Inconceivable

Dear…?

Dear.

Dear Book?

Dear Self? Dear Sam.

Good. Got that sorted out. What next?

Lucy is making me write this diary. Except it’s not a diary. It’s a “book of thoughts”. “Letters to myself” is how she put it, hence the “Dear Sam” business, which of course is me. Lucy says that her friend, whose name escapes me, has a theory that conducting this internal correspondence will help Lucy and me to relax about things. The idea is that if Lucy and I periodically privately assemble our thoughts and feelings then we’ll feel less like corks bobbing about on the sea of fate. Personally, I find it extraordinary that Lucy can be persuaded that she’ll become less obsessed about something if she spends half an hour every day writing about it, but there you go. Lucy thinks that things might be a whole lot better if I stopped trying to be clever and started trying to be supportive.

It’s now five minutes later and I find I have no thoughts and feelings to assemble. Lucy has been right all along. I’m a sad, cold, sensitivity-exclusion zone who would rather read the newspaper than have an emotion. I always thought she was exaggerating.

Dear Penny

I’m writing to you, Penny, because in my childhood you were my imaginary friend and I feel that I’ll be more open and honest if I personify the part of myself to which I’m addressing these thoughts. Does that make sense? I do hope so because, quite frankly, if ever I needed an imaginary friend I need one now. The truth is that I want to have a baby. You remember how our favourite game when I was a child was looking after babies? Well, things haven’t changed at all, right down to the fact that I still haven’t actually got a baby to look after. This thing, so simple to many women, is proving very difficult for me. Sam and I have been trying for five years (I hate that word, we used to make love, or have a good shag, now we “try”), and so far not a hint. You could set your watch by my periods.

Sometimes I feel quite desperate about it and really have to struggle not to be jealous of women who have babies, which I loath myself for. Occasionally, and I hate to write this, I’m even jealous of women who’ve had miscarriages. I know that sounds awful and I’m quite certain I wouldn’t say it if I’d had one myself, but at least I’d know I could conceive. I don’t know anything. My wretched body simply refuses to react at all.

However, and let me say this very firmly, Penny, I’m determined that I am not, I repeat NOT, going to become obsessed about all this. If, God forbid, it turns out that I cannot have children, then so be it. I shall accept my fate. I shall not acquire eight dogs, two cats, a rabbit and a potbellied pig. Nor will I go slightly mad and talk too loudly about topiary at dinner parties. I shall not be mean about people who have children, calling them smug and insular and obsessed by their kids. Nor will I go on about my wonderful job (which it isn’t anyway) to harassed mums who’ve not spoken adult English for two and a half years and have sick all over their shoulders and down their backs.

I will also desist from writing letters to imaginary friends. I hope that doesn’t sound hurtful to you, Penny, but I feel I must be firm at this juncture. Whatever the fates decide for me, I intend to remain an emotionally functional woman and I absolutely SWEAR that I will not get all teary when I walk past Mothercare on my way to the off licence like I did last week.

What does she find to write about? I’ve been sitting watching her for ten minutes and she hasn’t paused once. What can she possibly be saying?

The most important thing to remember, Penny, is that there are many ways of being a whole and fulfilled woman and that Motherhood is only one of them. It just happens to be the most beautiful, enriching, instinctive and necessary thing that a woman can do and is entirely the reason that I feel I was put upon this earth. That’s all.

However, as I say, despite remaining resolutely unobsessed, I do not intend to give up without a fight. Five years is too long and I have decided that after two more periods I’ll seek medical help. Sam doesn’t like this idea much. He says that it’s a matter of psychology, claiming that whilst at the moment we can still see ourselves as simply unlucky, if we go to a doctor we’ll be admitting that we are actually infertile and from that point on we’ll be forever sad. Of course the real reason that Sam doesn’t want to go to a doctor is because it’s the first step on a road that will almost certainly lead to him having to masturbate in National Health Service semen collection rooms. However, we’re going to do it, so T-F-B, mate, too flipping bad.

This really is very depressing.

And to think that I had dreams of being a writer. Oh well, at least this sorry exercise serves the purpose of shattering for all time any remaining illusions I might have had about possessing even a modicum of creative talent. If I can’t even write a letter to myself, then scintillating screenplays and brilliantly innovative television serials at the very cutting edge of the Zeitgeist are likely to be somewhat beyond my grasp.

Oh good, she’s finally stopped.

So what I’ll do is I’ll just carry on writing this sentence I’m writing now for a moment or two longer… so that it doesn’t look like I stopped just because she did… Ho hum, dumdy dum… What can I say? Saturday tomorrow, going to see George and Melinda plus offspring.

Brilliant, Sam. Give the boy a Pulitzer Prize. That’s it, finito.

Dear Penny

I must admit that going to see Melinda and George with their new baby today was a bit difficult. I hate being envious, but I was. It was so sweet, a little boy and absolutely beautiful. He’s got quite a bit of dark hair and is very fat in a tiny sort of way. Couldn’t get over his little fingers, I never can with brand new babs. Just gorgeous.

Dear Book

I’m very worried about George and Melinda’s new sprog. Ugly as a monkey’s arse. Couldn’t say so, of course, but I could see that poor old George was dubious. He calls it Prune which I think is fair, although “old man’s scrotum” would probably be closer to the mark; what with that strange black hair and so much skin one could easily imagine him swinging between the legs of some prolaptic octogenarian.

I had hoped that the sight of young Prune (or Cuthbert as he is called) might put Lucy off a bit, make her see that there are enormous risks involved with propagation. Remind her that for every Shirley Temple there’s a Cuthbert. The thought of having to face those chasmic, gaping, bawling toothless gums five times a night would, I imagine, make any woman reach for the condoms. Quite the opposite, though. She thinks he’s utterly adorable. Amazing. It’s like we’re looking at different babies. I mean I know he’ll probably turn out all right. All babies start off looking like the last tomato in the fridge, but “cute”, “gorgeous” and “adorable”, which were the adjectives Lucy was throwing about the place with gay abandon, struck me as the ravings of an insane and blind woman.

Quite frankly, I began to see King Herod in a wholly different light.

I got home feeling all clucky and sad but I am determined to resist maudlin “I’m barren” mawkishness. The truth is, though, I fear that I am barren and if that isn’t enough to make me mawkish I don’t know what is. I mean, some girls are up the duff straight off. Lucky bitches. Their eggs just seem to be genetically programmed sperm magnets. My friend Roz from college could get pregnant just by phoning her husband at work and if you believe what you read in the papers half the schoolgirls in the country are teenage mums. But some women, I’m afraid, women like me, well forget it. I’m about as fertile as the Lord Chief Eunuch at the Court of the Manchurian Emperor. I couldn’t even grow cress at school. All I ended up with was a mouldy flannel.

However, as I say, I am determined to approach this period of my life positively. Hence these letters to you, Penny, the point of which, according to my friend Sheila (who saw an Oprah on the subject), is that Sam and I become proactively involved in our emotional journeys. We cease to be mere corks bobbing about on the sea of fate and instead become partners with our feelings. Sheila says that according to several American experts whom Oprah spoke to, the desire to have children is entirely natural and good and we should embrace it whether it turns out that we are fertile (I hate that word, it makes me feel like a failed heifer) or not.

Sheila does not have children herself but she understands the desire to nurture them very well, being a theatrical agent.

Dear Book

Another evening, another desperate effort to think of something to write about.

God, I’d love a shag. I really really would like a shag. But we can’t. We’re off sex at the moment and I must say I miss it. Lucy is over there looking saucier than the condiments shelf at Sainsbury’s. The very definition of the word shaggable. Sitting on the bed, wearing nothing but a pyjama top, bare legs raised, tongue pointing out of the side of her mouth, nose wrinkled in concentration. She really is so beautiful sometimes. But I’m not allowed to jump on her. Oh no. Absolutely not. Can’t even pop into the lav and give the old fellah a slap to relieve the tension. We’re saving up my sperm, you see. It’s this month’s theory and it’s one of my least favourite.

Dear Penny

Sam’s rather grumpy at the moment because he’s feeling sexually frustrated. I can’t deny I miss it myself a bit, in fact to be quite frank, as I know I must be with you, Penny, I wish he could give me a bloody good seeing to right now. But no. No, no, NO! We can’t and there’s an end to it. I should explain at this point, Pen, that this is an RBM, a Restricted Bonking Month. What’s happening is that I’m making him save up all his sperm and when the time’s right he’s got to bang me as hard as he can, three times within twenty-four hours. It’s this month’s theory. Wait for the right time and then have one concentrated, day-long, high-density, sperm-rich assault on my ovulating eggs.

But when is the time right? To have it off or not to have it off, that is the question.

When is the optimum ovulatory moment? Some girls say they can feel it when they ovulate, that their bodies send them little messages, but I can’t say mine ever does. All my insides ever tell me is “I’m hungry” and “How about another gin and tonic?”

The only way I can determine the optimum bonking moment is to apply scientific methods of research, which I’ve never been very good at, not even being able to programme my mobile phone. In theory it should all be quite simple. Just a question of counting days, studying your pee and taking your temperature all the time. But it really is a horrible and soul-destroying business. I count days, I collect urine, I pee on a little traffic light from Boots, I take my temperature, I fill in my chart, I do some more pee, I put some more little red dots on my calendar until it’s completely covered in little red dots and crossed-out little red dots so that I don’t know which little red dots are which. It’s like trying to have it off in an intensive care unit.

And the biggest problem of all in these meticulous calculations is when do you begin them? When do you start the counting? Are you supposed to start counting at the beginning of your period, or at the end? Joanna (who’s good with numbers – she does the accounts at the agency) said she thought it was sort of the end of the beginning, not when you first feel your period coming, but when it properly starts. But Melinda (who has actually had a baby) said you count backwards from the next one, which can’t be right, surely? I remember reading in Elle or some such mag that clues can be gleaned from the colour of your menstrual blood. Well, frankly.

I preferred last month’s theory. That one was a cracker. I loved it. We were experimenting with the “bonk all the time” theory. Based on the idea that fertilization is an unknowable, unplannable lottery. Which of course it is.

Lucy made a list in an effort to marshal her thoughts. I reproduce this list below. If nothing else it will fill up a bit of space and make it look like I’ve written more than I have.

Lucy’s Shag All The Time Theory List.

1. No one can ever be sure exactly when ovulation occurs.

2. No one really seems to know at what point during ovulation fertility is at its most likely.

3. If you did know these things it would not make any difference at all. Because no one knows how long it takes a lazy and reluctant sperm with attitude to swim what, I seem to recall being told at school, is the equivalent of a piranha fish swimming the length of the Amazon. Hence, even if you did know when ovulation was going to occur you would not know how long before that you should do the business.

The conclusion that Lucy drew from this list was that the only way to be sure of hitting the mark was to shag all the time. When I say “all the time” I mean once a night which is all the time as far as I’m concerned. If she starts insisting on afternoon delight as well I’ll have to buy some sort of pill off the Internet.

It was a good month, except when Lucy scalded herself. Nothing to do with me, I hasten to add. The problem was that after we’d done it she insisted on propping her bum up with a pillow for half an hour so that my sperm would be able to swim downhill. This is not an ideal position in which to enjoy a cup of tea and so, one day, over her and the duvet it went.

I must say I thought she deserved it. I resented the assumption that my crappy, lazy, undermotivated sperm would only be able to reach her eggs if given the unfair advantage of being allowed to swim downhill.

The other thing I find a bit sad about Restricted Bonking Month is it means that Sam and I don’t really have much physical contact at all at the moment. Sam’s not much of a cuddler, he never has been. He really only tends to cuddle as a sort of pre-sex warm-up, which is a shame. Personally I often crave a bit of physical affection that isn’t sexual and is, well, just affection. Sheila says that in her experience (which is considerable, she having had it off for the Home Counties in her time), non-sexual physical attention isn’t something that men do, and certainly not after about the first year of the relationship. So I might as well forget it or become a lesbian.

Dear Book

First entry for four days. I really must do better or Lucy will think I’m not trying. The whole problem with the theory of writing down your feelings of course is that it takes so long to come up with one. I remember trying to write a diary when I was at school. All I could think of to write was what I’d had for dinner. I’d read somewhere that the cool thing for a guy to record was his sexual conquests, giving them marks out of ten. Well of course I didn’t have any sexual conquests at the time and not for many years after, so that was no good. For a while I tried giving marks for my trips to see Mrs Hand and her five lovely daughters but it was pointless, I always got top score.

Lucy is enjoying doing her writing, of course, surprise surprise. She’s sitting there now, across the bedroom, scribbling away. She gets the bed, obviously. I have to do mine on the dressing table, which is of course completely covered in bottles of moisturizing stuff. How many types of moisturizing stuff does one woman need? I mean how moisturized can she get, for heaven’s sake? Any more and I shall be able to pour her into a glass and drink her.

What the hell is she writing about? I’m not allowed to ask. Apparently, if we read each other’s books we’ll be writing them for each other, which is not the purpose of the exercise.

I expect Lucy’s writing about what an emotionally retarded shit I am. That’ll be it. She can never forgive me for being more relaxed than her about whether we have children or not. I know that secretly she thinks this attitude has infected my sperm. She thinks that their refusal to leap like wild salmon straight up the river of her fertility and headbutt great holes in the walls of her eggs is down to a belligerently slack attitude which they’ve caught off me. She imagines them gently doing backstroke and diving for coins in the idle juices of her uterus saying, “Well, the boss doesn’t care either way about kids, so why should we?”

Dear Penny

Sam hates this. I’m looking at him now, hunched over his laptop, resentment radiating from his every pore. If ever a person’s body language said “This is airy-fairy New Age bollocks,” his does now. I really don’t see why he has to be so negative. Perhaps it’s because the exercise is making him confront his own shallowness. After all, it must be very difficult to become a partner with your emotions if you have absolutely no interest in what those emotions are. I don’t think he even knows whether he wants children. I’m going to ask him. I don’t think I’ve ever really properly confronted him with the question.

Lucy just stopped writing and asked me for the millionth time whether I was sure that I even wanted children because she didn’t think I did. God, we keep having these conversations. I think we should just tape one and put it on a loop. It’s not that I don’t want children. I’m not made of stone, for heaven’s sake, but children are not the only thing I want. I happen to believe that when God made me he made me for a purpose beyond that of devoting my entire life to reproducing myself. To which Lucy replied that when God made me he made a million other people the same day and probably doesn’t even remember my name, which I thought was bloody hurtful actually. So I suggested to her that if my presence on this planet is so insignificant then there can be no reasonable justification for me aspiring to procreation. In fact I should probably just kill myself right now, relieving our overstretched planet of a pointless waste of its resources. She said I was just being pompous and unpleasant and then started to look a bit teary, which is of course a very easy and entirely unfair way of winning an argument. Actually, sometimes, I think I’d quite like to die young. That way I could avoid failing to fulfil my potential.

What he dresses up as self-doubt and humility is actually frustrated arrogance. He only gets depressed about himself because he doesn’t write any more. But it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. He says he can’t write, so he doesn’t write. It’s as simple as that. I told him he’d get a lot further as a writer if he spent less time moaning about it and more time doing it. To which he said he’d like to but that I was taking up all his spare time making him write a stupid book of letters to himself. Which is just ridiculous. At least I’ve made him write something, as opposed to nothing, which is what he usually writes. Actually, I think it might do him good as a writer to get in touch with his feelings occasionally. All he seems to do as a commissioning editor at the BBC is encourage people to write ever ruder jokes. This must surely eventually coarsen his creative soul.

Anyway, he didn’t answer that because he knew I was right. He just snorted unpleasantly and now there’s an atmosphere.

It’s all very well her telling me to write. I can’t bloody write. I’m a creativity-free zone. The only thing about me less fertile than my imagination is my bollocks. She is wrong about my attitude to kids, though. Of course I want children. Well, I think I do. There’s been so much angst surrounding the subject for so long now that I’ve forgotten what I originally felt. But I’m sure that if I do want children it’s because I love Lucy. That’s the only way I can think about it. If I try to think of kids in the abstract I very quickly come up against no sleep and vomit in my personal stereo. Having kids seems to me like the end of life as I know it, and I like life as I know it. I like to work, I like to drink, I like to sleep in and have clothes and furniture with no dribble and sick on them. Viewed dispassionately, I’m not keen on the idea of having children at all and I’m not going to lie to Lucy about it no matter what a cold, heartless shit she thinks that makes me.

Kids, however, as a part of Lucy, as an extension and expression of our love, I can relate to, and if it happened I’d be delighted. No, I’d be more than delighted, I’d be in heaven. It would be the greatest thing in the world, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t. That’s how I see it. If we have children it will be another part of us, of our love. If we don’t, then we’ll still have us. Our love will be no less whole. I don’t want to get soppy here, but it’s how I feel.

I’ve just said all this to Lucy and she went all teary again, which at first made me think I’d won her over but it turned out that she was crying because she thinks I’ve already resigned myself to not having kids and that we’re going to end up sad, bitter and unfulfilled and destined to a pathetic, lonely old age.

Dearest Pen Pal

I was talking to Drusilla today at work. Sheila (my boss, the one who told me to write to you) had rushed out of the office (she’d heard there was a bloke on Oxford Street selling dodgy fags at a pound a box), so Joanna and I were being slack. In fact we were playing the Spotlight game, which is great fun. What you do is you get the Actor’s Spotlight (which is a book full of photographs of actors) and open it at random. Whoever you pick on, you have to sleep with. Not actually, obviously, but just as a thought.

I’d just been landed with Sir Ian McKellen and was rather thinking that I had my work cut out there when Drusilla popped in. Drusilla is an actress, hence her connection to herbal and fruit teabags is almost mystical. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her when her hand has not been jiggling a little string over a cup of hot water. She’s convinced that I only have to get the right combination of herbal teabags and I shall instantly have triplets.

I’m not sure. Fruit-flavoured teabags are a mystery to me because they’re not fruit-flavoured at all. They smell of fruit, but quite frankly they taste of bugger-all. The strange thing is, no matter how much I know this to be a fact, I’m always disappointed. You get that terrific whiff of blackcurrant, or orange and ginger and you think “Surely this time the goods will be delivered.” But no. Yet another mug of hot coloured water to nurse till it goes cold.

Drusilla recently played a mad mystic in an episode of Casualty and I’m here to tell you that she was typecast. We’d hoped that it might turn into a semi-regular but sadly it was not to be. Shame. I think Casualty could do with a witch in it. Anyway, the point is that Drusilla has got very interested in my fears about being barren and is convinced that the answer lies in the runes. She’s been reading up on some ancient Druid-like fertility rites or other and came in today waving a crystal about. She says that Western society is the only society which has dispensed with its fertility rites and the only society in which the birth rate is falling. “Hallo-o,” she said. “Obvious connection, I think.” Then she suggested an impromptu fertility ceremony.

Well, I knew she was mad, but this took even me aback. Unbelievably, she wanted me to lie on the floor while she and Joanna squatted over me. I swear I’m not making this up. Then she wanted us all to make some sort of appalling vaginal symbol with our thumbs and forefingers. Whilst doing this we had to chant the words “womb” and “flow” in low rich tones so that the sounds reverberated deep within us.

Well, I ask you. The whole idea was absolutely absurd and I said so.

Let me tell you I felt a right fool when Sheila came back with her fags and found us.

