Monday 15th July 2013

Matt Driver’s 54th birthday: we’re having crab, followed by moules marinières and chips. Matt has done so much for chips over the years, giving huge thrust to the oven chip movement in the early 80s. He put oven chips on the map. We’ve just got to the bit where Roberts returns to Eaton Place, still dripping wet after going down in the Titanic. But Lady Margery, of course, is lost. So after dinner, it’ll on with Up-Down on DVD.

Meanwhile in a remote mountain eyrie of Bulgaria, Robert Nevil has teamed up with the most fancified of the orphans – Dennis, who puts on a great performance whenever a cow pisses in the street, which happens often because the village people keep cattle on their ground floors who self-wend back to their byres at  each day’s close, and Saskia, who loves hairbrushes and stationery. The drama this year  is Le Petit Prince, but a Bollywood element is now de rigueur after the howling success of the Bollywood presentation a few years ago. So Dennis did a whirling dance with neck-wrenching. Saskia displayed a selection of Bollywood coiffures. More of the parents came (they’re not really orphans, you see;  the families are too large) and some even took their children home for the rest of the holidays.

Things are getting better for the orphans as a result of Poor Little Rich Gay intervention and the EU. Now Bulgaria is in the EU, standards have got to improve.

Yesterday there was a bus outing for the orphans. Robert Nevil showed up with a packet of yellow cheese crisps for added jollity and was last seen retching on board after eating one himself.

Robert Nevil’s current whereabouts are unknown.