There was a big response to the thank you letter I wrote to the wonderful David Bowie for lending me his house on Mustique. Here is another Doreen letter. A fax this time, thanking him for a Mediterranean cruise which he took us on with Iman, where we had a lot of laughs.

A Fax: To David

From: Eric, Tania and Doreen.

July 1991

      The chip pan hasn’t stopped frying once since we got back, Doreen has been that keen to take away the taste of all that mucky foreign food she’s sure we ate while we were abroad. “In foreign parts” Doreen calls it, with more than a trace of single-entendre. Mike was a Gourmet chef we told her but Doreen only snorted contemptuously and said Eydie Gorme was a singer and couldn’t cook to save a lobsters life. So its been beans, beans, beans,fry ups, bacon butties and chips with everything since notre retour.

      The snaps of the cruise came back from the Chemists and Doreen thinks Captain Jeff is a dish. What a hunk! He reminds her of an old boyfriend from Redditch, a motorcycle mechanic who was the fastest thing on a saddle, before being sadly crushed at a Slade Concert, in a sudden rush for the doors. Simon, she thought, an absolute treasure.

“If lips could talk I bet there’d be a volume in those.”

But the two girls worried her.

 “Girls at sea are so susceptible to sailors” said Doreen.
  “I know I was. And that was just in Birmingham, without all that rolling around on water.”    

Natasha, the English one, looked “a bit too nice”, and Doreen knows how fast nice girls can turn when in port, (or in sherry). As for the other girl, Eva, “Well” as Doreen put it delicately, “She’s not only foreign she’s a Dane, and look what Danish girls did to Hamlet. One went bonkers and the other was his mother!”

She’s had a soft spot for Hamlet ever since little Mel Gibson played the big Scandinavian schizophrenic with the heart of gold for that nice Italian gentleman, Signor Whatsirelli, as Doreen calls him. 

      She also liked the hunk below stairs, the blond boy from the Navy. She likes engineers, “they’re very good with their hands, and I bet he’s seen a porthole or two. So who’s the cuddly balding little feller?”

  “That’s Richard” I said,

“Uhm looks like Dick to me” she remarked obliquely.

And when I told her he was the mate, she said she wouldn’t mind mating with him any day; or the little dishy one, who looked like a young Gary Lineker. Such a nice boy, with a great pair of thighs.

“I bet he has natural ball sense.”

“Neil,” I said.

“I’d kneel any day” she said pouring another glass of Vino Huddersfield, on special offer from Tescos, with a label design by Prince Charles in aid of Save the Soviet Whales from Aids Trust. She wondered if the crew would like a nice pin-up of her for their quarters – she knows how sailors get.

“I was for a while Miss Redditch” she said.

And who, after all would miss Redditch?

    Doreen knows a thing or two when it comes to sailors. “I’ve had them up to here,” she said mystifyingly touching her armpits. In fact lets face it, she’s cruised Birmingham from top to bottom in her better days as one of the most popular Hotel Receptionists in the Midlands and also claims that when she was a Nurse she took part in one of the greatest ever Naval Operations of all time, at the Selly Oak Hospital, when Lt. Commander Ronson became Mrs Janet Twigge. Doreen claims to have held the scissors, and swears there is a video of the whole operation. But you can only get it if you sleep with Richard Branson, so that’s out.

      David she thinks looks far too thin, and as for that Somalian girl, well stand her sideways and you won’t know she’s there. Thin as a Polish couture rail. So she has offered to turn that pastry cook off the boat and come over for a couple of weeks of good old honest to God English puddings, spotted dick, jam roly-poly, semolina and toad in the hole, which Doreen swears she does as a “an after” with pineapple chunks to give it that Hawaiian flavour. She found the recipe in a copy of Yes Mum, her favourite magazine which is mainly pictures of the Queen Mum, knitting patterns and recipes for Gin pudding.

      She thinks she could do something with the boat, but honestly it’s going to take a lot of work. The decor is a disgrace in her view. There’s not a bit of dayglo on the ship and “you can’t have a cruise without raffia.” She would like to do the whole thing over again from stem to stern (and that Captain too given half a chance). She’d like to choose a motif for each floor, one layer orange, the next floor pink, the next Thames mud etc and use some really exciting vibrant materials to cheer up the place – she wonders if you like plaid, because they have some exciting new tartans coming out of Milton Keynes designed by the Duchess of York for Lyn Wyatt’s nouvelle Texan Palace and they look really great on a wall with antelope heads or zebra skin rugs. She also has her eye on some linoleum flooring which would replace that boring white carpeting that she says is so passé. Looks like a toilet paper commercial in her view.

“All that’s missing is the fluffy dog and the Andrex.”

Well you know our Doreen, how she gets after a couple of Babycham. She turned up her nose at the French champagne we bought at the airport at only seven times the normal price. Really they are bandits at the airport. I was compelled to pay ten pounds to use the toilet by a fat sweaty woman of middle-eastern origin, who was growing enough hair under her armpits to fill a duvet – I had nothing smaller and I was bursting. When I asked for some change she pretended not to speak a word of English. I ask you, and running a foreign toilet.

      Well David dear I must close, there has been a major pile up at Spaghetti junction – so must dash. Doreen wants some pictures. She’s doing a talk for the WI on Horrible Deaths, part of her work with the abled to help them cope with life.

      Next year Doreen suggests you take a nice English holiday for a change instead of always dabbling in foreign parts. “What’s wrong with Skegness for a couple of weeks? Or even Rhyll if you must go abroad?”

      She sends her love and suggests that your album cover would look great if only you’d put a nice pair of Y-fronts on that Greek boy. Some things are better left to the imagination she says…

           Love to all as ever,

Eric, Tania & of course Doreen.

 

 

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