It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine — aka Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife — has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is as if I had heard that my mother had run off with an Albanian gigolo, or Russell Brand. Nurse Jenny is the kind of girl one takes home to mother. Just as Natalia Vodianova is the type one takes to Marcel Proust’s salon. (That’s the frog writer, not a hairdresser.) My fiancée Lindsay Lohan one takes to a motel.
Sure, love to most people is a frail little fantasy to be smashed by pride and jealousy, but I’m way above that. No one suffers like I do when that roly-poly cupid takes target practice on my already wounded heart. The first time I saw Call the Midwife I was a goner. My jets were somewhat cooled when Ms Raine was given The Spectator diary slot and wrote about me with such caution I suspect she had an ambulance chaser standing over her shoulder. Now, one year later, gossip columnists are making fun of me pining away in my chalet while she’s romping around with some dumb redhead. Oy veh!
Sex and attraction defy Cartesian analysis and are actually a pain in the you-know-what. I used to think that once old age set in the demons that drove me to chase women non-stop would go the way of my backhand. On the contrary. As the backhand got stronger — I stopped hitting top spin and began to slice, saving energy and making it safer — so did my appetite for the fairer sex.
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