… If only I’d had £50.000 lying around doing nothing!

The annual Robert F Kennedy Memorial charity action ended just a few minutes ago, and some lucky woman (I’ll take bets that it’s a woman) won herself the right to a “featured extra, non-speaking role” in a scene with Johnny Depp in the upcoming movie ‘Public Enemies’, shooting in Chicago this month. They had other things on offer, but, well … who cares?

The interesting thing is that they grossly underestimated the likely interest in this particular item. I don’t know whose job it is to decide how much they think each lot is going to go for, but it surely can’t have been a red-blooded heterosexual woman, because they thought it might possibly make $20,000, which is a paltry £10,246 on today’s exchange rates, and with one minute to go, this auction stood at $91,000, which is just over £46,600. With bid increments standing at $5,000, the next bid would have had to be $96,001 (nearer to £49,000). The results aren’t available yet, but you can pretty much bet that there was a last minute flurry and I’d guess it probably hit $100,000 - but anyway, the very least it went for is $91,000. Or to put it another way, one hell of a lot more than £10,246.

I don’t know what the ‘featured non-speaking extra’ role will actually consist of, but it may well be nothing more than five minutes on set, at anything up to several hundred yards from the man himself, but with lots of free-boredom-while-you-wait thrown in for good measure, and maybe a little extra discomfort on the side, what with hanging around for hours in the blazing sun/pouring rain/howling tornadoes etc and not knowing where your next meal is coming from or when you get to go home.

So, I’m not jealous, then?

Oh, aren’t I? I’m about as green as the Devonshire Emerald. As green - or greener than - the badly named White’s Tree Frog, which is in fact, green. As green as E141, Windsor & Newton 483, and Pantone 357C all rolled into one.

So would I have paid large sums of money for the privilege of sharing a set with Johnny Depp for a few moments and maybe the opportunity to chat during the coffee break?

Ha! What do you think?

*Sigh*

‘You’ve abandoned me!’

The frantic wail wafted to my ears from the office. I was puzzled, because I was still sitting exactly where I’d been when Other Half had walked out of the lounge not two minutes earlier. I waited, and after a momet, his footsteps approached.

‘You’ve abandoned me!’ came again the plaintive cry. ‘I’m heartbroken!!!’

What on earth was the man talking about?

Turned out he was talking about dolls.

I had been sitting between him and Fred and now I’d been taken off to another location with Fred, leaving Other Half alone. Well, I hadn’t … the Doll me had. And Fred isn’t really here (sadly), just the Doll Fred. Confused? Let me explain.

A very good Depp friend of mine, who goes by the name of Heathrow for reasons I won’t go into here, took it into her head one day to make little caricature dolls of her friends, based on some cartoony drawings which another friend had done. They are really quite enchanting, and somehow, despite being cartoony, they really do seem to look like us. She is very talented.

So, then she made some caricature dolls of Johnny Depp characters for her most favoured friends, of whom I am honoured to be one. Normally, Me Doll sits next to Fred Abberline Doll on my desk, but we had spent a week with OH Doll - for he had been honoured with one too. Anyway, I was asked to take some photos so I’d moved them all around, and that’s what caused OH to have a little mini-meltdown.

Oh, sod it. Go read the story of the dolls over here - Yellow Swordfish tells it so much better than I do! But don’t get excited - Heathrow doesn’t take orders.

So, I’ve been using the iGallop, but to be honest, it’s not really like riding a flesh-and-blood horse, and in June we’ll be in Utah and Other Half has inexplicably decided to book us on a Red Canyon trail ride.

Now, I used to ride quite regularly, but over the last few decades my excursions on horseback have been few and far between and have usually resulted in a severe case of jelly legs on completion of said excursions. Not so long ago I’d have said ‘No bloody way am I going riding in the heat of the desert on a possibly rabid horse with triple E, where I might get bitten by a rattlesnake or at least die of heatstroke, but … well, you know … it’s the Depp effect in action again. I said ‘Fuck it, let’s do it!’ After all, Johnny himself has done the horse-riding thing in more than one movie, despite the fact that he is, as Tim Burton said once with a vague attempt at smothering his giggles, ‘not a horseman’. He appeared magnificently on a beautiful white steed in The Man Who Cried, briefly and splashed with mud in The Libertine, and most amusingly in Sleepy Hollow - after which he adopted his studio mount when he learned that it was probably going to be destroyed. He has, however, never to my knowledge worn a silk suit while riding a Gypsy Vanner across a field bareback, so it’ll come as no surprise to you all that I photoshopped the above picture using some of my own images.

But I digress. Back to my projected Red Canyon ride. I am not Johnny Depp, and neither (sadly) is OH, and we would not have stunt men standing at the ready to do the difficult bits, or lackeys to ply us with iced water in an air-conditioned trailer when it all got too much. And there was still the little jelly legs problem. I figured we’d be more able to enjoy the experience if we put in a little practice.

What to do?

After a little thought, I remembered that a while ago, our Village Advertiser ran an ad for a local stable which offered Western style riding lessons! Aha! The very thing! A few lessons prior to departure for the US of A might get me up to speed and offer OH a fighting chance of Not Falling Off, so I dug out the number, picked up the phone and rang to book some lessons.

‘Oh,’ said the young lady at the other end of the phone, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t do lessons anymore!’ and went on to offer me a part share in a ‘little horse’ which wasn’t at all what I had in mind and is actually a rather odd thing to suggest as a substitute for a few half hour riding lessons. Anyway, the young lady did suggest another establishment a little further away which also taught riding Western style, and I looked them up online.

Tomorrow. I’ll ring them tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll have some way of transferring two creaky old farts from ground level to five feet above it without ricking backs or dislocating anything, and I’ll be very interested to find out what it is.

Mmm. I’ll let you know how that goes, then.

Oh, how I laughed when I came across this little gem!

I was doing a little interweb browsing with ‘Depp’ in the Google search box, as you do, when I came across a long and very technical article about a new protein that some medical bods had discovered and named ‘Depp’. Now, it’s a long time since I did my nursing training, such as it was*, and my advanced biology has got a little rusty, but after perusing this piece with furrowed brow for some considerable time, and consulting with my friend Dar, the psych nurse, it seems that this particular gene is at least partly responsible for the uterine changes necessary for the successful implantation of the fertilised human egg.

Well, well, well.

I’ve known for a long time that Mr Depp does some serious remodelling of the female hormone profile, but it’s nice to get a little acknowledgement from the medical profession, huh?

There’s more. Hints in the titles of the related articles suggest that with a little more research, Depp may help our understanding of endometriosis. Possibly, women with endometriosis are suffering from a surfeit of Depp - and if that is so, all I can say is thank goodness I am not among those who need to cut down.

But steady on, there, ladies. Don’t all rush at once. Chances are your doctor won’t know WTF you’re talking about, and if he does, I’m willing to bet that neither type of Depp will be available on the NHS - more’s the pity.

*My nursing training was many years ago, and involved animals, but I think that the word ‘Depp’ in this article is an acronym from ‘Decidual protein induced by progesterone’.