If Restricted Bonking Month works and I do finally get pregnant, Drusilla will of course claim victory for her fertility ritual, but I shan’t mind. I’m that desperate I’d give credit to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Dear Book

Lucy decided that the optimum moment of Restricted Bonking Month had arrived during lunch. My lunch, not hers. She wasn’t there, she was at home surrounded by calendars, thermometers, red felt-tip pens and urine. I was lunching at One Nine Oh (so called because it’s situated at 190 Ladbroke Park Gate – brilliant, eh)? One Nine Oh is something of a media haunt and I often lunch there in my capacity as one of the BBC’s most senior and experienced lunch eaters.

My guests were Dog and Fish, a comic double act who seem to be doing quite well on the circuit at the moment. They are two Oxbridge graduates who are of the opinion that current comedy is “completely crap and useless” and what we need is a new, post-comedy comedy. Basically, they want to do for the comic sketch what Techno did for the tune. I asked if that meant you had to be out of your head on drugs to enjoy it and they grinned knowingly and said that, “Yeah, it would help.” I saw their act in Edinburgh and think they’re truly and deeply awful in a very real sense. Time Out, however, says that they are important and mould-breaking (no mention of funny, but that would be selling out), so the BBC must of course beat a path to their door. If for no other reason than that if we don’t Channel Four will get them and yet again look more hip than us.

They told me that they wanted to do a post-modern docusoap sitcom. The idea being that we supply them with cameras and a crew and that they record their lives. Each week they’ll present us with a half-hour of the best bits plus a four-hour version to run through the night “for the real Dog-geeks and Fish-heads”, they said, “the real post-comedy comedy nutters”. They claim that by this means they’ll cut out all that false crap which TV comedy normally gets bogged down in, like scripts and jokes and acting in an amusing manner, and get straight to the raw improvisational bones of their genius.

“Basically, we’re talking about existentialism with knob gags,” is how Fish put it.

Sometimes the irony of my job strikes me quite forcefully. I mean, when I was younger all I ever wanted to do with my life was write comic scripts. Now what I do with my life is commission other people to do it. People whom I have to admit I don’t normally think much of. That’s my tragedy. I mustn’t complain, though. I get to eat a lot of excellent lunch.

Anyway. Lucy’s call came along with the starters. Finally, it seemed, after days of intense numbercrunching, the ovulation result had come up and we were on. By a curious coincidence I’d ordered Oeufs Benedict to begin my meal. Her eggs were ready at exactly the same time as mine.

I hate mobiles but Lucy had made me buy one for just such a circumstance as this. I’m going to have to work out the volume control, though, because unless I’m being paranoid her voice seemed to be being broadcast through the restaurant PA.

“Sam, I think I’m ovulating. Come home and fuck me now.”

Well, people may have heard and they may not have heard, but either way they could not have helped but hear my reply, which was intended to be in a whisper but emerged as a sort of loud gasp.

“Fuck you? I’m in a meeting.”

Dog and Fish smiled broadly at this and I could tell that in the delicate dance of mutual respect I was losing ground somewhat. Thinking fast, I repeated what I’d said but with a different emphasis.

“Fuck you! I’m in a meeting.”

Dog and Fish laughed out loud at that and Lucy must have heard them because she absolutely made me promise not to tell them what she was phoning about. She thought they’d write a post-modern, après-comedy sketch about it. They wouldn’t, of course; the subject did not come within their frame of reference, the single and only thing of interest to Dog and Fish being Dog and Fish.

It was all very well for Lucy to swear me to silence but she was also demanding that I jack in the lunch immediately and hurry home. It’s not an easy situation to think up a decent excuse for. I mean cancelling a meeting is easy. Anyone can cancel a meeting. People do it to me all the time. But attending a meeting, a meeting that has been set up for months and then suddenly getting an abrupt phonecall after which you leap up from the table and leave your busy and highly fashionable companions to dine alone, that requires an explanation. What do you say? All I could do was act casual and try to keep it ambiguous.

“Sorry,” I said. “My wife is ovulating and she wants seeing to.”

Not great, but the best I could do at the time. In fact I think they thought it was a joke.

“Nice one, geezer,” they said and laughed in a grunty, cynical, fag-ashy kind of a way.

I left a credit card number with the Maitre d’ to cover Dog and Fish’s lunch and grabbed a taxi. All the way home I tried to think erotic thoughts, knowing what would be required of me the moment I walked through the door.

Sure enough, when I got home Lucy was already in bed. It’s all very well for her. Nobody minds at the agency if she skips a day. Most of her clients only do voiceover work anyway, which is all fixed fee. Personally I think that all Lucy and the other women in that agency do all day is gossip, but I’m not allowed to say that, of course.

“Come on! Come on!” she was shouting. “The pee traffic light is green! My temperature is optimum and all the little red dots have collided!! My eggs are done now! They’ll be hard boiled in a minute!”

Oh, the pressure.

Great steaming shitballs, I hate myself sometimes. All month I’d been wanting a shag and now of course I get stagefright. Well, who wouldn’t? It isn’t easy to get a hard-on when your partner is desperately staring at her watch and bleakly contemplating a lonely and emotionally unfulfilled life of childlessness ahead. An unkind God seemed suddenly to have replaced my dick with a small piece of warm, flesh-coloured plasticine. “Lifeless” would have been a compliment. Lucy tried her best, of course, but it wasn’t much help. I knew that all she was thinking was, “Come on, get hard, you bastard. My eggs are on the turn.”

We succeeded in the end. I managed to just about sustain a sort of semi-half-master until achieving a lacklustre orgasm. More of a boregasm really. Words cannot describe how annoyed with myself I was. I felt really unmanned and that I’d let Lucy down. She said it was all right, but without a great deal of conviction. I told her that I didn’t think I’d produced enough but she said it didn’t need much. “It’s quality, not quantity,” she said, which was nice of her.

Dear Penny

It was Bonk Day today, the culmination of Restricted Bonking Month. This sort of thing is definitely not good for the sex life. I mean sex ought to be spontaneous and erotic, not contrived and mechanical, but what could I do? I needed servicing and there’s an end to it. I could see that Sam was a bit upset afterwards. I fear that he feels he’s being used like some kind of farmyard animal. Nothing more than a breeding stud, brutally milked for his sperm. Not that he was much of a stud today. Frankly, I’ve seen harder knobs on the door of a bouncy castle. For a minute there I thought he wasn’t going to pull it off. I used all my womanly wiles, even “going down” on him as they say, something I’ve never been big on. Well, I’m just not very good at it, I never really know what to do. I mean you put it in your mouth, and then what? Chew? You certainly aren’t supposed to blow, despite the name of the exercise. Anyway, he did not respond at all well and it was marshmallow in a slot machine time, I’m afraid.

It was all rather disheartening really, Penny. I mean I don’t aspire to being a sex bomb but a girl does rather hope to be able to provoke an erection in her husband. It was the pressure, of course. After all my calculations he knew he had to produce the goods. Difficult for him, I’m sure, but as a woman with feelings I do rather wish it hadn’t appeared quite such an ordeal.

Anyway, long story short and all that, honour was satisfied. Sam says that all he can say is that if we do score this month the kid will be a strong swimmer because its dad certainly didn’t give it much of a start.

When we’d finished he rushed off, of course. I asked him not to because I think it’s important to spend a bit of time together after sex or else it’s just sex, isn’t it? But Sam said he had to go back to work, which, considering he claims his job consists entirely of telling arseholes how clever they are, didn’t seem like much of an excuse to me. I told him that at times like these we should make an effort to concentrate on the emotional side of our relationship, otherwise our love life will be nothing more than a mechanical thing, devoid of sensuality and romance. He said, “Right, yes, romance, absolutely right,” and left.

When I got back to TV Centre there were three messages to ring Aiden Fumet, Dog and Fish’s manager. He’s also the manager of about sixteen other acts whom Time Out and the Guardian have sequentially announced as “quite simply the best in Britain today”. Aiden Fumet is a very aggressive man, which is all right in itself – certain types of agent and manager have always been aggressive. What puts Fumet beyond even the most distant pale is that he is also self-righteous. He seems to see any failure on the part of the BBC to grant a series to any of his acts as evidence of a vicious conspiracy to deny the young people of Britain the cornedic nourishment for which their souls are clearly crying out. The idea that the BBC might think some of his acts less than good does not cross his mind.

“What the fuck was that malarkey all about, then, Sam, dumping my boys at One Nine Oh?” Fumet said when I called him back. “I’d better warn you now, mate, that Dog and Fish are one phonecall away from going to Channel Four. One fucking phonecall and they’re with Michael, OK? And the BBC can fuck off.”

Well, I was in no mood for this. Normally I have to admit that I’m a bit of a pushover. To be honest, I just can’t be bothered to argue with these people. The worm, however, can turn and show his teeth (if worms have teeth) and a worm who has just been crap in bed with the wife he loves and who is counting on him to fill her up with sperm is likely to turn like a U-bend.

“What is going on, Aiden, mate…” and I commenced to give him the most exquisitely phrased bollocking of his entire life. Unfortunately it was all wasted because after he’d told me to fuck off he’d hung up.

Later, I told Lucy about the whole incident over supper, and that led to a slight misunderstanding. She said that she was sorry about today, and I thought she meant she was sorry about me getting shat on by arrogant, no-talent twatheads. So I told her not to worry. I told her that it was my job. Well, it turned out that she was actually talking about our lunchtime sex session. She’s been concerned that I might feel used – “milked for my sperm like a farmyard animal” was how she put it. So when I said, “Don’t worry, it’s my job,” she thought I meant having sex with her was my job and said, “I hope you don’t see it as a job,” in a very tart voice indeed. But I of course still thought she was talking about my work and therefore took her tart retort as a snide reference to the pathetically unfulfilling way I earn a living and said, “Yes, it’s a job, a bloody boring job. There’s certainly no satisfaction to be had in it.”

Misunderstandings all round and quite an atmosphere had developed before we got it sorted out, after which I immediately put my foot in it again. Lucy remarked that this confusion perhaps indicated that we should be setting time aside to be tender and close with each other and communicate more. Well, I thought she was just trying to be nice to me, so I told her not to bother on my account as I wasn’t bothered either way. It turned out that she was actually appealing for a more tender and sensual attitude on my part, so me saying I wasn’t bothered was the worst thing I could have said.

After that we didn’t talk any more and she started clearing the plates in a marked manner.

Dear Penny

I got my fucking period today.

I’m writing this with a hotwater bottle clamped to my tummy because of the cramps. Oh, how I love being a woman. I’ve known it was coming for days.

“What’s that dull aching feeling, I wonder?”

“Why, that’s a little warning that you’re going to be bent double in agony for a couple of days living off painkillers, and by the way it looks like you’re barren as well.”

Drusilla says I have to learn to love my periods, that they’re part of the sacred cycle of the earth and the moon. Words failed me at that juncture, which was fortunate really because had I thought about it I would have told her to get on her sacred cycle and ride it off a sodding cliff.

It really is so depressing, Penny. The grim, clockwork inevitability of my body failing to perform the functions for which it was designed. A few months ago I broke down on the M6, my car, that is, not me, although quite frankly I nearly did as well. It was awful, just sitting there waiting for the breakdown people to come. Completely useless, sitting in an apparently perfectly serviceable car but not able to get anything to work (it was a blocked fuel line, by the way). Millions of other cars kept whizzing by and they were all working but I was stuck, absolutely stuck, and there was nothing I could do about it. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was. Well, my whole life’s like that really. Month after month I’m stuck, my car won’t work and I have no idea how to make it go. All there is left for me to do is to try and seek help, to face that long trudge up the hard shoulder in search of a phone that probably won’t work in order to call an emergency service that will take for ever to respond and when they do won’t be able to find the problem or have the right tool to fix it. Meanwhile, the entire rest of the female sex are whizzing past in Renault people carriers with eight babyseats in the back. Am I dragging out this analogy too far? If so I don’t care.

Look, I know I’m whining here, but if I can’t whine to my imaginary friend who can I whine to? My periods are absolutely horrible and the crowning nightmare of my apparent infertility is the idea that this abject misery, which I have endured twelve times a year since I was thirteen, might be for nothing. I mean, if it turns out my whole plumbing system is irrevocably buggered and that I might just as well have had a hysterectomy twenty years ago I shall just die.

Dear Book

Failed again. Arse. Lucy says that Sheila says the bloke on Oprah said that I’m not supposed to use that word. “Failed”, that is, not “arse”. Apparently the “fail” word implies a value judgement. If we say that we’ve failed then that means in some way it’s our fault, which of course it isn’t. Lucy has read eight and a half million books on the subject of infertility and while they don’t agree on many things they do all seem to feel that a positive outlook is essential.

Well, bollocks to that. We’ve failed again. Lucy has got her period, Restricted Bonking Month was a complete washout. She’s in bed right now, with the light off, groaning. I’m sure the main reason she wants a kid is to have nine months off having periods. They seem to be so awful for her. She says I can never know how bad it feels, but to give me some idea she says it’s like being kicked in the balls over and over again for two days. Sounds terrible, although how she would know what being kicked in the balls is like I don’t know.

I always feel at such a loss at these times. So impotent. Whoops, wrong word there, but you know what I mean… I mean I know what I mean… for heaven’s sake, I think I’m going mad. Nobody’s going to read this but me and yet I’m beginning to address this pointless exercise to a third person. I must get a grip.

Anyway, as I was remarking, I feel so useless at period time. I watch Lucy groaning away and I really haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on with her. All I know is that her gut swells up like a football, which is doubly sad because it makes her look pregnant. I think all small boys should be given lessons about menstruation when they are eleven. I mean, we were never told anything about it when I was at school. I’ll bet they still gloss over it, and as you get older you don’t like to ask. I mean obviously I know the basics, but the details you have to pick up off the tampon ads on the telly and it’s most confusing. They use all this code language and imagery like “protection” and “freedom” and “all-over freshness” and there’s wings involved and the blood’s blue and frankly you just don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on at all.

Dear Penny

Felt better today, physically, anyway. Mentally I’m still feeling low. The brutal truth is that it is now sixty-one periods since Sam and I started trying for a baby. That’s five years and one month. What’s more, when I come to think about it, prior to that we weren’t exactly being careful. In fact we had at least a year of relying on withdrawal. I wanted to get preg even then and I remember thinking that if one night he didn’t get it out in time I wouldn’t mind a bit. I know now that he might as well have left it in until Christmas, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Because, basically, I have to face facts. I am Sad. I’m Barren. My womb is a prune.

There, I’ve said it. I don’t care, it’s how I feel. What’s the point of this book if I can’t be honest? Excuse me, Penny, got to get a tissue.

I’ve been crying, Penny, sorry. I tried reminding myself about the homeless and the starving people in Africa, but it didn’t work. Anyway, I’m back now. Don’t worry, I’m not about to collapse or have a breakdown or anything, it’s just that sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed, that’s all.

And, yes, I know that a lot of women wait a lot longer than five years and a month (actually six years and one month in my case, if you count the careless year) and then all of a sudden they start spraying sprogs about the place like a fish spawning. I’ve heard all the stories. Couples who gave up hope only to have eight kids in a week!

“I know someone who waited decades!” people say.

“My cousin had actually been dead for three years when she had her first. Dead of old age! She was a shrivelled, sundried-tomato-like, cadaverous old corpse and what’s more her husband had no testicles, having lost them in the Crimean War. Yet once they’d had one they couldn’t stop. Ended up with enough for a football and a netball team plus a crowd of supporters!!”

I’ve heard them all.

Mum says that she’s sure it’s all in the mind. Everybody says that. She says I concentrate too much on my career. Everybody says that too. Besides which, career? Ha! Ha ha HA! One thing I do not have is a career. I am not a theatrical agent, I am a theatrical agent’s assistant. Negotiating residual repeat fees for cable broadcasts of ancient episodes of Emmerdale Farm (when it was still called Emmerdale Farm) is not what I call a career.

Melinda says I’ve got to relax. Everybody says that as well! In fact, that is the thing that everybody says most. They say, “Relax, the thing to do is put it out of your mind and then it will happen.” It is simply not possible to bloody well relax with your body clock ticking away in your ear at five million decibels, and your eggs getting more dry and ancient by the day.

Melinda and George brought Cuthbert round today, which was nice. No, really it was, I’m not so bloody sad that I can’t enjoy my friends and their babies. Sam still refers to Cuthbert as Scrotum, which is ridiculous because he’s beautiful. I held him for a while and just wanted to eat him. It’s pathetic, I hate myself, but all the time I was saying how lovely he was, all I could think was, “Wish I had one.”

Dear Sam

Scrotum may have improved slightly, difficult to say. I mean he no longer makes me want to hide behind the sofa like he was a monster from Doctor Who, but then that may just be because I’m getting used to him. George has overcome his initial qualms, I’m pleased to say, and given the lad the benefit of the doubt. The prospects of young Cuthbert ending up wrapped in a blanket outside a police station are receding. I mean it’s clear that he’s not going to be a male model, that’s for sure, but George thinks he could probably do something in the City or on the radio. Or a boxer, perhaps? We certainly wouldn’t have to worry about his looks getting ruined.

I’m probably being unfair here. I suppose all babies look this way in the very early stages, but I have to be honest and admit that they do absolutely nothing for me. I try to get clucky but no go, I don’t even want to hold them. I’m an arm’s-length man, thank you very much. That funny pulsating bit on their heads completely freaks me out. The first time I saw that I confidently expected the Alien to burst forth from it with Sigourney Weaver close behind. Of course Lucy went potty over the lad and had to hold him and I knew that all she could think was that she wished she had one.

I wish that she did too. I wish that we both did. I would love to be the father of Lucy’s child.

Sometimes, on the rare occasions when I go for my run in the park, I find myself fantasizing about us being a family. I imagine Lucy back home with the two cutest little toddlers ever and me getting back and having my bath with them and then we all have tea together and then a story.

I’ll stop writing now as I’m in danger of turning into a sad fuck.

Dear Penny

Drusilla has suggested aromatherapy. She’s given me some rose and geranium oils, which was nice of her. She says these oils are oestrogenic. Sam is of course completely dismissive. He says if women want to bathe in scented oils then that’s fine by him but they should not bloody well pretend there’s any further significance to it than that. I hate the way he does that. As if there’s some rational and obvious way of doing things and everything else is just self-indulgent claptrap. I mean it probably is self-indulgent claptrap, of course, but he doesn’t have to be so negative all the time. I said to him, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, you cynical bastard!” which I must say I thought rather a clever riposte.

The thing about Sam is that he protects his feelings by pretending he doesn’t have any. I’m sure that’s why he suffers from writer’s block. I just don’t believe you can write anything worthwhile without putting a bit of yourself into it.

Dear Self

The house reeks! Stinks! I do wish Lucy would not talk to Drusilla. I mean I know that Drusilla has considered Lucy her soulmate since Lucy got her the part of a plum in a yogurt advert, but the woman is nuttier than squirrel shit. The aromatherapy business has got out of hand. As I write these very words Lucy, a normally rational person, is boiling up the bark of a hawthorn hedge with the roots of a herbaceous bush in order to make a tincture for her bath. I try not to be dismissive, but Lucy knows how I feel and takes it as evidence of a shallow cynicism on my part. She feels that this is at the root of my inability to write, saying that I live my emotional life at a glib surface level and that I won’t write anything worthwhile until I get in touch with my inner feelings. The truth of the matter is, of course, that I don’t have any inner feelings and the reason I can’t write anything decent is that I am a talent-free zone with the brain of a Brussels sprout.

