Hello Kitty
Still, don’t those ladies who solaced everyone’s existence so much deserve better monuments than those prim joints (last orders 10pm, for God’s sake) named for their starry sisters, Kitty Fisher and Cora Pearl? Kitty was well known to Hogarth, but her great moment is surely the Joshua Reynolds portrait as Cleopatra at Kenwood, where she dangles a pearl over her chalice of vinegar.
Like one of those Renaissance pictures in which martyrs display their attributes — gridirons, flayed skin, all that — Kitty’s finger and thumb elegantly form the shape of her tu quoque in a pithy advertorial. Kitty was no singer, but Cora, in Second Empire Paris, did take part in the revival of Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in 1867, playing the role of Cupid and wearing a costume “qui commence bien au-dessus du genou pour se terminer bien au-dessous de la poitrine et se prête dans l’intervalle aux explorations les plus audacieuses …”
One of the striking features of Cora’s costume was that the soles of her boots were completely encrusted with diamonds. The performance appears to have been beneath contempt, but at least her breasts were described as “beyond reproach”.
Latest vexed discussions among my colleagues in the Russian embassy revolve around the question of how to address the beloved Rodina’s catastrophic decline, so astutely detailed by the latest MI6 C-creature Richard Moore earlier this year, noting that Russia is an “objectively declining power” and “an extremely challenged place”.
As we nibble at zakuski of Baikal sturgeon, Siberian tiger’s-eye soup (the rest of the beast is inedible and fed to the embassy wolves), bear black pudding and snow-leopard
pirozhki, ministered to by lovely “secretaries” in exiguous costumes made of that creature’s fur, sipping wines chilled in Caucasus snow, lighting our exquisite jade Turkestan opium pipes with thousand-petrorouble notes, we ask ourselves where, oh where did it all go so wrong?
Obviously the best way to counter this awful slump is to assiduously copy everything Britain does, so brilliantly successful ever since George Osborne’s days as Chancellor. We try to patch Vovik in on the hologrammatic plasma-reifaction interface (coincidentally also known as “vovik ”), our primitive version of your fabulous Zoom, but it turns out he’s indisposed, having one of his regular bloodswaps with a 16-year-old Belorussian virgin.