ACTORS
Actors, unlike farmers, get up very late, and go to bed after midnight, unless they are getting up at the crack of dawn to play in some film. As a race, they’re inclined to be surprisingly insecure, self-obsessed, only interested in talking shop, and finding out whether Quentin was perfectly frightful at Bristol.
Actors like to make love in front of a looking glass so they can admire their own performance, or with the television on, so they can see how ‘perfectly frightfully’ all their friends are acting. If they keep their socks on, they’re either a blue movie star or terrified of getting foot rot.
On the credit side, they are marvellous at playing out one’s fantasies, whether you want them to dress up as a sadistic schoolmaster, a vicar, or a gentleman farmer.
MUSICIANS
Musicians dress very badly, sometimes suffer from Halle Orchestra and enjoy playing the eternal triangle. Singers however have the most marvellous breath control and can kiss for at least ten minutes without stopping. Trumpeters and any player of woodwind instruments are also very good at kissing, having such mobile lips. Violinists have very versatile left hands—I really dig that double stopping.
Conductors have superb timing: anyone who conducts a whole orchestra shouldn’t have much trouble conducting an affaire.
If a man keeps boasting: “Look no hands,” while making love to you, he’s probably a concert pianist or a brain surgeon and frightened of losing his no-claim bonus.
WRITERS
Writers are alleged to write about it better than do it. Certainly they always regard you as copy, and if you make a
However, it is nice to get sonnets from time to time. They also write wonderful letters, which are absolute hell to answer, not much about oneself and full of all those fragments from Donne and Marvell.
One writer I know has an unnerving habit of taking two extra copies of all his love letters, one for himself, the other for the British Museum.
PAINTERS
Painters dress well, and have very nice handwriting. But don’t be fooled by that line about only seeing you as a beautiful form not as a sexual object. It’s the easiest way I know to get a woman to remove her clothes.
I think on the whole those involved in the arts make the best lovers, for they have more imagination, more ability to cater for your fantasies, and a bigger repertoire. Most of them have a kind of feline, slightly feminine mind—pure heaven from start to fetish. But don’t expect fidelity. Art has very little to do with morals.
ADVERTISING MEN
Most of their time is spent making presentations or discussing whether they should insert their eight-inch single column more than three times a week. They dress very well, if somewhat uniformly—navy blue suit, pink shirt—and are generally doused in free sample scent. When you meet them at parties, they say: “Actually I’m in advertising,” in a very apologetic way, because
Stages of Man
YOUTHS (See Schoolboys or Students)
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In my youth, youths used to breathe heavily, say thank you three times if you gave them a cigarette, open the matchbox upside down so that the matches cascaded onto the floor, and finally knock over the ashtray.
Today youths are extremely cool, have lean and hungry pelvises and hip measurements in single figures. They often marry at seventeen and refer to their father-in-law as ‘baby’. They don’t talk if they don’t feel like it, but this is probably because in the places they frequent, the music is so loud as to make conversation impossible. They wear clothes, which disconcert their elders, including tight jeans to emphasise a bulging crotch. They spend most of their time strumming on guitars or trendy-looking girls who look as though they’ve just crawled out from underneath a rolling stone. Secretly these girls will worry about tight jeans making a man impotent.
STUDENTS (See Airmen)
OLDER MEN
It has always seemed unfair to me that no one bats an eyelid if a man goes out with a girl thirty years younger than he is, but everyone starts prophesying doom and desertion if a woman shacks up with a man even three years younger than herself. A woman left by her husband when she is forty either faces living alone or has to break up someone else’s marriage if she’s going to get married again, whereas a forty-year-old divorced man can have a ball with any dolly he chooses.
As a result the world is now full of seventy-year-old ravers, locks clustering over the collars of their shirts, sideboards laddering their artificially tanned cheeks, and fifty-year-old ton-up boys, forcing themselves into tight jeans, brushing their thinning hair forward, and touching up the grey roots of their jet-black Viva Zapata moustaches. In the evening they wear sawn-off kaftans to hide their pot bellies.
In an attempt to keep up, they exhaust themselves going on vegetarian diets, giving up drink, and dancing all night in discotheques, then going round with grey faces saying they feel twenty years younger. In trying to be Peter Pan, they look more like petered-out pansies.
They also embrace all the phoney mysticism that surrounds smoking pot, and at parties they can be seen going furtively into back rooms and tearing cigarettes apart. Later they gaze into young girls’ eyes and say: “My dear, you’ve made an old man very hippy.”
Dolly birds like them—because it gives them kudos in the typing pool to be going out with an older man. Older men can also take them to trendy restaurants younger men can’t afford, and are said to be ‘experienced’ sexually. (I shudder to think what rubbish is dished up in the name of experience.) They also take them occasionally for dirty weekends at a Truss House in Hernia Bay.
FIANCES
Fiances are out of date and not getting it. If pressed they will say: “My fiancee and I have slept together all night in the same bed, but we haven’t actually slept together.” Fiancees never give their fiances their all—only
