We’re hoping that our friends’ Jack Russell, Cyril, will have a litter of puppies, because then we’ll adopt a couple of them. But I saw Cyril the other weekend, and to be frank, she looks way too skinny and nervy to be pregnant. Cyril is named after my friend’s father, whom her own children never knew. That’s why the kids wanted the dog to have his name — the revelations about her sex came later. Perhaps Cyril’s failure to get knocked up — despite being covered by the very spunky Jack Russell belonging to a local theatrical impresario — is a result of this masculine naming. I always make the point of calling her “Cyrille”, which everyone else thinks quite silly.

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I was walking with my friend Con the other day, when we fell into conversation about radiation. That has a nice lilt to it, doesn’t it? Anyway, I was saying how dreadful it is, that nowadays you can’t get a watch that glows properly in the dark, so paranoid is everyone about radiation. Con was assented to this, and told me how he’d been having dinner with an ancient uncle in Vienna, shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown, when the waiter told them the asparagus was off on account of the fallout on Austrian market gardens. It took quite a while for Con to get across to his valetudinarian relative that radiation was now generally considered to be toxic, because the uncle suddenly exclaimed: “When I was in the Urals, before the War, we used to have radiation baths for our health!”

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