Inconceivable
commissioning new ways of humiliating the public for the early Saturday evening schedules, the idea of making proper films is pretty seductive. I tried hard to join in with their enthusiasm but I couldn’t summon up much jollity. Jealousy really, I suppose. I don’t want to commission films, I want to write one. The idea of going about Soho searching out shaven- headed twelve-year-old film-school fashion junkies with rings through their scrotums made me tired. Unfair of me, I know, but as my mother said, life wasn’t supposed to be fair.
    George and Trevor saw things differently. They thought it presented a golden opportunity.
    ‘This is your big chance!’ they said. ‘Commission yourself. Write a script and green light it. The man’s crying out for ideas and he’s asking us to find them. You’ll never get an opportunity like this again! It’s gamekeeper turned poacher.’
    For a moment I was almost seduced, but then I remembered two things. Firstly my current relationship with the Controller does not lead me to imagine that he’d accept a script with my name on it. And secondly, even if he did, what script? I haven’t written a thing in years. I’ve forgotten how to write and even if I hadn’t I have nothing to write about.
    Trevor said he’d always thought that a gay alcoholic in recovery would make a great subject for a movie.
    ‘But that’s your story, Trevor,’ I said.
    ‘And a monumentally fucking dull one it is too,’ George added.
    Of course they’re both right. Nigel’s new initiative is an opportunity I should be seizing with both hands. But I just can’t do it. They say comedy is about conflict and pain. Where’s my conflict? Where’s my pain? I’m a boring bloke in a boringly happy marriage. Apart from my own monumental lack of talent and an impending sperm result there isn’t a cloud on my horizon.

Dear Penny
    I simply cannot believe it. Sam handed in his sample three days ago and since then he has been jumpy as a kitten. He pounces on the post in the morning even though he knows the result will take five days. He grabs at any envelope that comes through the door, ones containing offers to join bookclubs, others containing enquiries about whether we want to sell our house. He tears them all open in terror that they might also be concealing a failed sperm test certificate. I swear that’s what he thinks he’s going to get, a certificate, possibly with a ribbon on it or a red wax seal, saying ‘sperm test FAILED’. I’m afraid it seems that nothing, absolutely nothing, turns a man into a wanker so much as having to take a sperm test.
    Anyway, my blood test result came through with the second post and it seems my body has passed that particular hurdle, insomuch as the indications are that I ovulate. Hooray and whoopidydingdong. There are now only fourteen million things that could be wrong with my sad, dysfunctional tubes. Sometimes it really is hard to be a woman.
    I had to send off loads of signed pictures of Carl ‘Will you fuck me for a sandwich?’ Phipps today. I have very mixed emotions about that whole episode. Obviously I’d never do anything about it, I mean obviously. Nonetheless it’s quite flattering. At thirty-four and married it’s rather nice to discover that one could still get laid if one wanted to which one doesn’t and one certainly wouldn’t even if one did.
    When I told Sam that my blood test indicated healthy ovulation he acted most unpleasantly. Instead of being pleased that at least one part of my body functions as it should, he immediately took it as proof that he’s going to fail his sperm test and that he’s some kind of sexless eunuch. It really is most thoughtless of him to be so self-obsessed, and not very attractive. I must confess to having briefly entertained the unworthy thought that Lord Byron Phipps, the brooding, smouldering Tenant of Wildfell Hall, would not be so ungentlemanly or uncaring of a lady’s distress.
    He would also have more

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