Dear Penny

Sam is still moaning about my aromatherapy and herbal remedies (I’m currently boiling fennel and ginger, which I admit is a bit whiffy). He’s so cold and dismissive of anything remotely spiritual or sensual which is very frustrating for me because I really do feel the need for softness and spirituality in my life sometimes. I mean, what’s the point of sharing your life with someone if you can’t communicate with them about the things that matter to you? Sam, I’m afraid, thinks that feelings are an inconvenience and never really wants to talk about anything important. He’s only interested in his work and trivia like old popmusic. Sometimes I even wonder about whether he still fancies me.

Sheila took on an important new client today. An actor called Carl Phipps. He came into the office. Very arrogant. Good looking, certainly, but what does that signify?

Dear Self

Now she’s started using this little candle and dish arrangement in which she warms aromatic oils. The house stinks like a student party. I know I shall have a blocked nose in the morning. On top of which the whole business has made her all upset with me as well. This evening she wanted me to massage nutmeg oil into the crease of her bum (not, I hasten to add, out of any sudden erotic desire but because it’s what it said you should do on the bottle). Well, I put down my newspaper and did it, of course, but she could tell that I wasn’t overly enthused about the whole thing. She felt I was massaging her bum crease in a perfunctory manner and took this as further evidence of my lack of tactile warmth, similar to the shameful way in which I don’t like to cuddle while watching the telly. Lucy thinks I’m uptight and unloving, that massaging her bum crease is something I should relish, that I should be rejoicing in the sensual dialogue betwixt my fingers and her bum. I just think that I wanted to finish my paper.

Look, Book, I’m not saying I don’t fancy her. Of course I fancy her, but we’ve been together for nearly ten years! I just can’t get as worked up about her bum as I used to. I know her bum, I’m familiar with it, we’ve been through a lot together. Caressing it can never again be the same journey of mystery and delight that it was on our first wild nights together. I can’t say this to Lucy, of course. She’d be horrified and think me a callous pig. Although I can tell you one thing: if I strolled up to her while she was watching EastEnders and said, “Stick your fingers up my arse now,” I’d get pretty short shrift.

But it’s always the way with women, isn’t it? One law for them, one law for us. She’s completely irrational. She says that I’d probably be more than happy to massage aromatic oils into Winona Ryder’s bum and the truth is that of course I bloody well would! I don’t say so, of course, but naturally she takes my silence as an admission of guilt (contrary to all civilized law, I might point out). So she says, “Well, go on, then, I’m not stopping you,” so I say no, I’m not going to massage oil into Winona Ryder’s bum because I love her (Lucy, that is, not Winona) and whatever my unworthy male hormonal response to gorgeous film stars might be, I have chosen to be faithful to Lucy. Also, I have to admit that Winona might not be one hundred per cent keen on the idea and her wishes would of course have to be taken into account.

The extraordinary thing is that Lucy thinks that an attached man finding other women attractive is virtually tantamount to his being unfaithful. Which is bullshit! Only being unfaithful is tantamount to being unfaithful! I have tried to explain that the fact that a man remains faithful despite finding other women attractive (which all men do unless they’re dead) is the proof of his love and devotion and should be recognized as such and appreciated, not condemned. To which Lucy says, “Well, if you’re that desperate, go ahead, then. I’m not stopping you,” and I say, “I don’t want to! That’s the point! But the reason that I’m not unfaithful is not because I never find other women attractive, but because I love you!” And she says, “Well, if you’re that desperate, go ahead, then. I’m not stopping you.”

And so the long day wears on.

Dear Penny Pal

I feel a bit sad. I know Sam loves me and I suppose he still fancies me, but he doesn’t bother to show it very much and he never says it. He says he does, of course. He claims that I have selective ears, that I never hear him when he says nice things but only when he doesn’t. I don’t think that’s true. I think he only really says nice things when I ask him to say them, but I can’t be sure. I think that perhaps his mother didn’t cuddle him enough as a child or something. Tonight I made him massage some oil into my lower back and although he did do it I could tell that it was a major inconvenience for him, which made the whole thing pointless. I mean, if aromatherapy is going to have any effect at all I imagine it will be a pretty subtle one, dealing as it does with one’s most delicate biorhythms. Sam’s reluctant vibes will have buggered all that completely. Let’s face it, delicate biorhythms are not exactly going to stand a lot of chance against a great big lump of negativity that just wants to read its newspaper.

He used to be much more tactile but now he doesn’t even bother with foreplay when we have sex. I mean it’s not as if he’s In Like Flynn or anything like that. He’s not rough or insensitive. In fact I think he’s quite a sensitive lover, but he just doesn’t try so much any more. He just cuddles up for a bit until he thinks I’m ready and then he’s off. I sort of try to talk about it but he gets irritable. You see, he thinks it’s inevitable that two people will become less sensuous and erotically aware of each other as the years go by, but I don’t. Sometimes I’d rather just stroke a bit and cuddle than have sex, but I don’t think Sam would see the point.

Dear Book

I think Lucy is at the end of her tether. She’s been a bit quiet these last few days and I know it’s because she’s thinking about fertility. There’s been this documentary running on the Beeb about IVF couples and she seems to have learnt it off by heart. Personally I can’t watch it. I just cannot bring myself to be interested in the sad and desperate experiences of complete strangers. Lucy, on the other hand, tapes it. She tapes anything about fertility, even that arrogant pillock Kilroy who’s on in the mornings. She cuts articles out of the papers (incredible how many there are) and writes off to all sorts of organizations. It’s all a bit heartbreaking, although she’s very good about it, determined not to become emotionally dysfunctional, she’s quite clear on that one. But I must say I do find it slightly alarming how attractive she seems to find baby clothes. Mind you, this is something I’ve noticed in many women. They look at a pair of tiny socks and say, “Ahh, isn’t that just so-o-o sweet and just lovely.”

Why is this? I simply cannot fathom it. These are empty socks we’re talking about here, socks with no baby in them. How can women go gooey over a pair of socks? I find Winona Ryder attractive (as I think I’ve said), but I wouldn’t go all gooey over her socks… Well, possibly… I don’t know. Anyway, what I’m saying is that the sight of a group of girls picking up a tiny jacket or a little hat and going “Aaaaah” is a mystery to me.

It’s the same with dolls. Lucy likes dolls. She’s a woman of thirty-one and she loves them. Of course, because she’s a grown-up she has to pretend that there’s some kind of pseudo-artistic attraction, it’s old dolls she likes, interesting ones. She goes on about the porcelain head with the stamp of the German maker on it. But I know that she just loves dolls and that if she thought she could get away with it without looking sad she’d buy a Barbie.

Better stop. Got to read a script tonight, a comic play which has developed out of a new writing workshop we’ve been running at the Beeb. The author has already had a one-act piece put on at the Royal Court or some other gruesome up-its-own-arse, over-subsidized London centre of theatrical wankdom. Lucy tells me we actually saw it but I can’t remember it for the life of me. The new play is called Fucking and Fucking. I told him that we’d have to change the title and he looked at me as if I was some kind of fascist. It’s so depressing. It seems only yesterday that I was considered a hip and dangerous young producer because I commissioned sketches about tampons. Now I’m a Nazi for telling young writers they can’t use the word “fuck” in their titles. Of course at the Royal Court they positively insist on having rude words in their titles and anal sex by the end of scene one.

I can’t believe how quickly I’m turning into a sad, reactionary old git.

Dear Penny

I’m not putting it off any longer, Penny. I’ve made an appointment to go and talk to my doctor. Five years and a month (soon no doubt to be five years and two months) is too long for it to be bad luck. There is obviously something wrong and quite frankly it will be a relief to know the truth. Anyway, it seems to me that the best way to get pregnant is to go and start the process of some sort of fertility treatment. At least it is according to the seventeen million old-wives’ tales and urban myths I’ve been told over the last couple of years. You hear constantly of people who know people who had decided to start IVF only to get pregnant by conventional means on their way to the first appointment! There are also any number of stories of couples who failed at IVF but then immediately got pregnant by conventional means or by sitting on wet grass or something. Add to this the numerous people who have a cousin who signed up to adopt and then immediately fell pregnant, plus of course the tales of people who got pregnant in the five-mile-high club on the way back from trying to get a Bosnian Baby. All in all I have come to the conclusion that the only absolutely sure way to get pregnant is to be pronounced infertile.

Carl Phipps, our new star, came in to the office again today to drop off his current ten-by-eight. He’s already had an offer of a film and he’s only been with us a few days! I’m afraid this has made him rather grand. We call his type Uhoaas which stands for “Up his own arse actor”.

Dear etc

Depressed. Very depressed. I met the new BBC1 Controller today. He’s younger than me! This is the first time this has happened. I mean me being older than one of my bosses. I don’t like it at all. He’s a whizzkid from Granada. I think he made some documentary proving that the Conservative Party is funded by a gang of Middle Eastern prostitutes, so obviously that qualifies him to schedule the entertainment of a nation. Looking at him, I suddenly felt the icy hand of mortality upon my shoulder. I’m thirty-eight, I’ll be forty in two years.

I thought about going for a run. I didn’t go, but I thought about it.

I feel very sorry for poor old Lucy at the moment. Not only has she got all this fertility business on her mind, but now it sounds like she’s got a real idiot to look after at work. That new actor, Phipps guy, can’t remember his first name, Cunt or something, although I doubt that could be it. He sounds like a right pain. She went on about him a bit over dinner, so I could tell he’s got right under her skin. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about.

Dear Penny

I’m going to see Dr Cooper today. I feel better now that I’m finally acknowledging that there actually probably is a problem and that I’m beginning the process of dealing with it. All the girls plus my mum and Sam’s mum continue to assure me that five years and one month (nearly five years and two months) is not that long to be trying. I continue to be bombarded with the same old drivel about various women who tried continually and energetically for seven years and then – bang! – out popped triplets. I do wish people wouldn’t all say the SAME BOLLOCKS to me all the time. They might at least vary it slightly. There seem to be more urban myths attached to infertility than there are to famous film stars filling their bottoms with small animals. It will be so good to get an informed opinion rather than all this anecdotal hearsay.

Just got back from Dr Cooper’s. He says that five years or so is not actually that long to be trying and that he knows any number of women who tried for seven years and then had twelve apiece. I feel a huge gin and tonic calling.

Dr Cooper has, however, offered to do a blood test to check my hormone levels and a sperm test for Sam. I told Sam about it this afternoon and he took it very well. I thought it might bother him a bit – men are so funny about their manhood and anything remotely associated with their willies – but he was great and said it was simply not a problem and did not bother him in the slightest.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!

I’ve got diluted sperm. I know it. My sack is empty! My balls undone! Can’t write any more tonight.

Dear Pen Pal

The blood test is all set up for next Tuesday. Apparently this will ascertain if I’m ovulating or not. My God, I shall be so annoyed if I’m not. Ten years of condoms, caps, coils and abstinence followed by five years of thermometers, counting days and weeing on traffic lights would all be completely wasted.

Drusilla is horrified at the prospect of me having a blood test. She thinks that modern medicine is totally intrusive (and I suppose wandering about naked at Stonehenge isn’t intrusive). She thinks I should employ visualization therapy, which apparently consists of breathing, relaxing (surprise, surprise) and visualizing. She wants me to visualize a baby inside me, in my stomach, in my arms, in my very soul, a complete and perfect part of me. I said, “Drusilla darling, that’s all I ever bloody do,” and she said that was the problem. I’m obsessive, I need to visualize mystically rather than desperately, I need to allow myself the freedom to dream. Sounds like absolute bollocks to me.

I’ve booked a class for tomorrow night.

Sheila has suggested that I drink more heavily and take up smoking. This is because the only two times she’s ever got pregnant (Joanna and I were amazed, we had no idea she ever had been) were after colossal binges. It happened in her wild youth and resulted in abortions as she had no idea who the fathers were. I told her I’ve had many a drunken shag in my time and sadly the booze method does not work for me.

Sam seems to be going a bit funny over the prospect of his sperm test.

Dear Self

Heard an interesting fact about sperm today. Not that sperm is on my mind or anything but the subject came up in a taxi, as it will from time to time. Sperm counts, it seems, are generally down in the Western world. Seriously down, in fact, twenty-five per cent since before the war, or maybe fifty, the cab driver couldn’t remember the exact figure. It seems that for whatever reason, be it additives in the food, pollution, radiation from our mobile phones, or the gunk at the bottom of Pot Noodles, we modern men are considerably less flush in the sperm department than our grandfathers were. Isn’t that strange? I mean modern society’s attitude to old people is basically one of contempt. We don’t want to look like them and they cost too much to run. Most people think of old-age pensioners as being embarrassing wrinkly sad acts, terminally unhip.

“Poor old Grandad,” we think.

“Look at him, sitting in the corner dribbling and sucking his gums, always wanting to watch a different television channel from the rest of the family.”

Now it turns out the man’s got bigger bollocks than all of his patronizing male descendants put together! Spunk is a diminishing commodity. George Formby had more than Tom Jones, who in turn has more than Liam Gallagher. Amazing. Dixie Dean had more capacious testicles than George Best, who had bigger ones than Gazza. Actually, thinking about it, that’s probably why old-time footballers used to wear those huge shorts, it was clearly to fit their bollocks in. In fact it’s probably why when you watch an old pre-war game on film it always looks so slow and uninspired. It was probably as much as the poor bastards could do to drag their enormous scrotums up and down the pitch.

Recently I’ve been feeling slightly old, which is ridiculous at thirty-eight. Except is it? I mean of course I can realistically say that I may not even have lived half of my life yet, but come on, my sixties and seventies are hardly comparable to my twenties and thirties, are they? I mean I may have as many years left, but will there be as much life in them? No bloody way. I already get buggered knees if I play too much tennis.

I don’t like thinking this way. In fact, I don’t really like thinking at all. I’m not really an introspective sort of person. It’s writing these stupid bloody letters that’s making me all self-conscious. Perhaps I should cut down on the booze a bit. I’ll have a drink and think about it.

Dear Penny

I’m afraid Drusilla’s visualization class was a complete and utter washout. Why is it that anything interesting and different always has to be championed by the most unprepossessing people? Honestly, I’m trying to be nice here, but the types at this class made Drusilla (who is madder than the Green Room at the National Theatre) look positively sane.

I arrived at the Community Centre and a large woman with more hair (hennaed) than an old English sheepdog and breasts like Space Hoppers asked me if I wished to purchase some washable hessian sanitary napkins! I mean I ask you, Penny! Ugh, or what?! I’m happy to recycle glass, collect newspapers and rinse out tin cans but I do draw the line at recycling sanitary pads. If that is to be the price of saving the world then I fear that the world must die. And hessian? It would itch, I mean, wouldn’t it? Surely? These hippy birds must have fannies like tanned leather.

I nearly turned around and ran for it there and then, but I’d made the effort so I decided that I’d better give it a go. There’s no point being snobbish about these things, after all. Well, first off there was a “greeting session”. This involved us all sitting in a big circle and chucking a beanbag at each other and whenever you caught it you had to say your name. A simple enough exercise, one might have thought, but it was astonishing how difficult some of them found keeping the rhythm. I doubt if any of them had ever been on a Girl Guide camp.

Anyway, after that the leading lady (who was American) took us on what is called a “guided fantasy” which was quite relaxing really when you let yourself go. You have to imagine a cool forest and a path by a stream and things like that, damp mist, a green canopy above, you know the sort of thing. An infinity of calm. I rather enjoyed this bit and nearly nodded off, which was nice because I feel absolutely buggered at the moment. Of course if Sam had been there he would have made some smart Alec comment and ruined it, but if you don’t try to be clever some of these alternative things can be quite good.

Anyway, once she’d got us feeling all sort of “drifty”, the American lady told us to try and visualize an imaginary baby being welcomed into our wombs. Well, I’m afraid that was where I lost it. All the relaxation disappeared and was replaced by anger and frustration. My cool forest suddenly turned into London as of now. I tried to get it back but I opened my eyes and looked round the circle at all these other sad, silly women, who were just like me (except I occasionally get my hair done), and I hated them. And I hated myself for being one of them.

Afterwards I told the American lady that I really didn’t think that this was the right approach for me. I told her that I spend most of my time trying not to think about babies because when I do I upset myself. She said that she understood but that I have to allow myself to want, to dream and if necessary to grieve over my current lack of baby. She said that I was fighting my body, resenting it, seeing it as the enemy of all my hopes and that this self-created tension might in fact be getting in the way of conception. Actually, it did sort of make sense and I ended up rather liking the woman, but I still shan’t go again. I just get too frustrated. I keep screaming inside, why the hell should I have to imagine a baby? Why can’t I just have one! Far less nice people than me have lots, and it’s just not fair. I know that’s a wicked thing to say but I know I’d be a much better mum than half the women I see letting their children put sweets in the trolley at Sainsbury’s. And as for these people one sees on the news who seem to have children for the sole reason that they might go on to terrorize entire housing estates and become one-boy crime-waves. Well, the injustice is almost too much to bear. I’d read my child Beatrix Potter and Winnie the Pooh and the only glue it would ever get involved with would be flour and water for making collages.

When I got home I found there’d been a letter in the second post. It was from Melinda sending me photos of when we were round at her and George’s place with new baby Cuthbert. I’m holding him and he looks so sweet and it looks like he’s mine. I look like a mother with a child and I’m not. I nearly cried but I remembered my resolution not to be obsessive so I had half a bottle of red wine instead.

Sam’s sperm test is looming. I had originally thought that he was taking it well but now he does seem to be dwelling on it rather.

Dear Self

I had lunch with Trevor and George from work today and was determined to touch on the subject of sperm. Pick their brains, so to speak. I mean George ought to know something. He produced Cuthbert and I wouldn’t like to meet the sperm that fathered him. Trevor’s gay so God knows he should have some opinions on the subject, having encountered the stuff face to face, so to speak. All in all I had been looking forward to airing my fears re my upcoming (if that isn’t too loaded a phrase) sperm test.

I didn’t get the chance, of course. We talked shop. We always do. It’s a funny thing about this biz we call show: whenever people involved in it get together they can talk about nothing else. I’m as bad as anyone. I believe that in the army they have a rule in the officers’ mess of no talking shop over dinner. It sounds like a great idea but it wouldn’t work for us, we’d just sink into an awkward silence. Telling people in showbusiness not to talk about showbusiness would be like telling the Pope to lay off the religious stuff.

We were lunching in Soho at a posh place called Quark. All restaurants in Soho are posh these days. Those nice, rough and ready little Italian diners are just a distant memory. I’d already made an arse of myself, of course. I arrived first and the waitress (wearing a skirt that was little more than a big belt, why do these girls torment us so?) immediately put this plate of prawny things down in front of me. I said they must be someone else’s because I hadn’t ordered anything yet. Well, she actually laughed at me! Amazing, she laughed and said they were “for the table”, a complimentary pre-appetizer appetizer. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you won’t be charged for them,” like I was some sad tourist way out of his depth and worrying about his budget. God, I felt every type of turd. My own fault, of course. Silly mistake. Particularly for a professional eater of the sacred meal called lunch like myself. I tried to recoup by cracking a little joke. I asked her for a biro so that I could write “Prat” on my forehead and, get this, she fucking gave me one.

