Gentlemen farmers spend their time drinking at lunchtime, butchering wildlife, riding in point-to-points and swapping wives. At hunt balls, one glass of bubbly turns them as scarlet as their coats, and soon every cordoned off fourposter is heaving with occupants.



ACTORS

Actors, unlike farmers, get up very late, and go to bed after midnight, unless they are getting up at the crack of dawn to play in some film. As a race, they’re inclined to be surprisingly insecure, self-obsessed, only interested in talking shop, and finding out whether Quentin was perfectly frightful at Bristol.

Actors like to make love in front of a looking glass so they can admire their own performance, or with the television on, so they can see how ‘perfectly frightfully’ all their friends are acting. If they keep their socks on, they’re either a blue movie star or terrified of getting foot rot.

On the credit side, they are marvellous at playing out one’s fantasies, whether you want them to dress up as a sadistic schoolmaster, a vicar, or a gentleman farmer.




MUSICIANS

Musicians dress very badly, sometimes suffer from Hallé Orchestra and enjoy playing the eternal triangle. Singers however have the most marvellous breath control and can kiss for at least ten minutes without stopping. Trumpeters and any player of woodwind instruments are also very good at kissing, having such mobile lips. Violinists have very versatile left hands—I really dig that double stopping.

Conductors have superb timing: anyone who conducts a whole orchestra shouldn’t have much trouble conducting an affaire.

If a man keeps boasting: “Look no hands,” while making love to you, he’s probably a concert pianist or a brain surgeon and frightened of losing his no-claim bonus.


WRITERS

Writers are alleged to write about it better than do it. Certainly they always regard you as copy, and if you make a bon mot while they’re making love to you, they’ll leap off you and rush away to find a pen and write it down.

However, it is nice to get sonnets from time to time. They also write wonderful letters, which are absolute hell to answer, not much about oneself and full of all those fragments from Donne and Marvell.

One writer I know has an unnerving habit of taking two extra copies of all his love letters, one for himself, the other for the British Museum.



PAINTERS

Painters dress well, and have very nice handwriting. But don’t be fooled by that line about only seeing you as a beautiful form not as a sexual object. It’s the easiest way I know to get a woman to remove her clothes.

I think on the whole those involved in the arts make the best lovers, for they have more imagination, more ability to cater for your fantasies, and a bigger repertoire. Most of them have a kind of feline, slightly feminine mind—pure heaven from start to fetish. But don’t expect fidelity. Art has very little to do with morals.



ADVERTISING MEN

Most of their time is spent making presentations or discussing whether they should insert their eight-inch single column more than three times a week. They dress very well, if somewhat uniformly—navy blue suit, pink shirt—and are generally doused in free sample scent. When you meet them at parties, they say: “Actually I’m in advertising,” in a very apologetic way, because au fond they feel they ought to get out and do something worth-while like writing unprofitably, or painting unsellably. Nearly all of them have unsold novels in their bottom drawers and most of them live in Fulham. They have hearts with natural breaks in them.


Stages of Man


NOW LEAVING THE professions we move on to some of the stages of man.



YOUTHS (See Schoolboys or Students)

“But of course there’s nothing wrong with you, Adrian darling—I just can’t stand red hair …”