Truth is often stranger than fiction

Isabel Fonseca, the wife of Martin Amis, brings out her first novel next month. According to her publishers, Random House, it is “unflinching in its depiction of desire, of the responsibility that comes with age and family, and of the impulses that colour and disrupt our lives”.

It is also the story of a woman from New York who has a British husband that she does not trust, with whom she spends an extended sabatical in a remote tropical paradise. All of which leaves us wondering: where does Fonseca – who was born in New York, is married to the British Amis, and recently spent two and a half years living in Uruguay – get her ideas? “This isn’t a report from my life,” she tells the Mediabistro website. “Readers don’t care who you are, do they? They just read the book. It’s journalists who care about that stuff.” True.

News that the Queen may be considering making her first visit to the Republic of Ireland once devolution in Northern Ireland is complete (The Times, yesterday) raises interesting questions. Not least, where will she sleep? Dublin Castle does have a Royal Bedroom. The last dignitary to sleep there was Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980s.

Boriswatch. We hear that the Golden One, at a Wales in London dinner at the Lansdowne Club this week, spoke of that cigar case he took from the Baghdad home of Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s former Deputy PM. Also present, he said, was Elfyn Llwyd, of Plaid Cymru, who pocketed a piece of marble. The police, quipped Boris, seemed less interested in the Elfyn marbles.

Peep Show, Channel 4’s disgustingly funny sitcom starring the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, has won plaudits for its natural style. Not so natural to film, says David Mitchell.

“People are not actually filming with us,” he told us, at the Royal Television Society Awards at the Grosvenor. “They’re just talking into the camera. I think they feel like arseholes.” Bit weird.

The waxwork of Matt Damon at Madame Tussauds is to have a camera inserted into its eye, with his vision projected on to a screen. “It’s to tie in with his films,” says a spokesman, inexplicably. Anything else we should know about? “Oh yes. Jim Carrey. You speak, and your words come out of his mouth in different voices. A chipmunk, a Dalek and Barry White.” What?

Postscript

Writing with a purple crayon and in the style of a small child the MP Lembit Öpik (thb) contributes a poem, in his mildly bonkers way, to the Butterfly Book, a collection of images and writings by famous people to be sold in aid of the Claire Elizabeth Wadley Fund for Leukaemia Research. “You ask me about butterflies?” he asks, breathily. “Their wild, random path of flight, unpredictable from start to end, conceal a purpose to every drifting, marvellous and flap and flight. They are just like life.” Ah yes, indeed.

More poems, more embarassing politicians. The Bookseller notes that the publisher Parthian has gathered together 100 world leaders’ favourite poems for an anthology. Gordon Brown plumps for James Stockinger. Who? You might ask. He’s a sociology lecturer, who quoted John Donne in his lectures so much so that Gordon believed the academic was a poet. To spare Brown’s blushes, Parthian called Stockinger up and asked that he turn a bit of his doctoral thesis into verse, just to get Brown into the finished collection.

Van Morrisson has supposedly been booted out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas. Why? Food fight. He’s only 62.

“Dimbleby got buildings, Jonathan Crane got the coast and I got rivers,” Griff Rhys Jones tells us at the opening of the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. That means he’s about to do an epic BBC series on rivers.

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