Amazing! It’s this worship of all things American, I fear. They have rude, smart Alec staff in New York so we poor Brits who no longer have personalities of our own must do likewise. The thing is that it works in America. Brittle, wisecracking chutzpah is part of New York culture. It’s happening, it’s buzzing. When we do it it just comes across as surly. Manners are now seen as totally out of date, a shameful hangover from our class-ridden pre-meritocracy past. There’s a terrible modern orthodoxy that has developed which says that to be polite and show respect to other people is in fact to diminish your own status. Therefore people assert themselves by being rude. I think it’s sad.

Anyway after the prawny things disaster the half-naked waitress gave me the wine list. Well, I couldn’t face a wine list, not after the prawny mauling I’d just taken. I’d probably have ordered a dessert wine to start and been tarred and feathered and thrown out for being uncool. So I said I’d just have a mineral water and she gave me the mineral water list! I mean, for God’s sake! An actual leatherbound water list! I’ve never seen that before. The world is now officially raving tonto.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’d been hoping to draw the others out on sperm, but before I could even bring the subject up (which takes delicate handling in itself) we got into this terrible row about our job descriptions, amazing but true. It all came up because Trevor was talking about some script or other that he wanted to commission and he said…

“I don’t want to throw my weight around here, but as the BBC Head of Comedy, Television Group South, I feel that…”

Well, he didn’t get any further because George and I both protested that we were the BBC Head of Comedy, Television Group South. I knew that George wasn’t because I knew for a fact that he was Chief Coordinator, BBC Entertainment Group, Television. I’d seen it on an invitation to a party. I also knew that he was angling for the post of Network Regional Channel Controller because I’d read it in the Independent only the previous morning. George insisted that he didn’t care what it said on his invites, or what I’d read in the Independent, that he was BBC Head of Comedy, Television Group South.

“Well, what are you angling for, then?” Trevor asked, and George said that he was very excited about his current position and had no plans to move, which of course means he’s angling for something juicy at Channel Four.

That got us thinking. Because if George did go to Channel Four, and if he is, as he insists, BBC Head of Comedy, Television Group South, then either I or Trevor will be able to take over his job (which we both thought we already had anyway). Now, if one of us takes over George’s job it would leave whatever job that person currently held vacant for the other. We could all move on and hence would all be guaranteed that precious mention in the media pages of the Independent so vital to the profile of us usually anonymous execs.

Trevor insisted that he knew what my job was because he’d been offered it ahead of me (slightly disheartening). Apparently, I’m BBC Controller, Broken Comedy and Variety, which if true is disappointing because only last year I was BBC Entertainment Chief, Comedy Group, London and South East. Which would mean I’ve taken a step down without realizing it and am further away from becoming a Network Channel Controller than ever. Anyway, at this point a bike arrived with a package for Trevor addressed to him as Independent Commissioning Editor, BBC Worldwide, which is a post none of us had heard of. Most confusing.

We all agreed that at this year’s Christmas drinks we really would pluck up the courage to ask the Deputy Director General what our jobs are.

After that the talk drifted on to other things. Trevor and George had their usual row about booze. Trevor no longer drinks, which George strongly disapproves of, particularly since Trevor has been through “recovery” (another thing of which George disapproves) and feels the need to mention his “problem” on a regular basis.

“As an alcoholic in recovery I have no problem with the alcohol on this table,” said Trevor. “In fact I can enjoy the fact that you’re enjoying it.”

“That’s nice,” said George. “Like we give a fuck.”

Trevor protested that he was only saying and George asked him not to.

“Look, Trevor,” he said, “you don’t drink any more, that’s great, not that you ever drank that much in the first place, but now you’re cured, isn’t it time you moved on?”

“But that’s the point, George. You can never be cured. I’m an alcoholic. I’ll always be an alcoholic. I could have nothing to drink for fifty years and I’d still be an alcoholic”

This is the bit George hates most.

“Well you might as well have a fucking drink, then!” he said loudly enough for people at other tables to turn their heads.

At this point I thought I could bring up the subject of sperm to smooth things over a bit but George, having dealt with Trevor’s obsession, moved on to his own, producing some photos of little Cuthbert. I had thought that producing pictures of one’s baby in all-male company was against the law but like everything else that seems to have changed, we’re all carers and nurturers now. I blame those posters that were popular in the late eighties showing huge muscular male torsos tenderly holding tiny babies. Soppy, I call it, but then I suppose I’m not in touch with my feelings or something.

As a matter of record, though, I must confess that young Cuthbert is beginning to shape up a bit. He’s definitely filling out and losing his scrotal appearance. He looked quite jolly in his togs from Baby Gap. George said that Cuthbert’s clothes cost more than his own do, which he thought was obscene. What is the point of giving babies and kids designer clothes? They puke on them, they roll in mud in them, they shit in them. Tonto, absolutely bloody tonto. George says that he’s going to give Melinda a serious talking to. Trevor, on the other hand (who is rather an elegant sort of bloke), thought we were both being Philistines and killjoys and that he wished his boyfriend had half the dress sense of young Cuthbert. To which George replied that it was all very well for him because being gay he would never have to face the appalling cost of bringing up a baby. Trevor said that George was not to be too sure about that; with a Labour government in who knew what might happen to the adoption laws?

Oh, God. Trevor is going to get kids before I do and he’s a homosexual.

Dearest Penny

Sorry I haven’t written for a couple of nights. I’ve been feeling a bit sad.

You know I was telling you that Sam isn’t very tactile? Well, I’d been thinking that perhaps it was partly because our sex life has become so clinical. You know, it’s got so inextricably wound up in my quest for fertility that I thought perhaps I was turning him off. So I tried to broach the subject. I said to him that I was sorry that things have got a bit dreary for us in the lovemaking department of late and told him that it was only because of the baby thing taking my mind off it. I told him that I still found him desirable and once we got through all this I’d leap on him regularly and purely for the fun of it. Well, I have to say, he didn’t seem that bothered either way, which was rather dispiriting. He just pecked me on the nose and said I mustn’t worry and that he was fine. Quite frankly, this was not the reaction I was looking for.

I know Sam loves me but he hardly ever holds me any more. I mean he only really holds me, properly (as opposed to perfunctorily), when we’re having it off and as I say our having it off is not what it was. I think we need a physical relationship that extends beyond sex. Sometimes I’d just like a bit of a kiss and a cuddle without it leading to anything, but he doesn’t understand that. He simply doesn’t see the point of snuggling unless it’s in preparation for sex.

Except when he’s pissed, of course, then it’s the other way round, then it’s all cuddle and no chance of a seeing to.

“I love you I love you I love you,” he dribbles. “I really really honestly love you.”

I mean, I ask you. As if any woman desires the sweet nothings of a sad sack of beer and flatulence?

But anyway, I do feel a bit rejected. This evening I tried to snuggle up when we were watching Channel Four News but when Sam watches telly he really watches it, no distractions allowed, even during the adverts. It’s amazing. There he is, concentrating on the golden crispiness of a packet of fish fingers or the sheer joy of driving a Fiat Uno and nothing must intrude. If I put my arm round him or my head on his shoulder I can feel him tense up and if I should dare to ask him to massage my feet or some other such pleasantry, well blimey! It’s like I’ve demanded that he sacrifice his entire existence for my comfort. I suppose I must just accept that he is not, nor ever will be, much of a cuddler. I don’t think many men are. At least I hope it’s not just him.

Yesterday I had one more go at the visualization class. Drusilla made me. She said it was absurd to do it just once and that if I didn’t go again then I might as well not have gone at all. So I gave it another chance, but it really isn’t for me. We’re all supposed to know each other now so the American lady was a bit bolder and she hopped straight in with some cathartic roleplaying. She made us all cry like babies. Ten grown women sitting in a circle, crying and wailing. I think the idea was to physicalize and project our need for children and hence stop us feeling like it was some kind of guilty secret. That may have been it. Anyway, it was bloody embarrassing. After that we had to hug each other and offer comfort, sharing our sadness and recognizing that we are not alone. Well, I tried to be communally supportive but it was pretty gruesome. I ended up clamped to the bosom of a woman who smelt of dogs. I really shan’t go again now. I wouldn’t have gone at all if I hadn’t been feeling so helpless.

One strange thing, though. During the meditation bit of the class (which happens at the end – we have to sit around and go all dreamy) I found myself thinking about that appalling hoity Carl Phipps, you know, the Uhoaa from work. Can’t think why, I don’t even like him or find him attractive. Although he does have a nice smile, that is when he deigns to bestow it upon one so lowly as I.

Dear Book

Trevor and I played squash today. God, I am so unfit. I coughed up something that looked like it lived in a pond. I hardly smoke at all any more but I do like a drink. I think I’ll try and switch to Spritzers. The beer is beginning to lie rather heavy.

Anyway, I talked to Trev a bit about my impending examination re sperm and we both agreed that it is not a test of my manhood. A poor result, a thin scrotal mix in the pot, does not mean I am any less of a man. Trevor pointed out that I have always prided myself on my liberal outlook and have never had any respect for all that macho bullshit. He was actually very sensitive and nice. He asked me whether I’d think him any less a whole man if it was him who was suspected of having a sad sorry sack full of bugger-all banging betwixt his legs. I said of course I wouldn’t.

But I would! I know I would. I’d pretend I wouldn’t but I would. “Poor old Trevor,” I’d think, “not much going on in the bollock department,” I’d think, “something of a testicular void”.

And that’s what he’s going to be thinking about me when I fail.

I told Lucy about my fears and, here’s a funny thing, she burst into tears, which I wasn’t expecting at all. I mean, after all, I’m the man with the suspected empty balls, aren’t I?

So I said, “Hang on. I’m the one with the suspected empty balls, aren’t I?”

I thought she was going to hit me. She said that I was already thinking in terms of “fault”, which was pathetic and destructive! She said that the truth was that the problem was far more likely to rest with her than with me because a woman’s tubes are a lot more complicated than any stupid horrible little knob and that if my sperm proved acceptable our infertility would henceforward be her “fault” and I would blame her! This was of course followed by more tears.

“Well,” I said, “a: I don’t care whether we have kids or not and…” I didn’t get to b, because she called me an insensitive shit, redoubled her wailing and weeping and ran out of the room.

I hate seeing her cry. It really makes me sad. On the other hand I do think it’s a bit much that I can’t worry about my sperm count without her turning it all back on to herself. I mean, I’m in on this too, aren’t I? Or aren’t I?

But life goes on. There is after all more to it than my bollocks, although I do tend to forget that fact with a sperm test pending. But turning to other subjects, I’ve been thinking about the conversation I had with Trevor and George at Quark about our job titles. Perhaps I should be moving on from the Beeb? After all, there’s so much independent production going on and what with my Beeb experience, I’d probably be in huge demand. Of course I would. And I must say that I quite fancy a bit of that indie cash that’s swilling about the place. Honestly, I see children making five times what I make and all because they’ve rented three square feet of carpet in Dean Street, a secretary with a nice belly button and commissioned a witty documentary about chalet girls on the piste or something equally blindingly obvious. I mustn’t get resentful, but on the other hand I must get off my arse.

Of course what I’d really like to do is write an original script myself but since even coming up with an initial idea seems to be beyond my creative powers I might as well do my present job but for a decent salary, which means the indie sector.

Only eight days to go until the big test and I am definitely feeling quite relaxed about it. In fact, it’s actually seven days and thirteen hours, so what’s the problem?

Dear Penny

I can’t believe it! All Sam thinks about is his sperm test. I mean for God’s sake! From what I can gather, as a younger man he practically had a degree in masturbation. His horrid hand was never still! Even now I suspect he occasionally indulges in a sly “excuse me” when I’m not around.

All in all masturbation is clearly a much-loved hobby to Sam and yet here he is, moping about as if he’s been sentenced to be hanged by the scrotum until dead.

What’s more, he’s desperate to get a good result! Terrified that he might be found to be lacking in the tadpole department. This is unbelievably selfish of him because basically and in reality what this means is that he’s desperate for there to be something wrong with my body. I mean, that’s what it comes down to, surely? When he prays for a full complement of the damn stuff he’s actually praying for me to have shrivelled tubes, or blocked follicles or nodules on my whatsit or something equally ghastly. Because, let’s face it, it’s either him or me. We can’t blame Mrs Thatcher for everything like we used to when we were young.

And this is the whole point. There is basically only one thing that can go wrong with a man. N.E.S. Not Enough Sperm. That’s it and once you know you know, and you can start to deal with it. I imagine there are creams or possibly vitamin supplements of some kind.

But with a woman! Well, a woman’s plumbing is like… well, I don’t know what it’s like, I’m trying to think of something really complex but also very beautiful. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for instance, or Paul Simon’s Graceland album. There’s a hundred things to be checked and every single one of those checks involves a gang of doctors placing something up one’s doodah not dissimilar to the equipment they used to build the Channel Tunnel! How could he wish that upon me?

There was a documentary on this evening about orphans of war.

I wanted them all.

Every single one, disabled, dying. There was one little girl with no mummy no daddy, no home and no legs. I’d bloody have her any time. Does that make me a patronizing Western imperialist who wants to deprive a child of its culture merely to satisfy my mawkish maternal needs? Probably, but I don’t care. If Sam I can’t have kids (oh God, I’m going teary again) I think I’ll try and work for a children’s charity. I sent £100 to War Child but didn’t tell Sam as we already have a charity covenant and have agreed not to respond to impulse appeals.

Dear Self

I feel much better about the sperm test now.

I’ve decided that it’s actually politically offensive to get all worked up with fear and shame about something which is simply an accident of nature. Would I consider someone who is born with less than fully functioning legs or arms less of a man or woman for that? No, I damn well wouldn’t. So enough of this nonsense. I’ll take my sperm result like a man and if it’s a poor one then so be it. If it turns out that the contents of my balls is all stew and no dumplings then that’s fine by me. I’ll simply shrug, c’est la vie style. In fact I’ll take pride in the way God made me.

“I have runny spunk,” I shall announce at dinner parties. “Does anyone have a problem with that?”

Nonetheless, despite not caring at all, I’m planning to go into a bit of training. Well, you want to do as well as possible, don’t you? I might as well give it my best shot, so to speak (quite funny that, must suggest it to one of our ruder comics). I’ve resolved therefore to cut out the booze for a few days and eat a lot of fruit. Also George told me that he’d heard that zinc was good, so I’ve bought a tub of five hundred tablets from Boots. I’ve also got multivitamins, a crate of Energizer sports drink and an American book entitled The Testicular Workout. Having said all this, I wish to stress again that I’m not in the slightest bit concerned about my test result.

Turning once more to other matters, I did something a bit devilish at work today. I instigated a bit of tentative job exploration and on BBC time too. I wrote a letter to Simon “Tosser” Tomkins, with whom I was at college. Old Tosser’s done very well of late, having practically cornered the market in supplying the BBC with programmes fronted by posh smart Alecs. He and his partners have had a quite extraordinary run of success, producing quiz shows (fronted by posh smart Alecs), chat shows (fronted by posh smart Alecs) and endless travelogues (fronted by posh smart Alecs). All these shows, I have to say, have been pretty good, not least, I might add, because the BBC itself pioneered most of the formats on radio. Anyway, Tosser recently floated his company on the stock market and it turned out that it’s worth seven million quid! Which really is a quite astonishing amount of money. And to think I once saw him shove four radishes up his arse at a May Ball. Blimey. Anyway, I just sent him a friendly note, you know…

“Dear Tosser. The Beeb’s a bit crap these days or what? Too many shows full of yobs going on about how much they like football. I was thinking of putting myself about a bit. What do you think?”

I signed it “Sam Bell, Executive Chief Commissioning Editor, BBC Worldwide,” which is actually a post I made up but I didn’t want old Tosser thinking I’m not a major player. Of course, being me, as I was putting the note into an envelope I began to worry about it. I suddenly felt all guilty and started to think that I might be burning bridges at the Beeb. Suppose my negative thinking is showing in my attitude? I wouldn’t wish to blow the credit I’ve built up at TV Centre, certainly not before I get a new job. So I also sent a note to the new Channel Controller asking if he’d like to come to dinner. I very much doubt he will, since as I believe I’ve mentioned he’s younger than me and also knows pop stars and people like that, but it’s nice to ask him. A bit of smarmy arselick never hurts. I sent the letters through the BBC franking system. Let the licence payers stump up the cash. I’ve given them the best years of my life.

Dear Pen Pal

I spent yesterday lunchtime at a women’s clinic for alternative medicine and therapy. As I’ve said, all that New Agey stuff is not really for me, but on the other hand it’s foolish to dismiss things out of hand. Anyway, while I was there I bumped into Drusilla. she’d just been to an aromatherapy session and she reeked of orange and liquorice oils. It made me think of the school tuckshop actually. This was unfortunate because of course then I thought of all the girls I knew at school, and then I wondered where they all are now and of course then I thought they’ve all got babies! Twelve each, no doubt. Which is wonderful, and I’m glad for them, no really I am, but it does also make me feel a bit sad.

Anyway, Drusilla (who seems to be nearly as fascinated by my infertility as I am myself) asked how long we’d lived in Highgate.

“Five years,” I said, to which she positively shrieked and said that this was our problem! I told her not to be ridiculous, of course, but asked her to tell me more (you can’t be too careful). Well, apparently it’s well known that there’s an unfriendly and infertile ley line running right through Hampstead and Highgate. I pointed out that other people conceive in Highgate, but apparently ley lines are very personal and can be a fertility drug for some and an absolute vinegar douche for others. Drusilla is convinced that our problem is geographical. She claims that the most powerfully positive ley line within this, our ancient and magical land of Albany, runs right across Primrose Hill! Well, I half guessed what was coming, but it was still a shock. She wants Sam and me to have it off on top of Primrose Hill!

On bloody top! In the open air. At midnight under a full moon, no less.

It’s not on, of course. Absolutely out of the question. Under no circumstances would I dream of doing such a thing. Well, it’s ridiculous. She’ll have us fellating at Stonehenge next.

Incidentally, I nearly shouted at that arrogant sod Carl Phipps today. I was on my own in the office and he came in to pick up some faxes, from an American producer no less, very grand. I must say he was looking rather nice, wearing a maroon-coloured corduroy suit, so I said, “Oh you’re looking rather nice, Carl,” and he said, “Well, one tries.” I mean the arrogance! He might just as well have said, “Yes, I am gorgeous, aren’t I?” Which he is not, incidentally. Anyway, then he sat right down on the corner of my desk and said, “You’re looking like something of a sex bitch yourself today, Lucy” which was simply not true. All I had on was a silly little miniskirt, my kinky boots and that little tight top I quite like. Frankly I looked awful, so it was stupid of him to pretend I didn’t.

Carl is terribly popular with the public. He’s definitely our biggest client. He gets loads of fan mail from that costume thing he did at the Beeb. I can’t think what people see in him.

Dear Book

Good news and bad news. Lucy has vetoed my all-round scrotal fitness plan. She says that the test must not be rigged. If we’re to get anywhere with discovering why we’re infertile I must present an honest picture of myself and my life. i.e. half pissed most nights and occasionally at lunchtime. Lucy suspects, I fear, that my fondness for booze (which though sociable is by no means excessive) may be the problem. She imagines that the inside of my scrotum resembles the Groucho Club at 1.45 on a Saturday night, i.e. nearly empty but with a thin smattering of pissed-up free-loading liggers who have no real skills or purpose and appear to make no positive contribution to anything whatsoever that might justify their comfortable and socially exalted existence.

