DEAR FATHER DEAR FATHER.

Bloggers all seem so surreal. Do people really exist? Could I pinch them? Something about the internet is still so far fetched for me that when I meet a fellow blogger I want to test them to see if they are alive.
Last night, I had a most delicious dinner cooked and given by Julie Anne Rhodes, Nick Rhodes' ex-wife - Duran Duran blah blah - who, I can report, definitely exists, lives in West Hollywood and writes a blog that you can easily follow. Her house has a Snow White feel to it, with large leopard skin chairs and beautiful paintings. (She obviously loves leopard big time, and had some very camp chairs dotted around the place.) Meanwhile, her aubergine dining room looked so cosy as the back drop to her home-made food. We started with an asparagus soup and ended with quite the most delicious fat-free, gluten-free cheesecake ever. Conversation was Hollywood and the Kabbala followed by wonderful ghost stories from a friend of hers, whose house had been haunted.
I know all about being haunted. A few years back, my late father arrived, his ashes in a box, from the States. As I hadn't lived with him, I wanted them near me. However, my housekeepers told me he was haunting the house - and I told them they were mad. Then, one morning I'm listening to a CD of my son singing, go downstairs to change it and find that what is playing is the Verdi Requiem. But Charlie was singing Mozart only a few minutes before! So I go upstairs and the same thing happens again. Again I go downstairs, and I think I'm going to go mad. I ring the housekeepers and they say: 'We told you, your father is haunting the house.' So I go to Julie Laverne, the friendly witch, and ask her to get rid of him. She comes over and says: 'Go up to the box with your father's ashes, hit it and say, "If you don't be quiet, we'll scatter you down the street".' And do you know, I never heard anything again.
As for blogging, I think my father, Anthony Cave Brown, would approve. He was an old-school Cold War writer, when there was fear in the world - which he delighted exporting through the newspapers. Well I am here exporting love through blogs. Farewell, father, dear father.