There are three people a girl simply must call on return from a detox boot camp designed to angulate the angles and preserve the perishables. In my case, the taut flat stomach of my youth has a tendency towards a little pot belly if not watched with the eyes of a hawk… so when that happens I just send him to the gym with a swift kick to the posterior… but we’re speaking about me… of course. Returning from the Maldives a slightly less whiter shade of pale, I sashayed my way through customs, (I declared only my love for a good vino and a bad man), sent my personal assistant B to collect all my battered trunks and started the three calls as the taxi seduced its way past the suburban outskirts of our blessed Lady London and penetrated to her dirty, dirty heart.

The first to my dearest Edie, to catch up on all that I had missed these past months. Edie, although being one of the ladies who lunch in this town, is however strangely blind to the vagaries and vulgarities of its beating, blood raw heart. Thus she recounts all tales in a convivial tone that makes the hundred and one parties I missed actually seem bearable and makes me pine for them during my long taxi ride home with Eilead the cab-man. And by the deep sapphire of the Laccadive sea there was severely little chance for gossip.

Arias, the young lad who brought me cherry flavoured popsicles when another day of rice cakes and saluting the sun got just a little more than this toxic girl could bear, would tell me a few tales… of his sister who had disappointed her father by running away from the easy ways of the village to become a credit controller for one or other chain of hotels (I promised to track her down in Leicester and reintroduce the heathen beauty to some real pagan living)… of the farmer found in the compromising position with the American tourist and the fruit of complicated name… but there is a human need, or at least a “Dotty” need, to find out who has been doing what to whom and whether it has changed the face of the industry (unlikely) and how I can take advantage of it (very likely).

Of course with the run up to the BAFTAs and now the Oscars there have been more than the usual number of industry insiders and outsiders swapping places faster than Maypole dancers, actresses bashfully dismissing their chances against the competition (oh, please!) and not as young as they used to be members of the Pussy Posse of LA (a group of clean living cat fanciers who came to our shores to check out our breeding stock, or so I choose to believe). So here are a few more salacious rumours I have managed to glean from Edie before I am even out of eye-line of the bright lights of Heathrow traffic control:

A certain actor (as opposed of course to the usual multitude of actors who increase in number by the minute) is desperately searching for the script that will compensate for his rampant heterosexuality and mainstream chiselled jaw by allowing him to play fairy…. But also disabled… and a creative genius… and misunderstood by his athletics obsessed father… and having a boyfriend of a differing ethnic origin who might just be dying of a disease that leaves them thin but beautiful, coughing delicately into his embroidered handkerchief, his lover’s initials gradually covered up by dried on blood. He’s seeking to tick all those boxes that can guarantee a win this time next year. Good luck to him but doesn’t he realise that what’s hot now… gay… transgendered… deeply cynical investigative writer… will simply not be in next year or the year after. Though that’s not going to stop me taking the lovely juicy cheque he’s waved at me since I landed in Terminal 4 though. Morals are for losers. 

The lady with the long legs had been showing more than mere common courtesy demands on her nights out in London pre-BAFTAs. Dancing on tables has a certain je ne sais quoi when done with aplomb, steady heels and bravado. But this lady’s fall from Heaven was widely recorded. How I love these tiny, tiny phones with cameras. I would never be so crude as to carry one myself (that is why God created personal assistants) but they have made it possible to see this stella lady’s moment of flash that competed with the thousand and one cameras that flashed back at her. Such a shame her face was slightly obscured and her shrub wasn’t… Oh well, it worked for Sharon Stone…

Another actor… this time one from that multitude, one who thinks that all students making films with less than a ton in the bank are always on the brink of overnight success and that their juddering camera work is always the sign of a truly original talent on the brink of flying free like a flock of shit dropping doves. But I digress, this actor has been cheating on his long term girlfriend in the home counties. Let’s call her the Babysitter as that’s the reason he stays with her… his kids, her life… well, childcare is so terribly expensive these days. He has been with (amongst many others) a girl in the city with more fire in her blood and much worse eyesight. To this girl I raise a glass of super chilled champagne and toast her for her charity work. Had she not allowed this gentleman the loan of her passion perhaps he would have gone cold and given up on his acting ambitions long since. And then a hundred and one amateur shorts I have watched from my chaise longue would have had a funny, head bobbing space where once this actor of actors would have filled in as the 30 year old hitman, the cuckolded husband and the dirty older man chasing the youth he lost before the film girl was born… oh, wait, perhaps that last one wasn’t one of his roles. To all cheating actors, and there are so so many of you… the fact that you can get away with it doesn’t impress me… what impresses me is that you get it in the first place.

And lastly Edie drops a pearl in my ear of such breath taking magnitude that I am afraid I cannot tell you without my lawyer, your lawyer and the entire student population of Grey’s Inn Court in attendance. But I can drop some hints… yellow, sky high, six pack, long dark night of the soul, Oscar speech, revelation. Now if you have a Dotty kind of mind all will be transparent. If not, meet me on the streets of London and ask the old man, kicking up the papers with his worn out shoes. He might just be the person in question…

So by the time I have reached the satin black door to my flat, stopping to check out how my ladies in the flat opposite have been fairing since I went (still there, no thanks to the council’s plan to buy them out and replace them with real scumbags… estate agents), I was a-warm with the glow of second hand news and plans to ruin, torment and tease. As my troupe artiste swarmed round me I recounted tales of the other guests at the boot camp, and guided their unpacking of my trunks at a safe distance (really, I am more of a conductor than a member of the pit). Then, a chilled glass of champagne in hand, I dialled the second most important number on my ivory handled telephone. Evgeny Lushkov.

People often ask me who dresses me, expecting the big names, Ford, Klein, MacQueen…. Very few expect that my source is a short, barrel shaped Chechnyan ex-gymnast with a handle bar moustache with a sweet Geordie boyfriend and an eye for the lines of a woman’s body. Returning from the Maldives a few pounds lighter (and that’s all, of course I do not pay for such trips myself. Qu’elle horror!) there was an immediate need to update my 17^th Century French wardrobe with a few key pieces that will accentuate the loss and bare the beauty. And of course there was a very key piece to be made. A dress for the Oscars.

Within the hour I was standing naked in the middle of my day lounge.

Evgeny admires the female form, caresses it, dresses it… but it holds as much sexual fascination for him as a Botticelli nude. Though post-detox I am less of a Botticelli and more of a Picasso in his geometric period. But at least I know when Evgeny warms up the metal end of his tape measure he has no dubious intentions. Though of course the same cannot be said for my troupe, staying to languidly watch the proceedings and make suggestions with a hungry eye. Of course they do not all live with me but hang around when it suits them, and one of my fitting suits them very well indeed. I will leave the details of my dress for Uncle Oscar for another day, but the fitting went very well indeed, trying a hundred caressing silks and satins against my flesh soothed me into a trance-like state of pure pleasure.

All the better for me to make the final call when my tempers were be-calmed and my voice deceptively sweet and winning. A call to my manager… a fat man in LA, recently appointed, long time regretted… to tell him never again to send this toxic girl away from these shores to remove all the sweet and bitter poisons that make her the bitch she is, or else risk the removal of two things as dear to him as the bright lights and bad people of my city are to me… and removed with a spoon.

So here’s to the re-tox, I start with a honey button raised to you.

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