Therefore, despite her low opinion of my fertility, Lucy wants it to be presented honestly and for this reason the zinc and the multivitamins have been ditched. Also (rather splendidly) she’s told me to keep drinking. Although only at normal levels, whatever they may be. I find it almost impossible to work out how much I drink. I mean I know it’s not that much, but how much is that? If ever I ask myself “How many did I have last night?” I always answer, “Oh, only a few.” But when you actually try and work it out, check how much you spent, the state of the whisky bottle still on the kitchen table, the various places you’ve been, suddenly you’re worrying that you’re an alcoholic.

Anyway, Lucy’s decision not to let me prepare for my test has certainly made life easier. I’m particularly pleased to be able to give up the Testicular Workout. It promised firm, full and rounded testicles in a wrinkle-free scrotum inside one month, but it required a kind of tensing of the arse and lower gut muscles which made me frown furiously. I’m glad not to be bothering with that any more. I have enough new lines on my face without deliberately grimacing for ten minutes a day.

Anyway, in four days’ time it will all be over. Which means from tomorrow onwards I’m not allowed to ejaculate. Apparently a three-day period of being left alone in quiet contemplation will give my sperm time to consider their characters and pull themselves together a bit. No great hardship, this abstinence. Sex for Lucy and me at the moment is rarer than a decent sitcom on ITV and I’m usually too tired to be bothered with slapping the monkey.

No reply yet from Tosser, or indeed the Channel Controller, but I take this as no slight. They’re both very busy men, very busy men indeed, as, of course, am I.

Dear Pen Pal

I gave blood today. This test is to consider my hormone level to see if I ovulate. I did it at an NHS Female Health Clinic in Camden. I didn’t do it at my normal GP’s because Dr Cooper is on holiday and I don’t really like Dr Mason (nothing specific, just don’t really like him).

God, Camden’s getting gruesome. If you’re not out of your brains on drugs the police stop you and ask if you’re lost. I walked up the High Street holding my copy of the Big Issue as a sort of shield. So depressing, all those homeless people. How did it happen? Thatcher, I used to think, but she’s been gone for donks and they’re still here. You give money to a couple of them but you can’t give money to them all and when you’ve run out of change you want to say to the ones you haven’t given anything to that you’ve already given money to the previous ones, but why would they care?

The clinic was depressing, as it would be. All these women having their bits and their boobs checked, or barren like me. One tries to maintain a positive outlook but it’s not easy.

There was an old TV Times in the waiting pen (I won’t call it a “room”, that would make it sound too cosy; it was just a sort of square of plastic chairs with a couple of broken toys on the floor). Anyway, the TV Times contained quite a good article about Carl Phipps, when he was still in that awful thing Fusilier! on ITV. Quite nice pictures, although I must say I prefer him now he’s got longer hair. That crew cut was rather brutal. Still, his eyes haven’t changed, still soft and limpid. He knows how nice they are, though, like David Essex used to. I’ll bet he uses twinkle drops. The text went on and on about how girls are always getting terrible crushes on him. You can see how they might, but God, some women are stupid.

Dear etc.

Quite astonishing development at work today. I’ve been to Downing Street. I didn’t meet the Prime Minister, but it’s still amazing. It completely took my mind off my sperm test.

It happened like this. I’d just sat down to another morning of brooding over the lack of direction or passion in my career, leafing through another pile of scripts, wondering why the hell I can’t seem to find it in me to write one myself, when Daphne said that the Channel Controller was on the line. Well of course I was thrilled, he could only be phoning personally to accept my dinner invitation! I was mentally leafing through Delia as I grabbed the phone and had already decided on the salmon mousse to start when it turned out that Nigel had called about something even more exciting! He was phoning from Barcelona, where he was (of course) attending an international television festival. Perhaps the single greatest perk of being at the Beeb is the international festival circuit. The BBC don’t pay you much, but they do let you lig. Even I get to go to a few. Lucy and I had a fantastic weekend in Cork last April, except that she thought she was ovulating so I wasn’t allowed to drink. Controllers, being an altogether superior breed, of course, virtually spend their lives at festivals. You can always find them in some exotic location bemoaning the fact that Baywatch is the most popular Programme in the world and that cartoons are the sickness at the heart of children’s broadcasting. Anyway, this was why Nigel was calling from Barcelona.

But oh, such news! It turned out that the Prime Minister’s office had been on to the BBC about the PM appearing on Livin’ Large. Livin’ Large is our current Saturday morning kids’ pop and fun show and every week they have a sort of interview spot where the children get to ask questions of a celebrity. Now, unbeknownst to me (surprise, surprise) our PR people had had a brilliant idea. (I must digress here to remark that the fact that our PR people had had a brilliant idea was shocking news in itself and evidence of how much things have changed around the old place. BBC press and public relations used to consist of an office with a large enthusiastic woman in it whom everyone ignored. Now it’s a huge and entirely separate company called something like BBC Communications or Beeb COM, whose services I have to hire. It’s quite extraordinary. In order for me to ensure that BBC shows are plugged in BBC publications I have to pay BBC money to BBC Communications. It seems loopy to me, but George assures me that it’s cut away a lot of “dead wood”.)

Anyway, BBC Communications’ idea had been to ask the Prime Minister if he would like to appear on Livin’ Large and take some questions from “the kids”, thereby cutting through all that cynical adult bullshit and plugging in to the pure unsullied enthusiasm of youth. Astonishingly, it seemed to me, the man was considering it.

The problem for Nigel (the Controller) was that Downing Street (which is a vigorous, “can do” sort of a place these days) wanted to meet today! and no other later date would do because the PM’s diary is chockablock with summits and Cabinet crises right through till Christmas. Nigel had of course tried to get a flight back from Barcelona but there was a football match, or the French air-traffic controllers weren’t letting anybody out of Europe today or something. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I would have to go to the meeting!

Well, I spent the rest of the morning phoning my mum and Lucy and everybody I knew and trying to get my tie ironed. Of course, one might have thought that in the heart of one of the largest television studio complexes in the world getting one’s tie ironed would have been easy. To get someone from wardrobe would, one might imagine, have been the work of a moment. Unfortunately “wardrobe” no longer exists as such. It’s a separate company called Beeb Frox or else something equally awful, and one has to negotiate with it. This Daphne, my wonderful secretary, duly did, and came back with a quote of £45. It seemed a bit steep to iron a tie but apparently Beeb Frox claimed it would scarcely cover their paperwork. I told Daphne that seeing as this was the Prime Minister and all, she’d better get on with it, but it turned out not to be that simple. In order for my office to generate a payment from finance (BeebCash Plc) I needed first to prove that I had secured the most competitive tender for the work. Daphne said that she was required to approach a minimum of two outside costumiers to see if they would iron my tie more cheaply than Beeb Frox. Only when we had three estimates to compare could we commission the work. Meanwhile, it would also be necessary to decide out of what programme budget the ironing of the tie was to come. Clearly this would have to be Livin’ Large, but if that was the case their Line Producer would have to sign the chit. Also, Livin’ Large was not made in house but by an independent company called Choose Groove Productions. Incidentally, I must add here that this does not mean that Choose Groove Productions make Livin’ Large in any practical sense, oh no, the BBC make it, with BBC staff in a BBC studio, paid for by BBC money, the only difference being that some bloke with a ponytail in Soho takes a thirty-grand-an-episode production fee and gets to stick his company logo on the end of the programme. It was to this lucky recipient of the BBC’s forced entry into the marketplace that Daphne would have to go to get budgetary authorization for my tie to be ironed.

In the end, Daphne flattened the tie underneath a pile of old copies of Spotlight for a stick of my KitKat.

So anyway, to get on with the story, this afternoon there I was, fronting up to the gates of Downing Street and being saluted through by a policeman. It was like a dream. I walked up the street with my briefcase, just like cabinet ministers do on the news, and in through the famous door.

I must say it’s bloody dowdy inside, or at least the bits I saw are. Amazing. The entrance hall is like a rundown hotel. Nobody could accuse any of the previous fifteen administrations of wasting money on decoration because I swear that the place hasn’t had a lick of paint since Chamberlain was waving his bit of paper about. While I was waiting I noticed an old plastic carrierbag chucked on the threadbare carpet against the skirting board. I remarked to the amiable old doorman that I hoped it wasn’t a bomb and he said that he hoped so too but that it probably belonged to somebody.

Anyway, after about ten minutes one of the PM’s “forward planning team” arrived, a young woman called Jo whom I think I recognized from her having been on Question Time. She ushered me into a small room with a chair and an old couch and some dirty coffee cups on a table. Here she “briefed” me on the background to this particular “outreach initiative”. She told me that the Prime Minister was Britain’s newest, youngest, hippest prime minister since Lord Fol d’Rol in 1753 and that her office had the job of reminding people of this fact and generally demonstrating that the PM was neither fuddy nor duddy.

“We want the kids to know that their PM is not just the youngest, most energetic and most charismatic premier in British history but that he’s also their mate, a regular bloke who likes popmusic, wearing fashionable trousers, and comedy with proper swearing in it. Which is why we think it’s important to place him on Livin’ Large.”

“God yes, great idea,” I said, pathetically. It’s amazing how even the proximity to power seduces a person.

“But in a dignified context,” Jo added firmly. “No gunk tanks or ‘gotcha’s. It struck us that some kind of ‘youth summit’ would be appropriate, you know, the boss chats with the future and all that. It could be an extended version of that section where the celebrity guest takes questions from the kids.”

I said it sounded fantastic and that the BBC would be honoured.

“But nice questions, of course, not political. That wouldn’t be appropriate. Questions about the issues that matter to kids. Popmusic, fashion, computers, the Internet, that sort of thing.”

My mind reeled. This was fantastic. A genuine television event! Like Mrs Thatcher getting grilled about the Belgrano on Nationwide or the Blue Peter elephant shitting on John Noakes. The Prime Minister himself doing an interview with kids on live TV and I was to exec it! Christ! Like I say, I reeled.

“This means a lot to the PM,” Jo continued. “Dammit, as far as ordinary people are concerned politics is boring! The kids don’t want a lot of old fuddy-duddies telling them what to do. We need to let people know that things have changed. Basically, it’s very important to us that the premier gets a chance to point out that he likes popmusic and that he actually plays the guitar. Will that be possible?”

Well, as far as I was concerned he could point out that he liked liver and onions and played the didgeridoo if he wanted, but I said that I thought everybody knew that the PM played the guitar; it seemed to have come up in every interview he’d ever done.

“People have short memories,” said Jo, “besides which we need to make it clear that it’s the electric guitar he plays, not some strummy-crummy, clicky-clacky, Spanish castanets type, classical fuddy-duddy stuff.”

Well, I nodded and agreed and wondered if it would be appropriate to kiss her arse and pretty soon Jo signalled that the meeting was over.

And so there it is. I, Sam Bell, have successfully brokered a historic live TV encounter between the PM and Generation Next. Trevor and I spent the afternoon trying to think of a good hook for the trailers. Trevor kept coming back to “The Premier meets the Little People” but I’m sure that’d just make everyone think of leprechauns.

I must say this business has changed my attitude to my job entirely. I mean, if I was in the independent sector I certainly wouldn’t be meeting the PM. Besides which, it has occurred to me that I could use my newly acquired inside knowledge of Downing Street to write a political thriller. It could be just the inspiration I need.

Good old Beeb, say I. When Tosser offers me a job I’ll turn it down.

Dear Penny

Guess what! Sam nearly met the PM today. I could hardly believe it when he told me. Now that’s what I call cool. I’m so proud of him. I’m married to a man who deals with the very highest in the land and from what he tells me he handled it incredibly well. The only thing that made me a bit sad is that if we never have kids then I won’t be able to tell them that their dad once nearly met the PM. Oh well, I really must stop thinking things like that.

Dear Self

Another bit of good news today. They tell me that I can produce my sperm sample at home! Yes, apparently sperm survives for one hour once outside the body (if kept warm) and as long as you can get the stuff back to the clinic within that time it doesn’t matter where you pull one off the wrist. Great news.

Anyway, I went in to see Dr Cooper after work to pick up the sterilized pot (you can’t just hand it in in a teacup). You can get the pots at Boots, but I’m not asking some sixteen-year-old girl for a sperm pot. Dr Cooper decided to take the opportunity to offer advice and consultation. He asked me whether I was aware of the manner in which I should produce my sample. I told him that I thought I could just about remember, I might be a bit rusty (it being as much as three or even four days since I last played a solo on the one-stringed bass), but I was sure that it would all come flooding back.

I must say I’m delighted about this “home-tossing” development, generally much more relaxing I feel. Interesting as well, because this will be the first time in my entire life that I will be able to have a completely legitimate hand shandy. Amazing really, when I think back over all the sly ones I’ve had over the last twenty-five-odd years, all the lies and stratagems I resorted to, particularly as a child, and here I am positively being encouraged to abuse myself by the National Health Service. Ironic. I thought about ringing my mum, just to rub it in, but I don’t think she’d see the joke.

Dearest Penny Pen Pal

I think Sam’s quite proud of his pot. He’s put it on the mantelpiece in the sitting room like it was a darts trophy. I hope he doesn’t imagine that’s where he’s going to fill it. The bathroom’s more appropriate. And I’ve told him he’s got to think about me while he’s doing it. Horrible business all round, quite frankly.

I adopted a baby gorilla today. She’s called Gertrude. She was advertised in the Big Issue I bought in Camden. You don’t actually get to have Gertrude at home but for £90 they send you a picture of her and a certificate of adoption. There are only 650 of Gertrude’s type left on the planet. What are we doing to the world? It’s so disgusting.

Sam gave me a rather patronizing look when I told him about the adoption, which infuriated me because I acted out of ecological concern and for no other reason. Although I must say Gertrude does look very sweet, so small and defenceless, absolutely beautiful little thing. £90 well spent.

Dear Idiot

Rather an unfortunate development arose today workwise. And when I say “rather” what I actually mean is “unbelievably” and such a bugger coming so soon as it did after my Downing Street triumph.

I was sitting at work trying to read a treatment for a game show that had been sent in by Aiden Fumet on behalf of one of his acts. It was bollocks, of course, and depressing bollocks at that. Something about contestants having to identify their partners by smelling their socks and looking at their bare bottoms pushed through holes in the set. The bit they seemed most proud of was that the game would also feature gay and lesbian couples. This alone, the authors seemed to feel, made the idea important, alternative and at the cutting edge.

Anyway, I was just applying my “Loved it but seems more Channel Five to me” rubber stamp when the phone rang and Daphne told me it was someone called Tosser. Good, I thought. Tosser has always been a tiny bit patronizing with me and I’d been looking forward to telling him that I was no longer in the market for employment so he’d have to headhunt elsewhere. I relished this chance of informing him that as I’d recently been entrusted by the Channel Controller himself with the duties of executive producer to the Prime Minister, I was now feeling very comfortable at the BBC.

Sadly I was not to have this chance.

“Sam,” said Tosser, “love to come to dinner, old boy, except I’m going skiing. But as it happens I’m not sure the invite was intended for me anyway. It said ‘Dear Nigel’ on the note.”

Oh my God.

Oh my Goddity God.

I went first hot and then cold and then both hot and cold at once.

Wrong envelopes!

Such a basic farce plot! I would have seen through it in a second in a script and now it had actually bloody happened!

A man did not need to be Stephen Hawking to work out the permutations of the plot. If I’d sent the dinner invitation to Tosser Tomkins, then I’d sent my enquiry about leaving the BBC to…

Daphne took another call. I knew even before I had registered her hushed and respectful tone that the sword of Damocles was suspended above me. This would need very careful handling.

“Sam. The Channel Controller on line two.”

I made my excuses to Tosser. “In shit, Toss, got to go!”

And picked up the phone. Nigel’s voice was cold as a penguin’s arse.

“Sam, I have a memo here in which you address me as a tosser.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Yes,” said Nigel, “it certainly was, mate.”

He went on to assure me that he was flattered that I had thought to seek his advice about whether I should leave the BBC and intrigued that I wanted his opinion on whether I should “put myself about a bit on the job market since after all the independent sector is clearly so much more vibrant”. He thanked me for my consideration and promised to give the matter his fullest and most immediate possible attention.

Click. Dial tone. Bugger.

That was it. No goodbye, no mention of my dealings with Downing Street about which I had copiously emailed him.

Well, I couldn’t leave it there, could I? I rushed along the corridor to his office. Television Centre is of course famously circular and I was so flustered that I missed the Controller’s office entirely and had to run round the whole building again. I’ve done that before, of course, many times, but only when pissed and trying to find a Christmas party.

Responding to my urgent pleading (conveyed to him via one of his icy receptionists – he has two, flash bugger), Nigel allowed me into his office.

I can remember (just) that office when it was a friendly place. When the BBC really was a family. A family in which almost every member was a jolly uncle or an aunt. A family of fat boozy old time-servers who earned little and drank much. Men and women who went through their entire lives without once wearing a stylish garment or having a fashionable haircut. Who worked their way up the system, serving the public faithfully (if slightly unsteadily) from Floor Manager to Producer to sad old git in the corner of the bar who was too old and pissed to find his way out of the circle. Well, those faggy, boozy days are long gone and it’s probably for the best. None of those jolly old boys would last a second in a climate where there’s five hundred channels competing for the audience and the money’s all going to cable and satellite. Still, I can’t deny that, as I stood there trembling before my Channel Controller (who, I must say again, is two years fucking younger than me), I found myself wishing that he was a fifteen-stone, red-nosed old bastard who would just tell me to bugger off and forget about it before commissioning another series of Terry and June.

“Look, Nigel,” I said, still dizzy and clutching at a Golden Rose of Montreux for support and nearly cutting myself on its petals. “This is awful, I wanted to invite you to dinner.”

He answered me with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

“That note I sent you was meant for someone else. Simon Tomkins, you know, he was on the panel with you at last year’s Edinburgh Television Festival. He was the one who said the BBC was an ageing tart trying to flag down a curb crawler on the information superhighway.”

Well, it put the thing about calling him a tosser to rest but, beyond that, I’m afraid I had dug myself deeper into the hole.

“So what you’re telling me, Sam, is that this note dissing the BBC” (he used the word “dissing” even though he’s a thirty-six-year-old white freckly philosophy graduate from Durham University) “was actually intended as a job application to one of the foremost independent producers in the country?”

“Uhm,” I said.

Not good, but the best I could do at the time.

“Well?” said Nigel.

I was clearly going to have to do better than “Uhm.”

“Oh, you know, just a punt, Nigel, really more to see what sort of shape the independent sector’s in than anything else.”

He did not believe me even slightly.

“Uhm… did you see my emails regarding the Prime Minister? Tremendously successful meeting we…”

“Yes, I saw them,” said Nigel, and there our meeting ended save for Nigel assuring me that if I was at all unhappy at the BBC I had only to offer my resignation and he would consider it most favourably. He said he was disappointed, that he had always taken me for a company man (which I bloody am actually). He talked about the Beeb being a family, that it was not just a part of one’s career but a career in itself, a career that demanded some sense of loyalty.

Yes, Mr Nigel straight from Granada, bloody exactly, until the next time the Chief Exec at Channel Four resigns or Murdoch is looking for a bit of posh to give cred to the management “team” at one of his tabloid channels. Then the BBC will be a family all right, a modern dysfunctional family in which everybody buggers off at the first chance they get, with Nigel at the front of the queue.

Needless to say, dinner was not discussed.

Dear Penny

Got my picture of Gertrude today and was slightly disappointed to discover that it’s the same as the one in the Big Issue. You’d think they’d have taken more than one shot of her. Still, at least it’s a better print.

