One set of parents lived in New York. The other set in San Francisco. So who would the young couple spend Christmas with? This was NOT my type of film and when the girl tricked the boy into flying to Seattle, which looked like a medieval Trumpton, I turned to my companion and said “who is sponsoring this rubbish, the American Tourist Board?”. There was a ‘funny’ scene involving pretty salads and I was carrying the one with yellow peppers out of the utilities room and worrying about whether to dress it here or at the table.

When Rousse and I went to the salon, there was a body under a sheet in the corner and we turned to each other and said “guess we won’t be getting our hair done today then”.

I mocked the test by ignoring the paper and acting up. The television screens on the walls were showing people failing to answer questions on quiz shows while the paper offered bizarre mulitiple choice options: “this woman is a) both unable to speak coherently AND giving the incorrect answer or b)….” I skipped the section on Logic and went straight to the London section. That should be easy. Someone said, knowingly, “Oh, these questions were set by the printer you know” and everyone went “Ah” as if that explained everything. The section on London was just a sequence of photographs. One was of three or four women pleading with a police officer not to let the doctors innoculate their children.

Sitting outside in the beautiful sunshine I was resting from a show rehearsal when a big grey hairy dog walking past stuck his tongue out and in a swift movement removed the chewing gum from my mouth. His owner and I had to prise open his jaws to retrieve it.