A Pizza called Dizzy, A Popinjay, and "Can You Ever Get Too Much of Anything?"

One morning last week I woke feeling dizzy. As Dizzy is our live-in nanny - our last child left home fifteen years ago?! - I have been charged with sexual harassment. Isn't that something! I tried to plead "sexsomnia," but the judge, Mr Justice Useless, was arrested during the hearing for "sleepwalking"!

I should have pleaded "parasomnia," only the police officers fell asleep while taking my statement! To make matters worse, my counsel, Mr Lola Heyday, snored while addressing the bench during my plead. The cost? Well, the facts! On the morning of the alleged incident I had woke from a deep sleep - recorded in my statement as eight feet in depth - believing Dizzy to be a "two and a half metre" high veggie pizza called "Barefoot Sally". I was mortified this was not brought to the court's attention!

I was glad, however, to be exonerated of the alleged charge. The jury unanimously agreed that Dizzy looked like a pizza and eat her for lunch.

An ex-manager of mine was a popinjay and wore a poppadom on his head which he only removed when attending the theatre. His love for comfort included sitting on a hard-boiled egg strategically placed on his office chair each morning. He never worked more than one hour in one day as a rule, unless he felt like a pencil. Sometimes his face would go deathly pale; proof the egg was working its magic on his posterior. His brain vacillated frequently - no easy task - causing him to fold his arms behind his back, raise his right leg in a Nazi salute, and anxiously admit, "If my wife sees me with a paint brush, my goose is cooked!" For the rest of the day he would walk on his hands.

He had a mania for talking about painting. He made day feel like night. I remember one day he looked at me with his moist mouth - his eyes were elsewhere - "I've some canvasses I'd like to show you which I will be exhibiting soon in my outside toilet." I fell silent. Sometimes he looked like Goya on a good day, and had the aroma of a rotten Corot. For six months he studied under the eye of Charlie Orchard - the rest of Charlie's body was never discovered - a well-known harmonica player, who had studied under a hospital bed in Paris.


Stunned by my silent interludes he used to talk about his reputation in artistic and social circles, and his collection of park gates. All his misery came from wanting to be himself year in, year out. He seemed to live outside of life. Everything he thought and said was convertible into cash. He possessed no imagination which I found disappointing. A prerequisite for a manager perhaps, but not an artist.

Reflections: For some people there is never enough of anything: enough money, enough time, enough gossip, enough praise, enough clothes, enough trains, enough bowel movements. No-one - to my knowledge - has fought fate and won. Your true soul is written upon your face - if not in public, at least, in private - and cannot disguise envy, greed, hatred, suffering, unhappiness, frailty, corruption, selfishness.

Spring and regeneration do not exist forever, for anyone. It's not the journey that counts. It's your intentions and actions that define your true self. Others can accurately describe your life if you can't. Camouflage helps most people cope with their life as best they can. The rest? Too self-obsessed, prejudiced, and ignorant, they're already dead, and probably don't know it.