JUDGE NOT, LEST YE BE JUDGED

La nostalgie de la boue?

I was making my bed yesterday, planning what I was going to do with my long weekend, having narrowly escaped from a potential nasty flu, when SNAP! My back went. I am now hobbling around my bijou apartment in great pain. Someone suggested I lie down on the floor, but I daren't in case I can't get up again. I had been scornfully criticizing the Brussels conference flavour of the month, MSDs, or musculo-skeletal disorders, bad back to you Vera (she's not good on medical terminology), and now here I am struck down. I assure you it is causing me no small amount of discomfort to sit here and address my subjects. Are there any osteopaths out there?

Visitors to this blog have been a bit thin on the ground lately. This could be because I cast nasturtiums upon blogging in a recent blog post. It's IRONY, stoopid!! It might also be because I appeared to have deleted my blogroll. The reason was that I decided to update it, and inadvertantly posted it back in white font on a white background. Thanks to a slightly scathing remark by Peter of Naked Blog I noticed the error and have now rectified this problem, got rid of some dead wood and have added a few new names, but my favourites remain (yes that includes you, Peter). If you feel you have been unjustly (or accidentally) deleted and would like to feature on the blogroll of the world-renowned Daphne (visits currently running at 33 per day), please make a formal application via the appropriate channels.

Or perhaps it is my subject matter. I appreciate that my jet-setting lifestyle may elicit a fair amount of envy. Travelling all over Europe as third triangle with the Kurt Nachtnebel Oompah Band (K.N.O.B.) or strolling along the leafy boulevards of Brussels eating chips go hand in hand with a life of a privileged globetrotter. But I must remind my readers seething with jealousy that it was not ever thus.

I am a gel who worked her way up to where she is now. I studied hard at school, had a Saturday job, and married well. Many people think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth because I first saw the light of day in the Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner. Now that Harold has passed on and I no longer have to keep up the pretence of being a high-born lady, I can reveal to you that my mother was a modest waitress. I was born in the pantry while she was serving dinner to Lord McMilky and his party. I arrived between the main course and dessert, which is why my middle name is Pavlova. It could have been worse. The Duchess of Bridport's favourite dessert was Spotted Dick.

As a child I helped in the kitchens of the hotel as a lowly kitchenmaid, bossed around mercilessly by two ugly sisters. But I had a talent for entertaining. I danced like Marlene Dietrich, and I sang like Zizi Jeanmaire. One day, while polishing a silver gravy boat, there was a puff of smoke and a lovely fairy godmother appeared, brandishing a Eurostar ticket. "Go to Paris, Daphne, and seek your fortune!" she told me in a voice that tinkled like stardust and a strangely false French accent.

I duly arrived in Paris shod in my ruby slippers, and headed on pointes down the Rue de la Brique Jaune towards the Opera to start my career as a petit rat. Sadly, there was a strike that day and I had to take a job as cloakroom attendant at the Chat Qui Pue, a revue bar on the left bank. Thanks to my beauty and youth I was adopted by a friend of Sacha Distel, and before I knew it I was keeping my Rolling Stones records on the Boulevard Saint Michel. Yes I did.


But when I was alone in my bed, I was plagued by the words of a god-awful song by some moustachioed Englishman strumming a guitar badly. I started to have my clothes made by Balmain, and put diamonds and pearls in my hair. I went to Juan-les-Pins for my summer vacation and got an even suntan. The Aga Khan sent me a racehorse for Christmas and I kept it just for fun, for a laugh. Damn thing ate me out of house and home, and never won a race.


The glamorous lifestyle couldn't last. Before long I was ruined and living in a council flat in Clichy, forced to find work as a chambermaid in the Ibis hotel at Porte de St Ouen. That maudlin song was still going around in my head: "Where do you go to, my lovely ..." I prayed for another song, any song, to knock it off the no.1 slot in my mind. And then, one day, I heard a guest at the hotel whistling a catchy tune. It was jaunty, upbeat, and I found myself humming it as I hoovered the threadbare carpets. When I sang it to Boutons, the bell-boy, he identified it as the theme from "Match of the Day".

Reader, I married him. The whistler, that is, not Boutons. Harold, my dear late husband, lifted me out of the gutter and drove me away in a pumpkin-coloured Ford Fiesta. He introduced me to a glittering world of Ferrero Rochers and diplomatic skullduggery. When he passed on two years ago I once more had to fall back on my own resourcefulness and paddle my own canoe. Within two years I have worked my way back up to the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. Well I have a new set of Rolling Stones records, that's a start.

My story is an salutory tale. What goes up can come down. The wheel turns. When I see a homeless person in the metro, I think "There but for the grace of God ..." and I give them a signed photograph of myself in my dancing days. They can barely express their gratitude.