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Robert’s major claim to fame is his privilege in having attended school with that doyen of English cricket writers,
The Times
correspondent, John ‘Wooders’ Woodcock. It is, nevertheless, also true that the Cabinet Secretary is generally held, in international diplomatic circles, to be one of the coolest customers ever to don a three-piece pin-striped suit and bowler and brolly. It was therefore all the more flabbergasting when we read here in Australia that Sir Robert had been moved to slug a photographer at Heathrow Airport prior to his departure for Sydney.
Slug a photographer
? Sean Penn, probably. A Frank Sinatra gorilla, perhaps. But the head of the British Civil Service? It seemed as likely as Malcolm Fraser losing his trousers . . .
    The saga of the ex-prime minister’s pants was not, however, to dog my promotional tour steps in Melbourne. My last book,
Another Bloody Tour
, an account of England’s disastrous 1986 tour to the West Indies, had just arrived here, and was creating quite a stir, especially amongst the male-chauvinist misogynist-journalists who prefer to pontificate about it rather than actually
read
it. I have definitely come to the conclusion, especially in the male-dominated arena of cricket, that it is not
what
you write that certain people object to, but the fact that,
as a woman
, you wrote it
at all.
    The first engagement in Melbourne was an interview with Channel 10’s Gordon Elliot, on
Good Morning Australia.
It is the equivalent of our Breakfast TV, and took place in the open air, outside a large department store, Myer’s, in a shopping mall.
    ‘You were awful,’ said Phil supportively that night when I phoned him.
    The next day the producer rang up and offered me a contract.
    Another guest on
Good Morning Australia
that day was Melbourne society queen Lillian Frank. Lillian is a large, extrovert, extremely attractive lady, who goes in for a lot of brilliantly outrageous hats and clothes, and speaks with an indefinable Mitteleuropean accent. I warmed to her immediately. She reminded me of an interpreter friend of mine in Brussels.
    I think it was John Dryden who wrote in his poem ‘Absalom and Achitophel’:
     
    Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
    And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
     
    Sadly I cannot check this out as I write. Few of the cricket correspondents have brought their
Complete Works of Dryden
with them. Anyway, this interpreter chum of mine definitely oscillates in that vague critical zone between outright genius and downright bonkers. She speaks seven different languages with absolute fluency, all assimilated, presumably transcutaneously, from her seven different ‘husbands’, and she too operates in that same sort of indefinable accent, which I find so endearing. I remember interpreting a long time ago at a Council of Agricultural Ministers in Brussels – so long ago I think it was even in the days before popes were being sponsored by beer companies – and it was very late at night. It was one of those annual EEC agricultural price-fixing marathons that often used to go on for twenty-four hours at a stretch. (They subsequently became much snappier, when some Calvinistic Dutch president banned booze from the conference room. Nothing quite focuses the average political mind like the prospect of an alcohol-free twenty-four hour agricultural price-fixing session.)
    Anyway, the proceedings were moving painfully towards the usual compromise-style denouement. At such precarious junctures, the President-in-Office of the Council generally clears the room of the inevitable congregation of minor luminaries, leaving the ministers alone with their senior advisors, (usually the permanent representatives in Brussels) to wrangle over the last few European currency units.
    ‘
Seuls les ministres, et
un
adjoint
,’ ordered the President, trying to pare down numbers to an absolute minimum.
    ‘Only the ministers and one . . . only the ministers and one . . . only