I do have to admit, Pen, that I’m just a little bit concerned that those less environmentally aware than myself (my mother, for instance) might consider my adoption of Gertrude as reflective of my hopes for a child. This is definitely not the case. The plight of the mountain gorillas is an international tragedy and my involvement in the issue is entirely political.

Book

Lucy has put a picture of a baby gorilla into a clipframe and placed it on the mantelpiece. She says we’ve adopted it. I’m now rather worried that her nurturing instincts are getting the better of her. Interestingly, the baby gorilla (whose name is Gertrude) is, in my opinion, the dead spit of George and Melinda’s Cuthbert, although possibly Cuthbert has more hair.

I went for a quickie in the BBC club bar after work today. The club bar always depresses me these days. It’s been franchised out and now has a name, Shakers or Groovers or possibly Gropers, I’m not sure, I’m always pissed when I try to read the beer mats. I do know that the Studio One tea bar is now called Strollers. Anyway, I bumped into George and Trevor at the bar and they had clearly been sniggering about something when I approached, but on seeing me they stopped dead. It could only mean one thing. My arse-up with the Channel Controller is now public knowledge and it will only be a matter of time before the whole incident is recounted in Private Eye. Not good, I fear.

Still, it’s taken my mind off the sperm test.

Dear Penny

Sam’s a bit quiet and rather down at the moment. I know he had a row at work with that appalling Channel Controller. (Who else but an arse could spend £7 million of public money adapting Finnegans Wake? FINNEGANS WAKE! I ask you. A road map of Birmingham is easier to follow. And seven million! That’s a million pounds per viewer in my opinion and I said so at last year’s Light Entertainment Christmas party. George laughed so loudly something came out of his mouth, but Sam, who can be a fearful toady, told me to keep my voice down.)

I do feel sorry for Sam. I mean he really does seem a bit depressed, but it’s so hard to know how to help. The fact is he doesn’t want any help. He’d rather read his newspaper. If it was me I’d want tons of attention, in fact I do want tons of attention. Sam, however, neither craves it nor gives it very much and this leaves me feeling in extreme want of warmth. This evening I knew something was on his mind and I tried to reach out to him but he’d have none of it. He just drank beer and cracked silly jokes about if we do have a kid we’ll have to send it out to work at the age of seven because we’ll be so poor. Ha ha. So now we’re going to be penniless as well as infertile. Hilarious.

Dear Sam

Well, it’s done. Conjugal visit to hand completed. Not as easy as I might have hoped, considering my enormous experience in this area, but the required sperm sample is sorted. Funny to think that my sperm is in some laboratory somewhere waiting to be tested, darting this way and that for the benefit of a total stranger. Hope they’re looking after it, keeping it warm. I feel very slightly paternal about the stuff.

Producing it was a close-run thing. Originally we had planned for Lucy to attend the masturbation, possibly even lending a hand, so to speak. This was her idea. She doesn’t really like the thought of me having sex without her, even if it’s only on my own. She’s convinced that I’ll not give her a single thought throughout the whole proceedings but offer my entire fantastical erotic being to Winona Ryder, and of course she’s right. Well, for God’s sake! I get to sleep with Lucy every night, I only get to do it with Winona when required to produce a sperm sample. I tried to explain this, saying that psychologists had established that an uninhibited fantasy life was part of a healthy, monogamous sexual relationship. Well, Lucy wasn’t having any of it. In fact she acted quite hurt, which I find truly extraordinary.

Women! I simply do not know where to start. They actually think that a man can be unfaithful whilst indulging in solitary masturbation! It’s positively early Christian in its unforgiving intensity. Thank goodness I didn’t tell her I’d also been planning to invite Tiffany from EastEnders, The Corrs and Baby Spice to the party.

Anyway, as I said, Lucy seemed to feel it was important that she be involved in the process, so this morning when we woke up I went and got the pot from the sitting-room mantelpiece. I handed it over to Lucy, got back into bed and took up my limp appendage whilst she held the pot out expectantly, clearly anticipating an immediate outpouring.

Well, I’m here to tell anyone who cares to listen that masturbation with an audience (particularly an impatient one which hasn’t yet had a cup of tea) is not easy. I mean, of course Lucy and I had done this together before, but only in relaxed mode, in the spontaneous joy of passion, so to speak (and not, I admit, for some time). We had never before attempted masturbation for a solely practical purpose. Book, I am here to tell you that I felt a complete prick, both personally and of course literally. There I was kneeling on the bed, portion in palm with Lucy holding out the pot like some kind of beggar, and nothing was happening. Lucy, bless her, had a rather self-conscious go and disported herself about the bed a bit, you know, cupping breasts in hands and pouting, that sort of thing. I really don’t know which of us felt more stupid. After about thirty seconds I could see she was getting bored and beginning to think about breakfast. It was as much as she could do to stop herself looking at her watch. Quite obviously it was never going to work. I love her and I fancy her but a fellow can feel self-conscious even with a woman he’s shared a bed with for six years. I just could not get things going and in the end I had to decamp into the spare room and choke the poor old monkey alone.

I could see that Lucy was a bit hurt (though she denied it), but what could I do? You can’t masturbate without an erection and you can’t get an erection with your wife staring at your dick angrily and saying, “Come on, it’s already eight-fifteen. Don’t you fancy me, then?”

Anyway, left to myself I came up with the goods, so to speak. I say “goods”, if that isn’t too grand an expression to describe the sad little sample I produced. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve always been under the impression that my ejaculation is as substantial as the next man’s. If anything I might have even flattered myself that I was rather a major supplier. Well, let me tell you, you can forget all that once it’s dribbling down the inside of a plastic pot. It looks pathetic! I mean pa-the-tic. Like a sparrow sneezed.

Interesting, really, how vulnerable the whole exercise made me feel. I felt genuinely exposed, like my very manhood was being tested. As if the whole exercise was a test of my virility and sexuality. Rather sad, actually. I’d always presumed I’m a pretty relaxed, modern sort of bloke. I didn’t think I’d ever bought into any of that macho bullshit about being a big noise in the trouser department. Yet there I was staring at my sample thinking about trying to eke it out with a bit of flour and water.

But one thing you learn as you go through life is that you are what you are and you have to accept it. Besides which, I suddenly realized that I’d spent about two minutes worrying about how little I’d produced and of course I only had an hour to hand it in before the stuff died. I had to get to the clinic or I’d have the whole business to do again.

Now the advice that Dr Cooper had given me was to pop the pot down my pants, because at all costs its contents must be kept warm. In fact he had told me that if possible I was to work it into a warm crevice, which I assume is doctor code for shove it up your bum. It’s a very strange feeling waddling along the street trying to hail a taxi with a pot of sperm clenched between your buttocks. I was immediately consumed with the irrational conviction that everybody knew what was going on. Policemen seemed to glare, toddlers tugged at their mothers’ skirts and pointed, office girls veered across the pavement apparently to keep well out of my way. I swear I heard an Evening Standard vendor mutter “Dirty pervert” as I passed. Perhaps it was my desperate, hurried air that drew people’s eye. Let’s face it, a man is hardly going to look his most relaxed and urbane when he is charging along the street, agonizingly aware that his sperm has only minutes left to live.

Every taxi was full, every bus a “Not in Use. Driver in Training” let-down. The tube station had one of those chalk blackboards outside which regret that two thousand people are stuck in a tunnel below. Eventually I spotted an empty cab but inevitably another bloke spotted it too. We both dashed for it (well he dashed, I waddled) and arriving at the same time we wrestled over the handle together.

“Mine, I think,” I said. Normally I would have given up without a fight but I was desperate by this time, having only twenty-eight minutes left.

“Well, you think wrong,” said the man. “Bugger off and get your own cab. I’m having this one.”

Honestly, I don’t know how some people can be like that, so casually brutal and rude. I couldn’t do it if you paid me. It’s like when I see people throw litter out of car windows, I just think, are these people from another planet? Are they a different species altogether? I would never do that. Oh well, mustn’t get depressed about it, it takes all sorts I suppose.

Anyway, on this particular occasion, quaking at the thought of a scene though I was, there was no way I was going to let that cab go.

“Look,” I said, “I have to have this cab, it’s a matter of life and death.”

“Tough,” said the man. “I’ve got a very important meeting.”

“Well I’ve got some warm sperm up my arse and it’s dying.”

I’ll have to remember that one. The bloke let go of that door handle like it was a live snake.

“I bet you’re the sort who drops litter out of car windows as well,” I said as I got in the cab, and I meant it to hurt.

It wasn’t an easy journey, unable to sit down as I was. I had to curl up on the back seat in a sort of foetal position and I could see that the driver didn’t like it. But we got there in the end, with a few minutes to spare even, and I rushed into the clinic and handed in my sample. Actually that was a pretty gruesome moment too. I was so desperate to get there in time that I just rushed through the front door and went straight up to the reception desk. It was only as I was actually fishing the pot out of the back of my trousers that I realized that it might have been more tactful and polite to have retrieved the thing in private. The nurse stared at it as if to say, “And you want me to touch that now?” before going off to get some rubber gloves and a bargepole.

My God, I can’t believe I’ve just spent half an hour writing about taking sperm to a clinic! If I could only be half this committed and energetic at work I might not be in the shit I’m in. Things are still very edgy at the office. It seems to me only a matter of time before Nigel finds a way to get rid of me, and if I’m honest I’m really not particularly employable. Lunch-eating is not a skill for which there is much demand these days, it’s not the eighties.

Lucy keeps saying I need to start writing again. Touching, really, how she still believes in me.

I sent another note to Tosser (this time I checked the envelope three times) to try asking him again about a job. I didn’t bother with any matey-matey, beating-about-the-bush stuff this time. I just basically asked the bastard for a job. Hope I didn’t sound desperate. Does “Give us a job, you bastard,” sound desperate, I wonder? Depends on the tone, I suppose. But how does one imply tone in a letter? You can’t write “Not to be read in desperate manner” because that really would sound desperate.

Looking back over the last few pages I’ve written, I’ve come to the surprising conclusion that the American expert Lucy’s friend Sheila saw on Oprah was right: writing letters to yourself is actually a very good idea. I came home today all fired up with my success at delivering the sample on time and looking forward to telling Lucy the story (particularly the bit about hailing the cab), but she seemed all distant and distracted. She said it had been a difficult day at work and she didn’t feel like talking. Fair enough. I almost always feel like that. Still, it’s helped to write it down. Perhaps I should bash it all out into some kind of article and send it to the Observer Health section. I bet they’d give me a hundred quid for it, but Lucy would probably not approve. Besides which, I was forgetting, I can’t write.

Strange, Lucy not wanting to talk. I hope she isn’t working too hard. Actors can be such pains.

Dearest Penny

I have to tell you that something very strange happened at work today, which I hardly like to write about. I was on my own again. Sheila is still bronchial (self-prescribed cure: forty cigarettes a day) and Joanna is in LA with our one other big name, Trudi Hobson. Trudi is playing the icy British bitch in some dreadful action film. It’s a sequel called, well, can’t remember what it’s called actually. Shit Two, I should imagine. Anyway, there I am on my own and who should turn up but, yes! Carl Phipps, all brooding and Byronic looking in a big coat. Well, before I know it he’s telling me that fame is a lonely burden and asking me out to lunch! Extraordinary. I can’t imagine why he picked on me. I’m sure I haven’t given him the slightest indication that I enjoy his company or find him remotely attractive.

Well, as it happened I couldn’t go out with him anyway because I was all alone and who would man the phones? (Lots of voiceover work coming in this week, almost every chocolate manufacturer in the country seems to want one of our chaps to say “When you need a big, satisfying block in your gob…”). So I told him that I was too busy, and I said it slightly hoitily. I rather resent the assumption that mine is the sort of job that you can just drift in and out of, even though it is. “Fair enough,” says Lord Phipps and off he goes in a flurry of brooding, wuthering menace, and I thought that was the end of it.

Well! Ten minutes later he’s back with a positive hamper from Fortnum’s (perhaps not a hamper, but certainly a large plastic bag), full of fantastic stuff from their food hall. Oysters, olives, foreign nibbles and champagne no less! He said he was celebrating getting a recall for a very big American film. Usual thing, dastardly Brit to play villain. Actually, I must just say that for all that we hate political correctness, it has been a godsend for our posh actors. It seems that the English are the only racial group left on earth whom absolutely nobody minds seeing marmalized. Honestly, ten years ago it was costume drama or nothing for our boys. If nobody was making Robin Hood or Ivanhoe, they didn’t work. Now they get to crash helicopters into Bruce Willis!

Anyway, so there we were in the office, just the two of us, and I asked Heathcliff if he was celebrating, didn’t he have someone special to celebrate with? Do you want to know what he said to that, Penny? He said that that was exactly what he was doing!!!! Arggh!

Oh, my God! I could feel myself going beetroot and that rash on my neck coming back (when I was a teenager, if ever a boy asked me out I invariably instantly looked as though my throat had just been cut). My knees became the knees of a jelly lady and the cheese straw I had been toying with disintegrated and fell into the photocopier (and completely buggered it).

Anyway, of course I told him not to be silly and asked him what he meant by such familiarities. I put on my best snooty, posh “we are not at home to callers” telephone voice and said that I was a respectable woman. Well, he didn’t say anything, he just smiled in a sort of soft way that he knew brought out his dimples and took my hand.

Yes!

Smouldering eyes, shy dimples and holding my hand. Sorry about the breathless style, Penny, but I am much moved.

Because here, I’m afraid, is the terrible thing (none but you must ever know, Penny). I did not withdraw my hand! Not for a moment, anyway, or perhaps even a bit longer than a moment. A minute or two, possibly, not more than three, I’m sure of that. I left it there and we just sort of, well, looked at each other and his eyes went all melty (just like his close-ups in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall when he really was very good). He looked like the dispossessed lord of a bleak moorland estate. I swear his aftershave smelt of heather. God knows what I looked like – an electrified rabbit with a rash, no doubt.

Anyway, time felt as if it had been frozen as I became lost in his eyes. Then, and I don’t know if I imagined it, but I think, in fact I’m sure, I felt his finger playing in the palm of my hand which, as far as I know, is silent code for “I would not be averse to rogering you, ma’am.”

If this is true, I just can’t BELIEVE the man’s cheek. He knows I’m married. Married to a good, solid, honest, ordinary, boring, far better man than he, if not quite so dishy, bloke.

Anyway, after a bit I did take my hand away, thank God. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t. I think he would have kissed me. His face certainly seemed to be a lot closer to mine than it had been a moment or two before. And then short of making a scene I don’t know what I would have done. He is our biggest client, after all. I probably would have had to kiss him back, which would have been terrible! Anyway, instead I thanked him for the lunch in an extremely cold “not today, thank you” voice and said that I had to get on with my work. To which he shrugged, smiled a knowing little smile, picked up his fan mail and left.

I must say, I feel most peculiar.

But also very angry.

Yes, all right, he’s good looking and famous but that doesn’t mean that every girl is going to fall at his feet for a glass of champagne and a cheesy nibble! I love my husband, dull, sexless bore though he may be. What is more, I want to have his children, something which is not proving easy, and I can do without arrogant actors trying to interfere with my already unbalanced hormones.

Dear Sam

No news on sperm.

No reply from Tosser re him giving me an important new job.

No further communications from the Channel Controller.

My life is on tenterhooks, whatever tenterhooks may be.

One good thing is that everyone has been impressed by my visit to Downing Street. Except Nigel the Controller, of course, who still hasn’t talked to me about it. Lots of people are trying to get tickets to the show but I’m being ruthless. I say, “You didn’t want tickets when it was just Mr Blob Blob and the two puppet monsters. What’s changed?” and they say, “The fucking Prime Minister’s going to be there! That’s what’s changed,” which I suppose is fair.

I saw Nigel the Controller today and he didn’t remind me about my appalling faux pas over the letters, which I think is a good sign. Mind you, he didn’t really have an opportunity because it wasn’t just him and me, he’d summoned all the commissioning editors in the Entertainment Group (if indeed that is what we are), plus the finance and marketing people, for a big strategy meeting, so there were about ten of us festooned about his office. The subject of the meeting was the BBC’s plans to get into movies, so it should have been an exciting discussion, but with the cloud hanging over me I couldn’t get worked up. What’s more, I was the last to arrive, which is always a dodgy thing to be with a sarky up-himself swine like Nigel.

“Good of you to pop in, Sam.”

I should have told him to stuff it but I didn’t, of course, I started to try and explain. What is it Churchill or Thatcher is supposed to have said? “Never apologize, never explain.” Well, they were right. Nigel didn’t let me get any further than, “Sorry, I was…”

“I see,” he said. “So having wasted our time being late you want to waste more time telling us why. Is that it?”

I couldn’t believe it! The bloke is younger than me. George and Trevor were both in the meeting but they were no help, they just studied their briefing notes intensely.

“Uhm…” I said. Not a brilliant retort, I’m prepared to admit.

“Uhm,” Nigel repeated. “Well, as answers go it has the virtue of brevity, but I think that completes its list of recommendations.”

Some of the others actually laughed at that! Snivelling sycophants. Not George or Trevor, of course, but a couple of the accountancy people and a young woman with pink hair who came over from Sky. I’ll remember you, I thought, but why bother? She’ll probably be my next boss.

Anyway, I slunk into a corner and Nigel got down to some serious pontificating.

“Nobody watches television nowadays,” he said, “or at least none of my friends do. Television is wallpaper. Television is fast food. Television is arse produce. Movies are the millennial art form. Where do you think I’m going with this? Come on, come on, anyone!”

Honestly, it was like being back at school.

“The BBC should be getting into movies,” said the young woman with the pink hair and Nigel positively beamed at her. “Hullo,” I thought, but actually I think Nigel could only ever properly fancy himself.

“Exactly, Yaz,” he said and proceeded with great self-importance to rap out the names of recent British movie hits.

“Four Weddings, Full Monty, Trainspotting, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Emmanuelle Goes Beaver Hunting…”

This last one took us all a bit by surprise but we let it go.

“British movies have never been more healthy,” he continued, banging his desk. “There were at least three last year that the Americans quite liked. We need to be a part of that revolution. We need to reposition our goddamn asses.”

I swear he said it: “reposition our goddamn asses”.

“We need to be making movies.”

Everyone seemed terribly excited at this idea but I always thought the BBC was a television company and said so.

“Boots is a chemist, Sam. That doesn’t stop them selling chicken tikka sandwiches with yogurt and mint dressing.” This got a big laugh from Yaz, who leant forward to pick up her coffee conspicuously pointing her cleavage the Controller’s way. Nigel didn’t notice, being the sort of man who’d rather harangue his subordinates than look at a nice bosom.

“Jesus Christ, Sam! At least try setting your brain for the twenty-first century! As Britain’s premier media provider, the BBC is perfectly placed to connect up with the real cutting-edge talent that is out there making New Britain hip. Writers, producers, directors, women, the cream of Cool Britannia, the tip top of Britpop. We need to interface with these people. We have the resources to make films, we have the budgets to make films, all we need is the ideas.”

Later, discussing the meeting in the BBC bar, George and Trevor were very excited about it. After all, for people like us who spend our time commissioning new ways of humiliating the public for the early Saturday evening schedules, the idea of making proper films is pretty seductive. I tried hard to join in with their enthusiasm but I couldn’t summon up much jollity. Jealousy really, I suppose. I don’t want to commission films, I want to write one. The idea of going about Soho searching out shaven-headed twelve-year-old film-school fashion junkies with rings through their scrotums made me tired. Unfair of me, I know, but as my mother said, life wasn’t supposed to be fair.

