“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
They are crawling around in the dark on all fours making animal noises. Among them Bearded Bernie, a Liverpudlian solicitor, a translator and a girl who cycled here from Barcelona.
The scene: a lovely Greek farmhouse. The aim: to find your partner for the co-listening exercise, hold hands, listen intently to what he says, and then feed him back his words.
Welcome to the Guardian readers’ Butlins.
It’s hellishly hard to get hold of frozen sperm these days. I’m sitting in the Lister Hospital – the Dorchester of London hospitals – in the waiting-room of the Assisted Conception Unit. The doctor is running three-quarters of an hour late. I can only console myself with the thought that if I were going for artificial insemination on the National Health I’d probably have to wait months.
I am hoping to get offered some sperm-bank sperm and thus become one of the growing number of single women who are accepted for artificial insemination by donor sperm (AID).
The pouting girl in the loo shimmered, unremarkable legs squeezed into Lycra tights and see-how-far-you-can-go skirt hitched high. “Go on, you’re next,” she said. “It’s your turn.”
“I don’t want any,” I say.
“It’s coke.” She proffers a razor blade packet of snow provocatively from the palm of her hand. Outside, blissfully unaware, Mrs Toilet Attendant, sixtysomething, loses her rag: “Hurry up. We’re B-U-S-Y.” She spells out the word. Nearby stands a dish of peppermints, le pre snog preparation that the management vous propose, and a mound of makeup left behind.
Thus begins a night at Tramp, the London nightclub in which Pamella Bordes picked up Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil.
My family has what must be London’s only dachshund on wheels. She’s called Muffit. Crufts and suchlike are fine – working dogs, gun dogs, pedigree chums, prowling prancers and canines with unpronounceable Chinese names. But against her, they pale into insignificance.
Muffit was under the supervision of Keith Butt, the Adonis vet whom women cross London to see (they stop off in Harrods en route to buy a pet to take with them). Following an accident in which her back legs had become paralysed, he suggested she be sent to the kennel in the sky.
My father went to see her in doggy hospital to give her her last grapes. He ended up writing a cheque for some fantastic amount (relative to the size of the dog) which was duly dispatched to the States (where else?) where some doggy wheels were speedily fired, or run up or whatever you do to make canine roller skates.
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