Speaking of second chances, I wonder if the delectable Paula Privilege is on the verge of deciding to award one to Holland. Does she regret ending their affair, and is she hoping that by attacking me, she might win him back? In a blog post two days ago, she described me as a “vile, shameless hack.” My crime? Making “needlessly personal and hurtful comments about the journalist Keiran Holland.” Notice her distancing use of “the journalist” rather than, say, “my ex-lover, who cast aside his wife for me, only to be ditched and left stranded.” Perhaps she would care to explain why it is “indefensible” that I should sneer at Holland in my column while it’s perfectly all right for her to discard him like a pus-stained plaster when the better option of a fling with an American movie director presents itself.

Paula, shall we ask Keiran Holland to tell us which of us has hurt him more? I see a pattern emerging here, old bean. Have you forgotten the time you lashed out at me for “maligning” your son’s “educational experience,” obliging me to point out that while I, a stranger, might have maligned it, you, the boy’s very own mother, had been actively sabotaging it over a period of years?

I don’t like to hurt people unnecessarily, but I do like the truth, apart from when it might get me into trouble. And I hate hypocrisy, always. Sometimes the truth stings. Horror writer Reuben Tasker took to his website last week to express his anger and sadness at my casual dismissal of his novel Craving and Aversion, winner of a Books Enhance Lives Award. Tasker made a fair point: I ought not to imply that his book is rubbish without having read it. I apologized in the comments beneath his blog post and promised to make up for my sloppiness by buying a copy. I have now read it. It’s rubbish: badly structured, pretentious and violent in the way that only a perverted author’s sexual fantasies tend to be. One central character has her “waist-hugging ropes of flaxen hair” cut off and stuffed into her vagina, for example, before the end of Chapter One. “Waist-hugging”? Does this woman’s hair grow downward from her scalp like traditional hair or horizontally from her stomach? It makes no sense that this novel won a prize, until we consider that one of the judges was Keiran Holland. How tragic that a man as judgmental as Holland should possess such poor judgment.

CHAPTER 4

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

DID MOST MEN HAVE female gatekeepers? Simon wondered. So far this morning on the Damon Blundy case, he’d interviewed a rabbi and a plastic surgeon, both of whom had been protected by a woman-barrier who would only let him through after a thorough interrogation—a wife in the rabbi’s case and a PA for the surgeon.