On Desperate Times

On Desperate Times

This is the B3TA Question of the Week. I am not ashamed in the slightest.

Stranded in a hotel in an African war zone with no internet access and no pay TV for the best part of two weeks, I was forced to resort to desperate measures of the kind that no sane man should stoop.

After a set of circumstances too bizarre to enter into on these pages, I found myself in a Brazzaville hotel with nobody but heavily-armed goons for company, and no planes anywhere until the following Friday.

Possessing only my passport and the clothes I stood up in; and the warning of my boss still ringing in my ears ("You can catch it shaking hands with a vicar out there") I had to draw my own porn in order to preserve my sanity.

Alas, it all came out looking like Coronation Street's Audrey Roberts, only with evil, gimlet eyes, breasts the size of cantaloupes and a nadger that looked like a small dog nestling in her lap. But - as they say - any port in a storm, and eye-bleach was in short supply.

Petrified that the hotel cleaners would discover my heavy-breasted sketches and hand me over to the local militia for a good, hard mocking, I would rip up each and every page on a daily basis and flush my work down the toilet.

I was in therapy for months after I came back. I never mentioned Audrey.