Barry Humphries

As I approach a worrying age (don’t ask!) where everyone — as in this morning’s obituary page of the New York Times — is younger than me, a terrible thing has happened. An American fan has told me that she went to Madame Tussauds in London recently, with the intention of being photographed next to the effigy of Dame Edna, only to find that Edna wasn’t there any more. This information depressed me even more than the recent Washington inauguration of the blinking frog. When my client Dame Edna was first installed at Madame Tussauds about a quarter of a century ago, I was keen to know who had been melted down to create her, and I think they told me that it was partly a 1970s pop group called The Y-Fronts, and most of Mandy Rice-Davies.

New York In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a ‘reading’ from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I can’t resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future.

I keep forgetting where I am. A different American city every week makes it hard to remember where the light switch is on the bedside table. Is it up or down, do you push it or twiddle it or is it connected to a more complicated system that you have to get out of bed to operate? The ‘turn-down service’ also seems to be a turn-on service: that’s to say, you come home from the theatre to music, or ‘Mozak’, leaking into the room from an invisible source. Finding where it’s coming from reminds me of the old days, looking for the bug in Prague hotel rooms, but it’s not so much fun. Stopping the music, or calling for someone to stop it, usually takes about half an hour.