Skip to main content

First Reviews of My Tutu Went AWOL

  First, because my mother speaks below, let's discuss her attitude to mortality. I recently told her that I had reached the death-aware stage of life. 
  She said, 'Even the great and the good die, Iestyn.  Jane Austen, Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn...to name some favourites of yours.'
  I asked who she might list as favourites of hers that are no longer with us.  She answered. 'Oh, very much the usual.  Lena Zavaroni, Elsa the Lioness and Arthur Askey.'

  There are two five star reviews for my book so far on Amazon. From strangers, too. My family, merely strange, are adding to the feedback with ansaphone messages.
  My stepmother: ‘Iestyn, I’m on page eighty-five…don’t know what chapter that is.’
  My mother: ‘You’ve got your Mairs confused. The Mair I bought all the elastic for over however many years was the one who broke her television and had her leg amputated — she’s very much on her way out. The other Mair lived in Pimlico and is completely dead.’
 
  Cue best-sellerdom, clearly.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Me Featuring in The Sunday Times, Nicely...

  This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at same...  I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable.  But there was Olive... Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, ...

In The Times again...

   

The Marine Says I Must Re-queer...

                                                                 Being camp in Camp Basra... Stacks, ex-Royal Marines Commando, recently watched my Tutu Went AWOL! show on Zoom. He had notes. I was shifting from foot to foot, he said, and gesturing too much. 'And you must put back the stuff about the Brigadier and your fellow comedian being homophobic...' The Brigadier had been sneering about my act, saying it would be more suited to Butlins. But, more importantly, he believed I was an 'inappropriate influence on 42 Commando'.  Stacks, deadpan, commented, 'Sir, before Iestyn started hanging out with us, sir, it had never occurred to him to play Tiddlywinks with anything other than his thumb, sir.'  My fellow comedian, who I'll call Mark, because that's his name, asked Reg, Garrison Sergeant Major, in front of ...