Sally-Part 152. THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLES DANCE AND I FOR MY DAUGHTER GEMMA !

CHARLES AS WORSHIPPED BY SHIRLEY !

My daughter Gemma has suddenly changed and got her mojo back after seeing her first delivery now that she has started training as a midwife !

But enough about her !

Except that she made me an excellent cheese omelette today and I complimented her and told her that it was the best one I'd had since I visited Yugoslavia as a twenty year old !

"You went to Yugoslavia as a twenty year old ? You've kept that one quiet haven't you ? I never knew you'd been to Yugoslavia!" she continued somewhat repetitively.

Shirley explained to her that I'd been part of my College's Drama Group which had won a trip there thanks to The Sunday Times because we were so brilliant !

"And that's when I found my girlfriend in the arms of my fellow student Charles Dance when I opened the door to our old-fashioned railway compartment as we sped through Austria and I don't think that from what I saw that they were going over the script !" I snivelled pathetically, still full of self-pity over forty five years later !

AS HE APPEARS IN GAME OF THRONES . I DON'T THINK I HAVE ANYTHING TO WORRY ABOUT DO YOU ?

"Oh you shared a flat with him didn't you?" she asked without showing a moment's compassion for her father being cuckholded !

"No I didn't and I have never said I did!" I retorted, smarting from her lack of sympathy for me, "Charles once lent me his Jeep to move my stuff and we put on a two man and a woman play once which I only remember as a disaster because on the night my parents came to see it as I totally dried up at one point and blushed to my roots as nothing the prompt said very loudly from the wings made any sense or helped me get restarted until we had all returned to about ten lines before and leapt back in and just to show you that I am not alone in forgetting lines, ask your mother about the night she skipped a whole act in that play where she stomped across the stage in Jack Boots and really set the cast adrift !"

"Pardon me for pointing out that you were hardly a match for Charles Dance then and most certainly not now !" Shirley chipped in, equally dismissively. SHE fell for him when he was in Jewel In The Crown and wouldn't come out to dinner with us when he played Coriolanus in Newcastle twenty five years ago.

CHARLES AS I PREFER TO THINK OF HIM !

To those of you wondering why not, well she said, "When I have dinner with Charles Dance, YOU won't be there !"

Charles is really responsible for my not drinking now as my response to the heinous discovery and a lost girlfriend and my first real girlfriend at that and the one to whom I lost something irrecoverable and somewhat later in life than now seems believable, was to go and get myself blind drunk on Slibervitz which burnt my stomach and has made me pretty much intolerant towards alcohol ever since !

WE hadn't been friends at college and we hadn't remained in touch as he climbed the ladder to international acclaim and it was me who got in touch with him when I read that he was coming up to Newcastle . He wrote back saying something like,"Ah there you are Nashy ! Come round to the Stage Door after market and we'll sort out a meal after the show one night." So wringing wet after a day of steady rain and wearing a ridiculous pale lilac totally unwaterproof ski suit I duly turned up at the door to be looked down upon by a man reading The Sunday Sun as if I was a rather smelly drowned rat and who snorted with disbelief when I told him that I was a friend of the Star and would like to see him !

He slowly folded his paper whilst staring fixedly at this time waster, climbed down from his stool and clenching a roll-up in his gritted teeth limped resentfully away into the depths of the Theatre Royal.

He returned rather promptly, virtually grovelling and beseeching me to follow him as he walked backwards bowing before showing me humbly into the hallowed presence !

Charles was sitting naked to the waist pulling weights and looking up cried, "DAYVIDE!" a little too dramatically for my liking and proffered a hand backside up, for kissing I presumed !

"Oi Charles ! It's me not one of your Luvvies and I'm dying for a pee!" I said crossing his dressing room once I'd seen his private facilities and leaving a trail of mud across his plush carpet !

Anyway, the play was awful and the dinner equally so because he had an old female acquantance fawning over him, the two of them making it abundantly clear that I was not welcome and we parted company, never to meet again....except ONCE many years later....sort of....when I heard his voice in a Cornish town where he was directing a film and although he didn't spot me as he lavished bon mots on some sycophantic doters, I spotted HIM and said to Shirley, "There's Charles Dance, would you like to meet him ?" to which she replied, as he walked away from us,"NO because that BALD man is NOT Charles Dance !"

But it was !