Next Monday

Here is BBT/me again, having just said or done something that doesn’t entirely meet with James Gandolfini’s approval. There’s a difference, though: Billy Bob Thornton holds his cigarette in his right hand, I hold mine in my left. A detail, but it counts. It’s how you can tell us apart. As the wonderful John Berger wrote about Morandi: ‘That he was left-handed is, I feel, important, but I do not know why.’ If BBT was left-handed perhaps he’d still be together with Angelina.

Anyway . . . Next Monday, 4 August, is the official publication date of the Bloomsbury edition of Jennie’s 24 for 3, and though exact dates of publication are pretty meaningless (the book is already on sale, has been reviewed on radio), in this case it will be worth opening a bottle because – as well as being the anniversary of the day Britain entered the First World War, and of the last day alive of Marilyn Monroe, and an oddly significant date in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (Leonora’s birth, marriage, suicide) – it is BBT’s birthday.