen who writes for Tatler and has a column in the Evening Standard X."

What is there not to know about Richard Dennen? The twerpy poppet is quotidian tour guide to his own private Norfolk. Though he admits to 28 he is probably north of 30 and his journalistic achievements can be attributed only to a preponderance of homophobes in the British media (or merde as the French and English aristos call it). Let's just say Dennen is his cock-cunting editors' revenge on their readers.

I fancy he is the spawn of an unlikely knee-trembler between Nicky Haslam and Liz Jones at a Bessborough House shindig: if he put on 50 years and 50 pounds he'd make the perfect mongrel mini-me. His grail is a juicy boyfriend (forever elusive) sought within the crotch-gawping party environs of Prince William or the PM's father-in-law: take away the last two and all you've got left is a desperate tart divining solace in the smartest urinals.

One piece of advice to Dennen on his hopeless love life arrives from Josh Hunt who wrote a much more interesting gay column for the late freebie thelondonpaper. On the So So Gay blog he writes: "To be honest, spilling your guts about your personal life in the paper can make said life pretty hard to manage. My love life has improved greatly since the demise of the London paper, so I'd be loath to go back to writing in a freebie again (and I'm getting on a bit). I do however continue the column as a smaller scale blog - check it out at gayabouttown.com."

So there you are, Richard. Your SatNav to a happier life (and ours) awaits unwrapping. Meantime, Dennen's literary style critiqued. And if that sounds irksome then catch up with the weirdo Tatlersnob.

Octogenarian sex and a vintage vamp employment application

Sheila Vogel-Coupe, 82, at work

A curious feature of blogging is how old flatlining posts periodically jolt back to life due to zeitgeist catch-up.

My story on Hugh Hefner and what it's like to endure sex with him lay dormant for three years until he announced his recent engagement. As a result, tens of thousands of Americans, hungry for salacious geriatric detail, flocked to Madame Arcati via links on the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Drudge and Gawker.

Another example is Sheila Vogel-Coupe. Yesterday the net went mad for her because of her claim in an interview that she's not a prostitute but an escort. This time thousands of Brits flocked here to read much, much more and found moral sanctuary in my bosom: welcome. Plainly sex and octogenarians is a topic of fascination.

Which brings me to a letter I received this weekend from someone keen to explore employment opportunities at Madame Arcati Inc as a vintage vamp. She (let's call her Yvonne lest she used her real name) is a relatively youthful 58 and must think that I am a madam of another sort and I am deeply flattered. I thought I'd share it with you.

Hello,

I am Yvonne, 58 years old, interested to work as Mature Escort. Originated from Latin America, my skin has a natural tan, healthy, spicy personality, open-minded, no smoker and enjoy socialising. 

I have travelled several countries, able to Translate & Interpret in 5 European languages.

I am looking forward to receiving your reply.

With my kindest regards,

Yvonne