George and Trevor saw things differently. They thought it presented a golden opportunity.

“This is your big chance!” they said. “Commission yourself. Write a script and green light it. The man’s crying out for ideas and he’s asking us to find them. You’ll never get an opportunity like this again! It’s gamekeeper turned poacher.”

For a moment I was almost seduced, but then I remembered two things. Firstly my current relationship with the Controller does not lead me to imagine that he’d accept a script with my name on it. And secondly, even if he did, what script? I haven’t written a thing in years. I’ve forgotten how to write and even if I hadn’t I have nothing to write about.

Trevor said he’d always thought that a gay alcoholic in recovery would make a great subject for a movie.

“But that’s your story, Trevor,” I said.

“And a monumentally fucking dull one it is too,” George added.

Of course they’re both right. Nigel’s new initiative is an opportunity I should be seizing with both hands. But I just can’t do it. They say comedy is about conflict and pain. Where’s my conflict? Where’s my pain? I’m a boring bloke in a boringly happy marriage. Apart from my own monumental lack of talent and an impending sperm result there isn’t a cloud on my horizon.

Dear Penny

I simply cannot believe it. Sam handed in his sample three days ago and since then he has been jumpy as a kitten. He pounces on the post in the morning even though he knows the result will take five days. He grabs at any envelope that comes through the door, ones containing offers to join bookclubs, others containing enquiries about whether we want to sell our house. He tears them all open in terror that they might also be concealing a failed sperm test certificate. I swear that’s what he thinks he’s going to get, a certificate, possibly with a ribbon on it or a red wax seal, saying “sperm test FAILED”. I’m afraid it seems that nothing, absolutely nothing, turns a man into a wanker so much as having to take a sperm test.

Anyway, my blood test result came through with the second post and it seems my body has passed that particular hurdle, insomuch as the indications are that I ovulate. Hooray and whoopidydingdong. There are now only fourteen million things that could be wrong with my sad, dysfunctional tubes. Sometimes it really is hard to be a woman.

I had to send off loads of signed pictures of Carl “Will you fuck me for a sandwich?” Phipps today. I have very mixed emotions about that whole episode. Obviously I’d never do anything about it, I mean obviously. Nonetheless it’s quite flattering. At thirty-four and married it’s rather nice to discover that one could still get laid if one wanted to which one doesn’t and one certainly wouldn’t even if one did.

When I told Sam that my blood test indicated healthy ovulation he acted most unpleasantly. Instead of being pleased that at least one part of my body functions as it should, he immediately took it as proof that he’s going to fail his sperm test and that he’s some kind of sexless eunuch. It really is most thoughtless of him to be so self-obsessed, and not very attractive. I must confess to having briefly entertained the unworthy thought that Lord Byron Phipps, the brooding, smouldering Tenant of Wildfell Hall, would not be so ungentlemanly or uncaring of a lady’s distress.

He would also have more faith in his testicles.

Sam

Still no news on the sperm test.

Also still no word from Tosser about giving me a job.

However, I’ve also still heard nothing further from the Channel Controller about my sensational faux pas over the mixed-up letters and am beginning to dare to hope that I may have got away with it. After all, Nigel isn’t such a bad bloke, is he? He’s trying to drag the Beeb into the twenty-first century and all that, isn’t he? And he’s got a sense of humour, hasn’t he? He’d see the funny side, on the quiet. I mean when he was an Arts Editor I remember he did that documentary on Ken Dodd. Marvellous stuff. Really, really marvellous earthy, populist stuff. It compared Dodd to a Shakespearean clown. They did a bit of Dogberry and Verges from Much Ado to illustrate the point. Hilarious, particularly when they duelled with loaves of French bread, absolutely hilarious. I must tell Nigel how hilarious I found it. Yanton Nabokobovich did the interview, I recall, and called Doddy a true subversive. “Isn’t every joke really a small revolution?” Yanton enquired. “An act of rebellion undermining the status quo?” “If you like, missus! Ha ha!” said Doddy.

Brilliant telly.

Of course Nigel’s got a sense of humour and he’s a bloody good bloke as well. Old Nige won’t let me down.

Had a fascinating debate with the Complaints and Standards people at the Weekly programme briefing. George was in the chair and we were debating acceptable names for vaginas. Amazing. There we were, five men earnestly debating whether “fanny” was an acceptable term to use before nine o’clock. I told Lucy about it and she went back on her old thing about men being intimidated by fannies. She pointed out that there are any number of words for penis that can be used pretty much with ease on the Beeb – knob, willy, percy, portion, member, todger, tackle, dangler, sausage, John Thomas, Dick Dastardly, meat and two veg and Uncle Tom Cobblers and all. However, when it came to female genitalia almost everything was too rude. She’s right, of course. “Vaginas” are ruder than “penises”, even “fanny” is on the edge. “Muff” might pass, but again only just. The meeting was quite stumped. In the end we came up with “fou fou”, which is a term somebody’s mother used. I can’t see our tough young lady comediennes buying “fou fou”. We’ll be lampooned in the media section of the Independent before we know it.

Still no news on the sperm test, or did I mention that?

Dear Pen Pen

Drusilla came into the office today and caught me having a cup of coffee. She says caffeine is the enemy of womankind and insisted I drink a cup of squeezed lemon juice to purge myself. Then she asked if I’d given any more thought to the business of the Primrose Hill ley lines, because there’s a full moon next Thursday and the long-range weather forecast is good. The woman is out of her mind.

I also had lunch with Melinda and baby Cuthbert. He really is gorgeous and I’m sure that the slightly disconcerting impression of a permanent scowl will disappear as his mouth gets bigger. We ordered our salads (followed by cake) and inevitably Melinda produced her photos. Even though Cuthbert was sitting right in front of me in the flesh (and such a lot of flesh too, great folds of it), Melinda insisted that I look at nearly two hundred pictures of him. Which was nice (because he really is gorgeous, although slightly like a miniaturized Reggie Kray), but a tiny bit tiresome. How I wish we lived in times when the taking of a photograph was a rare and precious thing. When five or ten images sufficed to cover a person’s entire childhood. Nowadays people take millions of shots on computerized cameras and then reel them off on their home printers ad nauseam. Besides which, now that video cameras come with little playback screens it’s possible for people to show you their ghastly videos as well, sometimes while they’re actually recording them. Melinda didn’t go that far, but she had had an entire set of prints done for me, which really is too much.

I did think about showing Melinda a picture of Gertrude (just the one from the Big Issue, not the glossy one) but decided I wouldn’t. I thought that she might think it sad. Not that she’d have any reason to.

After about half an hour Cuthbert started crying and when I say crying what I mean is attempting to reduce London to rubble by the sheer force of sonic vibration. Melinda breastfed him at the table, which I thought was very right and feminist of her, although I do wish she hadn’t burped him quite so vigorously afterwards. Most of it hit the floor but I fear a splash or two of milky vomit may have landed in people’s food.

Actually, I had thought that you weren’t supposed to burp them any more.

I can’t deny, though, that it all made me feel broodier than ever. Despite Cuthbert not having a volume-control button and his indiscriminate vomiting and his slightly moth-eaten-looking patch of coarse black hair, looking at him did make me just long for one of my own. Particularly when I saw his little Peter Rabbit jumper. It was just so sweet. All my life I’ve looked forward to rediscovering Beatrix Potter via my children, so that did hit me rather hard. I must say, though, that I didn’t much like the baseball cap Melinda had bought him from OshKosh. It had “Yeah, I know I’m cute” written on it, which I thought was a bit sickmaking (and sadly not entirely true).

I’d never buy a cap like that for a child because what a parent is really saying with that kind of stuff is “Look how beautiful my baby is.” Which is not really on, not for the British, anyway. It’s not how we go about things. Or is that a wrong thing to say these days?

Also Melinda had just bought one of those “Baby On Board” stickers for their Fiat. Sam says he’s astonished that George allowed it, and that nobody buys those any more. I must say, I can’t say I like them overmuch. I mean, what is the parent trying to say to other road users? And what are other road users supposed to make of it? “Thanks awfully for the tip because I’d been thinking about driving into the back of you, but since you’ve got a kid in the car I’ll cover the brake.” It’s absurd. I’m going to have my own sticker made. “Sadly my husband and I have not yet been blessed with the divine gift of a child but we’d still prefer not to die in a car crash, thank you.”

Anyway, when we’d finally exhausted all the photos and cleaned the vomit off everything I got round to telling Melinda all about my strangely daunting encounter with Carl Phipps, or Heathcliff as I often think of him. I know I was only going to tell you, Penny, but I just could not keep it to myself. Well, guess what? Melinda thinks I should shag him! Yes! Shag him. I couldn’t believe it! Melinda of all people. She’s normally so proper. But she said that this was different, that these were special circumstances on account of the fact that Carl Phipps is acknowledged as one of the most dishy men in the country. Did I think, Melinda enquired, that if Sam got the chance of slipping one to Sharon Stone he would pass it up?

“Yes, I bloody well do!” I said. Rather too loudly, in fact, because people looked.

I don’t think Melinda really meant it. I mean, she’s never been at all indulgent of the idea of infidelity. I remember one New Year’s Eve George gave me a kiss and she got quite funny about it. I mean it was quite a long kiss, I admit, but it was New Year’s Eve and the bonging takes a very long time if you start at one and go on to twelve.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that George is probably not seeing to Melinda’s needs properly at the moment. I believe this often happens after a baby. The hubby starts to see the wife as a mother not a lover and feels strange about lusting after the thing that is feeding his child. Also, Melinda hasn’t quite got her figure back yet (poor thing). That’s understandable, of course, it’s only been a couple of months and it’s far too early for her to worry about that sort of business. Although I did think that three cakes was a little bit reckless. I only had one and a bit.

Anyway, I told Melinda that I had no intention of betraying Sam because I love him and that sexually he gives me everything I need. Which is basically true, on the whole, I suppose. Certainly it’s true about loving him, anyway. Although sexually I must confess to being not particularly satiated at the moment. The problem is that he seems to think of nothing but the result of his sperm test. In fact he’s obsessed with it. Which is not, I have to admit, particularly attractive in a man.

Yo, stud!

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!!! All RIGHT! Result, my son! Here we go, here we go! Result! Re-flipping-sult! Sorted. Oh yes! Sorted for sure. Passed! Passed my sperm test. The letter arrived this morning.

At first I didn’t want to open it. It was just like my “A” levels. I remember I was grapepicking in France and I had to ring home and get my mum to open the envelope. I can remember walking round that French phonebox for half an hour, too nervous to make the call. Of course I couldn’t hang around for half an hour this morning because I had to go to work, but I did make Lucy open the envelope and read the letter for me. As she slid a knife along the crease of the paper everything seemed to be in slow motion. I can remember thinking that now at least the waiting was over, whatever fate might bring.

I must say things started pretty grimly. There was no personal element at all, no “Dear sir,” no “Brace yourself, mate,” no “Better get yourself a drink, you sad pathetic excuse for a man, because you have no sperm.” Just a printed form on which they fill in your results with a ballpoint pen. So much for our more caring society. They do not even offer counselling.

Well, Book, I am here to tell you that at first I thought that all was lost. The very opening line (under the deceptively bland heading “motility”) said “30% sluggish”. Honestly, that was the very word they used. Sluggish. A horrible, horrible word, reminiscent of slimy snail-like creatures that can’t be bothered moving their arses on garden paths in order to avoid being stamped on. Sluggish! It’s such a loaded term, not clinical at all. I wanted a doctor’s reaction, not a critic’s! And if they’re going to use unscientific language couldn’t they have thought of a more friendly expression? Like “relaxed”, perhaps, or “unhurried”? If they’d told me I had relaxed sperm I could have handled it. Cool, laid-back sperm, sperm that liked to hang out and chill with the other guys. That would be fine. But “sluggish”? It’s almost as if they were trying to be unpleasant.

Anyway, the next line was worse! Yes, worse! I nearly cried. It said “41% swimming in the wrong direction”! I mean, what a thing to say about the very stuff of a man’s loins! My head was spinning. I thought, I’ve got stupid sperm! The stuff’s backing away up my dick all these years! Then I thought, “Hang on, this is ridiculous!” This test is rigged. How are they supposed to know what’s the right direction, for heaven’s sake? They’re in a plastic pot! I had this vision of all my sperm desperately groping about hither and thither, banging their heads against the sides of the container, lashing their tails around like fish in a bucket, thinking, “We’re genetically programmed to find an egg here. Where is it?”

By the end of the letter I was ready to slit my wrists.

In conclusion it said, “90% useless”! Bad swimmers, poor motility. A load of rubbish in general.

So now the full and terrible truth was upon me. I’m not a man. I’ve failed my sperm test!

I was already asking myself whether they’d let me take it again. If it was like your driving test, I mean I had four goes at that when in actual fact I should have passed on the first time except that my examiners were a bunch of total Nazis. Then of course it dawned on me that the sperm tester must be a Nazi too! A jealous, small-minded petty official dedicated to ruining the lives of better men. A hopeless and inadequate man, embittered because his own sperm were small and sickly and couldn’t find their way out of his trousers. A man who took his revenge upon society by becoming a sperm tester and failing anyone who came up with the real goods.

That had to be it. Give a fellow a sperm tester’s uniform and suddenly he thinks he’s Hitler!

I was on the very point of phoning my MP and demanding a full recount when Lucy pointed out that stamped at the bottom of the form in big letters was the word NORMAL.

Oh, the relief! It turns out that my pathetic percentages are par for the course, that pretty much all sperm is 90 per cent rubbish. Apparently there’s only a couple of decent wrigglers in an entire wristful. For all the macho pride and posturing of us men, most sperms just simply aren’t up to it. They’re sluggish. They’re stupid. They’re always wandering off in the wrong direction. They don’t know where they’re going.

Lucy said they sound exactly like a pub full of blokes, which was quite funny, I suppose.

Anyway, that was it. Passed. Normal. I was so pleased I danced round the kitchen and spilt my coffee.

“Normal!” I shouted. “Oh yes! Normal! Ordinary! Run of the mill!” Then I thought, hang on, normal? Ordinary? A bit disappointing, really. I mean, let’s face it, “Superb” would have been a better result. Probably just an off day. Still, whatever, I’m off the hook.

Dear Penny

Well, I must say I did laugh at Sam’s letter and not just because it nearly made him cry either. The bit about 41 per cent swimming in the wrong direction! Well, I ask you. I’m surprised it wasn’t 100 pet cent. What woman doesn’t know that sperm swims in the wrong direction? We certainly don’t need to invoke the hard-pressed resources of the National Health Service to find that out. Not if you happen to cough half an hour after a bonk and ten million of the little swine headbutt your gusset.

Anyway, armed with both our test results I took an hour off work and went to see Dr Cooper and he said that having established that nothing obvious is wrong with either of us, the problem might be that we are incompatible (I felt like saying that this thought hod crossed my mind too, but I didn’t). Dr Cooper says that my juices and Sam’s sperm may simply not like each other. That my body may be poisoning his tadpoles as they try to “swim up my Amazon” as Sam calls it. All this sounds completely gruesome but Dr Cooper assures me that it’s absolutely fine and normal, normal, that is, in sad infertile old bags like me. Actually he didn’t say that last bit but it’s how I feel sometimes. I have this vision of my insides as a wrinkled old prune. It’s funny. Sometimes it all seems so unreal, like a dream. Me? Possibly infertile? Surely not. There must be some mistake. I want kids, I’ve always wanted kids, my whole life has been built round the anticipation of bringing up kids, this can’t be happening. Why me? Why bloody me! Oh well, I suppose we all think that, don’t we? We desperate ones.

Anyway, back to Dr Cooper and his incompatibility test. I must say I was a bit taken aback at the thought. The idea of all Sam’s seed drowning in agony in the hell waters of my poisonous vagina made me quite teary. Like a murderess. Well, it seems that in order to discover whether this horrible possibility is in fact the case we must do a postcoital test. Which basically means Sam and me having it off and then a doctor having a look at the aftermath. Quite frankly, one of the most horrible suggestions anyone has ever put to me.

When Doc Cooper first explained it I thought he wanted us to have it off at his surgery which would be not on. I just couldn’t do it. However, Dr Cooper said that he would not be doing the test, for which small mercy I should think he is eternally grateful. I imagine that he’s absolutely sick of the sight of my nether regions by now, he’s been up them that many times over the years. And the thought of encountering them while they are gorged with Sam’s sperm is almost too horrible to contemplate.

Anyway, what has to happen is that Sam and I must get up early on the appointed day and get straight down to business. This is not regular morning practice for us, I hasten to add, both of us preferring a cup of tea and a slice of toast first thing. Besides which, the memory of Sam’s efforts at morning masturbation are still painfully fresh. Once I’ve been properly serviced and stonked up, so to speak, I have to go to some ghastly specialist clinic or other (which will no doubt look like something out of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward) and up me the doctors will go. Surprise, surprise. Who would be a woman? Looking back over the years of smear tests, non-specific infections, fertility bizzo and all, my poor old muff has definitely been a well-trodden path for the medical profession. Sometimes I think I should have a revolving door fitted. Anyway, as I was saying, the specialist, having had a jolly good poke around (with what will no doubt be a piece of frozen metal the size of a grill pan), will then be able to inform me whether or not my insides are filled with dead sperm.

Ugh!

God, I hate this. Why can’t I just get pregnant!?

I rang Drusilla from work and asked her when exactly she’d said that the next full moon was. I’m not going to do it, but I can’t afford to discount anything.

Dear Sam

Going to dinner at Trevor and Kit’s tonight. Had the usual hoo-hah about what to wear. Not me, of course. I know what to wear. Trousers and a shirt. But Lucy finds these decisions much more perplexing. What’s more, she insists on dragging me into her dilemmas and then blaming me for them! She stands there in her underwear and says “Which do you think, the red or the blue?” Well, I know of course the clever thing would be to refuse to answer, because there’s no chance in this world or the next of saying the right thing. Nonetheless, inevitably I have a stab at it.

“Uhm, the red?”

“So you don’t like the blue?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I was going to wear the blue.”

“Well wear the blue, then.”

“Well I can’t now, can I? Since you obviously think I look horrible in it… Now I’ve got to start thinking all over again…”

Madness, absolute madness, particularly since it’s only Trevor and Kit, for heaven’s sake. George and Melinda were invited too but they couldn’t get a babysitter. I pointed out to Lucy that that sort of thing will happen to us if ever we do score. I don’t actually think that she’s thought the whole social side of having babies through at all. Not being able to go out or get pissed when we want to, all spontaneity wiped from our lives in one single act. I said to her, I said, here we are, two highly educated, fully rounded people and yet we are desperate to totally subsume our existence in the abstract concept of a being who will suck us dry physically, emotionally and financially and will not even be able to form a decent sentence for at least five years.

Sam’s in the bathroom shaving, having just delivered a little monologue on the downside of having children, and I’m trying very hard not to get upset because I’ve already done my make-up. How could he be so thoughtless and selfish? He doesn’t mean to be cruel, I know, but he just doesn’t understand. I was born to have children. There’s never been a moment in my life when I didn’t want, some day, to be a mother. When he talks like that, as if children are some kind of lifestyle option to be taken or left, I feel a million miles away from him. Children are the reason for being alive.

