Bridget‘s back in town, briefly returned from the Italy she now calls home in order to manage some photoshoots to illustrate a book upon which she is working.

There now follows an extract from our evening’s conversation back in her supposedly four-star hotel room, after a decidedly mediocre-to-poor hotel meal and our respective glasses of cranberry juice and white wine:

• Bridget: …and in the evenings there’s nothing on TV except porn; it’s terrible!
• Alec: Oh really?
• B: Oh yes, it’s just all so boooooooring.
• A: [slight, near-disbelieving pause] … mmm-boring?
• B: Just last week there was this girl, naked, just writhing around on a sofa, not doing anything much, and the carpet in front of her was, y’know, covered in dirt, and dust balls.
• A: … “dust bunnies” …
• B: Very grubby. The music’s OK, though.
• A: What, “porn music”?[1]
• B: No no; Eminem and all sorts of stuff. It’s much better than what’s on the radio.
• A: Let me make sure I have this correct: you regularly watch Italian softcore lesbian pornography, just for the music?
• B: Yes!
• A: And your main complaint is regarding the dust on the set carpet?
• B: Yes.
• A: So much for an Irish Catholic upbringing. Given the filth, are these amateurs or something? They send the tapes in from home?
• B: No, you can phone them up. Men call them up and are like “Oh, hi, it’s so nice to meet you” and you can hear them “at it” in the background.
• A: There’s an idea. You should do that, you know.
• B: What?
• A: Phone them up mid-show and complain about the state of their housekeeping. It’d be surreal.
• B: The only other thing to watch is the Tarot-Card channel. Nation full of catholics and still they’re all superstitious. “Will my son get a job?”
• A: And they turn over the Death card, and say “Has he considered a career in Agriculture?”

The discussion thence ranged freely back and forth between relationships, sex, colleagues, politics, Geocaching, and how best to Photoshop two dogs.

—
[1] Note to non-IT-people: “porn music” is the ubiquitous term used to describe the “hold” music utilised by every major conference-call provider known to the corporate world. Somewhere there must be a music studio thats turns-out ream after ream of such aural fluff.

They probably do ringtones, too.