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.’
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