‘Wandering the epidermal hillsides were you, little Keith?’ asked Hitch.
It was Claire’s hour, we were at The Pillars, and the Hitch was raking me over the coals about last night’s amorous fencing match. ‘Claire’s Hour’ was 11am, so called because by then only Claire Tomalin was left in the Statesman offices. Everyone else was at The Pillars.
We drank seriously, but rarely wrote drunk. Filing sloshed was considered professionally untidy, as it meant you hadn’t already filed your copy that morning.
‘Well?’
‘I may have. Wandering steps and slow though, Hitch. Still, you should have seen this one. Fragrant buttocks, searching eyes. Tits like a genocide.’
‘Naughty, libidinous, incorrigible little Keith.’ said Hitch, with his trademark, inimitable understatement. ‘You’d get on with my friends in Washington.’
‘Elaborate on the last, Hitch.’ I said, zipping my fly up on the way back from Cambodia. ‘Cambodia’ was the gent’s loo at The Pillars, so-called because, in Ian Hamilton’s heart-stopping phrase, it was ‘utterly fucked’.
‘Pen and paper at the ready, little Keith. A lesson. The Americans are tits men. The Germans, meanwhile, are all about the arse: fastidious hand-washers to your casual observer, they’re secretly fascinated with the stuff of decay. The French are the only pure pudenda-worshippers in modern geopolitics.’
