The story thus far: in the 18 February issue of the greatest weekly in the world I wrote that I had fallen madly in love with Jessica Raine, the actress who portrays nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night BBC television show Call the Midwife. In the throes of demonic, erotic exhilaration, I may have piled it on a bit thick. So what? If Gordon Brown can ruin the British economy, Tony Blair take Britain to war based on an outrageous lie, and both bums still walk around without cuffs on their wrists, surely Taki can walk on air and fly on gossamer wings over someone he’s never met.
My whole point was to renounce today’s so-called sex symbols, those drunken tarts one sees piling out of nightclubs unsteady on their thick ankles and slurring their words as they try to pretend they don’t want their pictures taken. Here was Jessica in all the grace, shyness and understatement that makes a woman so attractive to the poor little Greek boy, so I went overboard. But nurse Jenny is my ideal woman, and although even I in my reverie was aware that it’s a role and nothing more, I had to compare her with today’s lot and weep.
Jenny-Jessica was my incarnation of goodness and her enchanting looks turned me into an erotomaniacal fool. Even worse, I decided to get back at the deputy editor of The Spectator, who had repeatedly made a fool of me by letting me stew on the altar — and with a Cardinal waiting to boot — while she amused herself with her family and friends in Old Queen Street. So I wrote, and I quote from the greatest Greek writer since Homer, ‘Goodbye, deputy editor of The Spectator, so long, Keira (as in Knightley), au revoir pour toujours, Rebecca (as in Hall); you’re all through, washed up, history, curtains, finished.’ I swear on John Prescott’s fat head that I meant it.
Well, in an act of unspeakable revenge, the deputy editor not only went ahead and got married and now calls herself Madame, she also hunted down Jessica Raine and commissioned a diary from her, a rare honour for someone as young as Jessica and one with just one hit under her thespian belt. And the deputy editor knew exactly what she was doing. In her diary of last week, Jessica Raine admitted to being perturbed by what I wrote about her, advised me to cool my jets, and plunged the knife in deeply by suggesting I read some bloody book by some female called How To Be a Woman.
This was as insulting and wounding to me as sending an Italian tank-warfare manual to Hasso von Manteuffel would have been. Gott im Himmel, what does the deputy editor have against me to wreak such Oedipal revenge? Her father, Sir Humphry, is an old friend of mine. As a schoolboy her brother Jack had me down to Eton to speak, and got me so drunk on his housemaster’s excellent wine I made a complete fool of myself. Plus, she went off and got married, so why pile it on?
Oh well, Jessica-Jenny has now spoken, and I can almost trace a lawyer’s thoughts when she wrote about ‘being compelled to bring him back to reality’, something professors Klinghoffer of Basel and Wulffshlagger of Zurich have been working on, my beta- amyloid plaques, the frontals of my brain that trigger me off when I see enchanting females like Jessica. Klinghoffer wants an intervention, which means cutting out some brain tissue, but Wulffshlagger insists that it’s not necessary and that I might end up like that Kennedy girl whose father, the kind Joseph Kennedy, had lobotomised 70 years or so ago.
Personally I don’t know whose advice I will take. My wife thinks I should be lobotomised, but my children think it’s too much. One thing is for sure. I will not leave it up to the deputy editor, nor to the love of my life that could have been, even if the kind nurse Jenny would look after me after the operation.
This has been a very hard column to write. Although infuriated by the heartless remarks about a man who not only laminated a picture of her on a bike, but also left copies of it on tables of strangers — the way handicapped people do — I think the deputy editor’s conduct has been worse. My amulet against women I have wronged in the past obviously doesn’t work, so I threw it down a crevasse I skied awfully close to yesterday. Let Jessica-Jenny go with men her age and listen to a monologue about football or other such rubbish. Let them lurch drunkenly towards her, unlike an older gent like me who would give up drink on the day that’s not about to happen. And let’s see who among my rivals will weave thousands of blossoms and use weathered green trellis lit from behind to simulate dining under a huge wisteria tree, a plan I had for Paris. From now on it shall be Ambra Moore, granddaughter of Sir Roger Moore, and daughter of Geoffrey and Loulou, who as a 13-year-old just scored a triumph in the Kennedy school here in Gstaad playing first a 15-year-old, then a 40-year-old in a play called White Puppies. I was a guest of the Moores and then gave a dinner for Ambra, her parents, Lara Livanos and my old buddy Sir Roger and his wonderful wife Kristina. ‘Keep away from young actresses,’ said James Bond.
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