Ephraim Hardcastle

HAS playwright Sir John mortimer’s widow, Penny, 60, found a new life partner? Writing about a seven-night cruise to new York, she found many fellow passengers boring but there was one exception – David, a ‘70-something’ US urologist and fan of Sir John, who died in 2009 aged 85. Seeming smitten, Lady m writes in the oldie: ‘David said he’d had a case that might have interested John. He and another doctor had been in charge of sewing John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis back on.’ Unfaithful Bobbitt’s member was cut off by his wrathful wife, Lorena, in 1993, at their home in virginia. Lady m’s daughters, Emily, 46, and rosie, 33, hope she will hook up with David, but she warns: ‘I tell them I think it requires more than a famous penis re-attachment story to justify spending the rest of your life with someone.’ PADDINGTON 2, which opens in Israel at the weekend, is advertised on posters showing the movie character, pictured, with his favourite marmalade spread on matzahs, or unleavened flatbreads, to comply with rules during Passover, or Pesach. Isn’t life grand? DAVID Cameron and George osborne – ex-prime minister and ex-chancellor – provide an interesting post-political contrast. A carefree-looking osborne perched in a City-bound District Line Underground train, deeply absorbed in his mobile phone messages, this week, while a pensive, tracksuit-wearing Cameron – accompanied by two protection officers – strode into Kensington Gardens for his morning jog. Cheery George is busy with six jobs. Doleful Dave’s struggling to finish his memoirs. THE late cookery star Fanny Cradock, whose old shows are being resurrected by the BBC, saw her career go up in flames after a disastrous TV appearance with Esther Rantzen in 1976. They gave a Devon housewife the chance to prepare a banquet for former PM Edward Heath. Mrs Cradock ‘openly sneered’ and ‘pretended to retch’ at the Devon matron’s efforts. Miss Rantzen described their encounter as ‘Cruella de Vil meets Bambi’. HAVING retired as chairman of his oil company, Algy Cluff, 77, launching a second memoir, Unsung Heroes, muses that he’ll concentrate on writing: ‘I am now of an age at which it is unlikely that I shall win the military Cross, sail singlehanded across the Atlantic or sleep with Ava Gardner, although my father claimed that he nearly slept with her on one of the Atlantic crossings in the Queen Elizabeth in the Fifties. His problem being that my mother was also on board.’ EDINBURGH’S annual Easter Play marking the Passion of Christ breaks new ground by inventing a character called Anna, Judas’s mother. Actress Sally North explained: ‘I was playing a woman in the crowd, and decided I was Judas’ mother.’ The mothers of Jesus and Judas grieve together ‘in a modern spirit of inclusiveness’. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.