Fiona Pitt-Kethley has published more than twenty books of prose and poetry.
Young men, like pups, can be somewhat unformed. Unless you’re certain of their pedigree, it’s hard to see how they’ll mature and grow. (Alsatians will fuck dachshunds now and then.)
A man who has some mileage on the clock in theory would be best. You know the worst – how much his hair is likely to recede, his face to fold, as ‘character’ comes out. (Furrows...
You’d get more protein from the average egg; the taste’s a tepid, watery nothingness – skimmed milk? weak coffee? puréed cucumber?
Fellation’s not a woman’s idea of fun. Just doing it as foreplay is OK. You kiss me, I’ll kiss you’s a quid pro quo – but carrying on until the buggers come – suck, suck, suck, suck for half a...
Lent is the time for cutting out what’s bad. I’ll give up going to bed with men who smoke, for that and other seasons of the year.
Is it the taste? That’s not too bad as long as I don’t put my tongue into their mouths. The tiredness of their skin? Their bloodshot eyes?
Is it the smell of fag-ash in my hair next day? Not really. That can be washed out.
Post-coital...
I don’t like visitors. I meet my friends in pubs where others do the washing-up. A dinner-party’s my idea of hell. (Guests come to criticise I’ve learned that much.)
All right – I compromise, and with a smile provide drinks, coffee and a home-made cake (when forced to it). But still I draw the line at full-blown meals – the planning’s difficult...
Back in my extra days, someone once swore she’d seen me in the latest James Bond film.
I tried to tell her that they only hired the really glamorous leggy types for that. (My usual casting was ‘a passer-by’.)
I’ve passed the lot in Pinewood Studios. It’s factory-like, grey aluminium, vast and always closed. Presumably that’s where they smash up all the...
There are really only two things people want to keep from public scrutiny: their real, private self; or the fact that they have no private self of any particular interest. Now, my instinctive...
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s favourite novel is a 16th-century Chinese work called Chin P’ing Mei. This book, she believes, was written as an act of vengeance. The author imbued each of the...
Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night: ...
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
Almost every woman I know has at one time or another been to bed with a man she shouldn’t have been to bed with – a married man, a friend’s man or, quite simply, a man who...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the...
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