I just reminded Lucy that kids are, in the end, just another lifestyle option and I think I made her feel better.

On the other hand. Sometimes I must admit that I catch a glimpse of Lucy, or a look at her while she’s asleep, and I think how pretty she is, and how much I love her. And I think how much more I would like to love her and how I would like to find new and more complete ways of expressing that love. That’s when I think that perhaps having a baby might be the most wonderful thing in the world. Oh well, mustn’t dwell.

Dear Penny

Last night’s dinner with Trevor and his boyfriend Kit was great fun, despite Sam getting me a bit upset before we left.

Sam and Trevor are of course colleagues in lunch at the Beeb and are terribly funny when they start sneering at the more awful of the artists they have to hand over all our licence fees to. Trevor was telling us about these ghastly Oxbridge-educated yobbos whose job is to make jokes about football on some beery late-night sports chat show. It’s called A Game of Two Halves and it’s Trevor’s biggest hit. Apparently the rough idea of the show (I haven’t seen it) is that clips of various sporting events are played and then the regular panel members compete with each other to see who can mention their penises most often.

It was nice to have a really good laugh. We always do with Trevor and Kit. Trevor is good at taking the piss out of himself and it seems he’s become a victim of his own success with this alternative sports quiz he’s developed. Two of the blokes on it have inevitably been picked up for representation by the bull-like Aiden Fumet. Fumet has been to see Trevor and explained that, on the strength of their current “ballistic” status, his “turns” must immediately be given their own sitcoms. When Trevor asked if before committing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of licence payers’ money to an untried project it might be possible to see a script, Aiden Fumet immediately turned into the spiritual skinhead he is and called Trevor “a pointless timeserving cunt”. He also threatened that any suggestion of artistic interference from Trevor or the “BB-fucking-C” would result in Aiden Fumet’s entire “stable” being no longer available to the Corporation.

Trevor does a very good Aiden Fumet, who has a strange hybrid accent – half bored aristocratic rock star and half East End stallholder. “What the BBC ’ave gotta understand is that all my boys are Time Out-approved geniuses and any more messing abaht and I’ll take ’em all to ’ollywood, where they have a proper professional attitude towards the talent and I can get two million dollars a turn, minimum.”

Trevor, George and I all agree that artists are a lot more arrogant with the BBC than they used to be. I suppose it’s down to the incredible diversity of employment options that anybody half good (or not even) is presented with these days. I mean, there was a time when there was only one channel and anybody, no matter how talented, who wanted to be on telly did so by the grace of the BBC. That was how we used to get those incredible long runs of things. People did what they were told, and if that meant doing sixty episodes of the same sitcom then that was what they did. These days, with eight million channels available the celebs call the shots, which makes life a lot more difficult for us execs.

Trevor also blames the Montreal Comedy Festival. This takes place in Canada (well it would do) and hence appearing at it is as close to playing in the United States as the vast majority of British comics are ever going to get. Which is why they all go there. Trevor and I go too whenever we can swing it, as it really is the most monumental piss-up, and the restaurants are excellent! The problem is that big Hollywood TV people also go. Well, not actually big Hollywood TV people. In fact, the minions of the minions of big Hollywood TV people. Those so low down the US TV totem pole that they have nothing more pressing to do in LA or New York. In fact, as far as I can make out, the Montreal Comedy Festival is really just an annual holiday for failed Americans because it is the one time of the year where they get to lord it over people even more desperate to make it in the States than they are themselves.

Anyway, these US non-executives swan about the place being bought drinks by British agents and pretending to be important. Then they go up to all the desperate British, Irish, Australian and Kiwi comedians and tell them that they are “just incredibly interesting and original” and that CBS will probably be very interested in turning them into Eddie Murphy probably or at the very least possibly giving them a sitcom development deal probably.

The sad truth, of course, is that the British comics swear far too much to be of any real interest to the Americans and I have to say that the Ozzies are even fouler. Also, the Montreal Comedy Festival is of only slightly more significance to American Television people than is the Big Knob Comedy Club in Brick Lane. So all that happens is that the British come home (having been drunk for a fortnight and having abused the sacred sexual trust of some poor little nineteen-year-old Canadian publicist), with eye-popping tales of impending and colossal success in the glamorous world of American sitcom. These tales are then circulated by the comedians’ managers and dutifully published in the Independent and, of course, Time Out (“Move over, Robin Williams, here comes Ivor Biggun from Slough!” “Eric and Ernie couldn’t do it, but Dog and Fish just might”). This confirmation of the stories in print then makes the managers, who originally circulated the stories, actually believe them, hence they think that they can push the BBC around.

“Listen, Sam,” Aiden Fumet regularly says to me, “I’ve been faxed by somebody very big at NBC! So where’s the fucking sitcom deal for my boys?!”

It was so funny! Trevor is always good at telling stories about work because you see he doesn’t really care about it very much, unlike Sam, who cares desperately and actually thinks that you can “plan” comedy hits and that festivals and managers and American development deals are terribly important.

Anyway, then Sam (possibly trying to be funnier than Trevor) brought up our impending postcoital business, which I suppose I didn’t really mind because Trevor and Kit are very good pals. Although it is slightly disconcerting to discuss one’s vaginal juices at the dinner table. We all had another good laugh about it, though, because, of course, it is funny. Trevor and Sam were both being most amusing, saying things about vaginal genocide and Sam’s sperm swimming back from the fray carrying little white flags.

We actually laughed until we cried and then I’m afraid to admit I nearly did cry a bit because the truth is, hilarious though it may be, it isn’t very funny wanting kids and not being able to get them.

Kit was so lovely. He’s a set designer for the theatre (mainly fringe; he told me that recently he had to do Burnham Wood moving to Dunsinane for about five quid: “We use a lot of real twigs, and binliners, of course, can represent just about anything”). Anyway, Kit asked what we would do if we failed the test and it turned out that my body really did reject Sam’s sperm. Well, before we knew it we were discussing Trevor making a donation! Ha! Apparently, Trevor has already done it for a lesbian couple in Crouch End that he and Kit met on the Internet. He explained that you don’t actually have to do it, you know, have sex together (“Not even for you, Lucy love,” said Trevor), you just use a turkey baster! Seems incredible to me, but apparently it’s true.

Sam laughed a lot at all this, but I could see he was a bit taken aback at the idea. He really has always been so blasé about kids that I didn’t think he’d mind what I did, but then he went quiet, so I expect he does mind really.

Life is becoming rather strange. My wife appears to be plotting to conceive with my gay friends using a turkey baster. That’ll be an interesting story to tell my mother over the next Christmas dinner.

It has made me think a bit, though. I mean, what if Sam and I aren’t compatible? What are the alternatives? Adoption? Artificial insemination? Forgetting about the whole thing? Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to do what I’ve done many a night of late and try not to think about it.

Dear Sam

A sort of half-exciting thing happened at work today. It started off very exciting, but then got slightly less so. I was just completing a particularly difficult level of Tomb Raider on my PC when Daphne looked in and said that the Director General’s office had been on and would Lucy and I care to go to dinner at Broadcasting House!

Well, would I? All thoughts of Lara Croft’s extraordinary bosom fled my mind instantly. I mean the DG’s dinners at BH are legendary. He has cabinet ministers, captains of industry, footballers, bishops, everyone. But never, to the best of my knowledge, has a lowly executive producer of broken comedy and sitcom been invited. I did once go to his Christmas drinks, but it was only the once and, anyway, there were at least two hundred people at that and it was only drinks. This was dinner! Dinner at Broadcasting House, the Ship that sails down Regent Street! What an honour! The DG must have heard of my trip to Downing Street. I doubt he could have missed it: I’ve talked about it loudly in every single nook and cranny of the Corporation.

Anyway, for whatever reason, we’d been invited. We were “in”. I nearly stood to attention when I told Daphne to accept!

“When is it?” I said. “I’ll cancel everything. If my mother dies, she dies alone.”

“Tomorrow night,” she said.

Slightly disheartening. Obviously an invitation at such short notice means we’re to be fill-ins for somebody who has jacked. Still, I thought, I’d never have expected to have been asked at all, so even being a replacement is an honour.

Then the phone rang. It was George.

“Guess what?” he said. “Melinda and I got asked to a DG’s dinner for tomorrow night! Incredible, eh, what a coup! Obviously we’re a fill-in for somebody who jacked but, still, pretty amazing. The appalling bugger of it is we can’t go! Melinda just can’t get a sitter she trusts. There’s only two sitters in the world it seems who aren’t mass murderers and they’re both busy. I’ve threatened divorce but she won’t budge…”

“When did you get your invitation?” I asked.

“Yesterday, late afternoon,” said George. “I rang the DG’s office first thing this morning to say we couldn’t do it. I could scarcely believe I was actually turning down the Director General this morning. I suppose in a way it’s pretty cool.”

After George got off the phone I tried not to be miffed. “Who cares?” I thought. “So what if I was second choice?” We were still going to dine with the…

And then Trevor rang.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but Kit and I got invited to have dinner at BH with the DG and we can’t go! His office rang first thing this morning. It’s for tomorrow night so obviously we were to be the replacement for someone who’s dropped out, but all the same! Pretty amazing, eh? I had to ring them back half an hour ago to decline. It was like pulling teeth but there’s no way Kit can break his rule.”

Kit, sadly, is HIV positive and although he’s doing incredibly well and you would never know he carried the virus he does have to be careful about over-exertion. He and Trevor have a strict rule that they have only one social occasion a week.

“And we used it up having you to dinner,” Trevor said, and I must say that I didn’t much like his tone, the clear implication being that he and Kit had been insane to waste their precious entertaining time on us when there were far more impressive prospects just around the corner. We parted slightly coldly.

So there it is. Lucy and I are to be the replacement for a replacement for a replacement. Nonetheless we are going to dinner with the DG, which is not to be sniffed at. I’ll have to make sure that Nigel hears about it. He can hardly sack me if I’m friends with the PM and the DG.

I spent all day expecting Keith Harris to phone and say he’d had to turn down an invite from the DG because Orville has a cold.

Tosser also phoned me today. No chance of a job with his company, which was a bit dispiriting, I must admit. I had thought, vainly, that he’d jump at the chance of recruiting me, that I’d be rather a prestige signing for his company. You know, top BBC man and all that, but obviously he doesn’t think so. “The BBC is just another player,” he said to me, which is a bloody ridiculous thing to say considering the BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world and he has a floor and a half in Dean Street. Quite frankly, I suspect him of only giving work to gorgeous young women with pierced bellybuttons and small tattoos of scorpions on their shoulders; there certainly seem to be a lot of them employed at his office, though that might just be coincidence, I suppose.

Dear Pen Pal

I’m writing this having just got back from dinner at Broadcasting House. The Director General was hosting one of his evenings for the great and the good so obviously we’d only been invited to pad out the numbers (Sam did some spying and it turned out that the Editor of the Daily Telegraph had jacked at the last moment. Sam said other people had been asked to fill in before us, but he was very vague about who they were, very important people he said).

Anyway, when I say we had dinner with the Director General we barely actually spoke to him, of course, being at the other end of the table, but it was still very nice. BH really is a fantastic building, even though some idiot or other ripped most of the Deco out in the fifties and replaced it with the interior of a Soviet prison. Nonetheless it still feels special to walk in through those same doors that Tony Hancock and Churchill and Sue Lawley have walked through before you.

Of course actually having dinner there (served by very smart staff) is particularly magical, it takes you back to another age, like the twenties or something. You start with drinks in a sort of antechamber and then go through into a marvellous dining room, all wood lined and shimmering crystal. I got sat next to a bishop who was very nice, and a junior member of the shadow cabinet who was not. He immediately made it quite clear that he was not happy at being seated next to a mere “wife” and, what’s more, a mere nobody’s wife to boot. I swear that as the swine came through and spotted his place-setting (with me already sitting next to it) his face actually fell! Unbelievable. He couldn’t even be bothered to make the pretence of being polite. He actually grimaced.

We attempted smalltalk for about a minute.

Me: “So you’re in the shadow cabinet? How fascinating. Although I always imagine that being in opposition must be very frustrating.”

Swine: “Hmm, yes. So your husband works in television comedy, you say? I really don’t think that any of that rubbish is funny any more. There hasn’t been anything remotely decent since Yes, Minister.”

After that he completely ignored me until the cheese, by which time he was pissed enough to try a bit of bored flirting in a lazy, patronizing, off-hand sort of way.

Swine: “I expect with you both being in showbusiness there must be terrible temptations. Do you ever get jealous? Does he?”

I wasn’t having any of it. “What a strange question,” I said, not only hoitily but also fairly toitily and turned back to the bishop, with whom I was getting on like a house on fire. He must have been ninety-three if he was a day and he was telling me about his hobby, which was collecting eighteenth-century Japanese erotic art! Extraordinary! Where does the church get them? What’s more, whilst describing a porcelain figurine of a naked ninja (in rather too much detail), he squeezed my leg under the table! The randy old goat. What is it about men? They’re pathetic. A couple of drinks and they start sniffing about like dogs. Sam was scarcely being any better than the bishop. He was sitting next to this tart with extraordinary knockers (not entirely her own, I fancy) and I could see him just ogling them. I mean at first he’d at least tried to be discreet, although I knew what he was up to, of course, all that reaching for the salt and passing the bread. Sad, really. And after a few glasses of wine he just gave up any pretence at subtlety and started simply staring at them with his tongue hanging out. I mean it couldn’t have been any more obvious if he’d said, “Phwoar! Look at the jugs on that!” I’ve no idea who this overly boobed slapper was, she was only about twenty-three or four and clearly a second wife to someone, but I didn’t find out whose. I looked for a man with a smug smile on his face but there were too many contenders. It may have been the shadow cabinet minister. On the other hand why would a man with a girl like that be flirting with me? I’m not exactly spectacularly blessed in the knocker department.

All in all, what with Sam drooling and the shadow minister sneering and the bishop’s hand beginning to gather a tiny bit too much confidence, it was a great relief when the DG made us all move round for the pudding. I ended up talking to his wife, who seemed very nice. I found myself telling her all about Carl Phipps. Not the hand-holding lunch, obviously, but about being an agent and representing him. I must admit I suddenly heard myself being altogether more enthusiastic about him than I’d intended to be. “He’s so nice,” and “He’s rather dishy,” and “He’s not at all stuck up,” the last of which at least is certainly not true.

I suppose it’s just possible that I sounded rather schoolgirly. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, I suppose. We shan’t be asked again anyway.

On the way home Sam insisted that he wasn’t pissed, but he did his usual pissed thing of worrying about whether he’d put his foot in it to anyone. I said he might as well have put his foot into that woman’s cleavage because he’d done everything else but climb into it (which he denied, pathetically). Sam always comes home from parties worrying that he’s said something wrong or offended someone. It’s incredibly boring and, what’s more, it’s affected me. I never used to be like that at all. “Fuck ’em,” I used to say, but he’s so bad he’s got me doing it as well. Sometimes we come home from going out and spend the whole cab ride asking each other if we were embarrassing and reassuring each other that we weren’t. It’s sad.

Anyway, he’d better not have been too pissed. He knows damn well what he’s got to do tomorrow morning.

Dear etc.

I think it went all right tonight. Bit worried I might have said the wrong thing. I’ve been over it with Lucy and it seems all right. As far as I can recall I only spoke to the Director General twice. I said, “Good evening,” at the beginning and later on I said, “Yes, I think things are fairly healthy in the arena of entertainment and comedy at the moment.” I don’t think either of those comments could be misconstrued. Surely not? Unless he thought I was being sarky? But why would he think that? No, I’m quite sure I didn’t make any faux pas.

Definitely.

What’s more, I certainly didn’t spend the evening staring at that woman’s tits, as I’ve been unfairly accused of. I mean they were there, for God’s sake! In fact they seemed to be everywhere! I simply couldn’t avoid the things. I could hardly sit and look at the ceiling all evening, could I?

Anyway. One thing is for absolutely sure. I am not pissed. I was very careful about that. Because, as I’m well aware, I have to provide a shag in the morning. What is more I intend to make it a cracker, because I really love Lucy. I really really do. Despite her paranoia about other women’s bosoms I absolutely love her. I just told her so and she said I was pissed, but I’m not. I just love her, I really do, I love her, I love her, I love her and tomorrow, before I go to work, I am going to make love to her so passionately and so beautifully that she will remember it always, because I love her.

Dear Penny

This morning I think I had the worst shag I have had in thirteen and a half years of moderately continuous lovemaking. I doubt that I shall ever forget it. Sam reeked of stale booze and fags, plus I was still seething about him spending the whole evening staring down that enormous cleavage, which he continued to deny, of course.

Anyway, we both knew we would have to go through with it. The postcoital examination had been booked for ten and you do not mess with a confirmed appointment on the NHS. I must say that from the moment we woke up it was clear that it was not much of a prospect for me, erotically speaking. Sam staggered back from a rather loud visit to the lavatory announcing that he had a headache but that it couldn’t be a hangover as he hadn’t been drunk. What’s more, we were a bit late already because, although Sam had set the alarm to give us an extra half-hour (it normally only takes us about fifteen minutes), somehow or other he’d managed not to push the button in so it hadn’t gone off.

Anyway, I had just decided to ignore the beery, faggy fug that surrounded him and attempt a bit of foreplay when Sam said, “I’m afraid we’re really going to have to be quick, darling, because I’ve got a meeting.”

Well, I screamed at him! “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said. “Trying to start a family when you’ve got a meeting! Perhaps if I phoned your secretary we could schedule our sex life into your diary. Just in pencil, of course. Wouldn’t want to be inflexible about it or put you under any pressure!” Sarcastic, I know, but I was furious.

Anyway then, of course, the inevitable happened and he couldn’t do it. His dick just completely disappeared. I told him to think about Ms “look at my gargantuanly fulsome funbags” from the previous night but he got all angry and said that he didn’t wish to think about other women, but that bonking to order was not as bloody easy as it might appear.

Well, to cut a short story even shorter he just about managed it. He wasn’t at all sure that he’d produced enough for the test but Dr Cooper had assured me that it doesn’t take much, so I thought that it would be all right. Actually I felt a bit sorry for him. I could see he felt he’d let me down a bit so I said he wasn’t to worry because it wasn’t his fault that he had a small and unreliable penis.

I really did mean it nicely but it just seemed to put him in an even worse mood.

So, Sam got dressed and went to his meeting, and I went off to the clinic. Obviously worried about all the stuff falling out on the way. Horrible thought. It had been such a gruesome effort mingling our juices in the first place that I didn’t want to have to go through the whole ghastly palaver of a pre-postcoital examination bonk again, if that makes sense.

So there I was, hobbling to the car and trying not to cough. Once in the car it was worse. Driving yourself in these circumstances is a mistake unless you have an automatic. It is simply not possible to change gear with your legs crossed, and trying to do the whole journey in third makes things very juddery when you pull away at the lights, which of course shakes things down even more.

Then when I got to the clinic the road was blocked by a car with its hazard lights on.

I hate hazard lights.

They should be bloody well banned. People think that if they have them on then everything is all right. They can do exactly as they please. Park in the middle of the road, reverse up motorways, drive through crowded supermarkets, invade Poland. “It’s all right,” said Hitler’s panzer commanders, “we’ve got our hazard lights on.” I mean I ask you!!! I’m confident that the day is not far off when the burly and tattooed drivers of getaway cars will claim as a plea in mitigation that as they speeded away from some robbed bank or hijacked security van they had their hazards on!