to clarify) in order to get it properly set for free by Frog specialists. Or was it a case of getting some sort of Social Security compensation? I never knew.

We met at the hospital and brother Y proved very toothsome and - of course - immobilised by his plaster. He shared a room with an old man who was sedated and mostly asleep. O announced that he was leaving on a trip to Tunis (to drive a car there and sell it for profit), and he’d be grateful if I would please take care (wink! wink!) of Y. But of course!

On my second visit, while the neighbour was just about awake, Y dragged my hand under the blanket for mini-nookies (unconsummated, as far as I knew). Shortly after that visit he had a pass for a day out and I picked him up and pandered to his greed by taking him to the Migros (not Patek Phillipe, please note) in Geneva to buy him a cheap watch.

Once home, he requested a shower and disappeared to the bathroom, with his plaster cast. Eventually he called me to come and dry him, which I did with pleasure. Then he announced that he was very tired and would like to lie down. So of course I joined him. So he screwed me. How many more brothers were there?, I asked myself.

Y did ask me if I had ever screwed with O and I swore blind that I hadn’t. Likewise when O returned from Tunis and put a similar question to me about Y, I also denied it. I am sure that they know, and perhaps they even discuss you between them, but it’s a point of honour not that you should not let the other one know. And it may therefore have been a test question for me to see how discreet I was.

The next event was a bizarre thing, which happened while O was once again back in Tunis. Letters, increasingly pleading, started coming from his father, begging me to send a certain sum (of the order of SFr500, I think; possibly less) to get O out of chokey. Why he was IN chokey was never mentioned. I saw this as a sophisticated way of getting money out of me, aka blackmail, and was very uneasy about it.

Eventually I wrote to a chum who was First Secretary at the Belgian Embassy in Tunis.

(Now his dinner parties at La Marsa, in which I participated while staying with him during my first ever visit to Tunisia, were something else. We played “spin the bottle” with numerous young Tunisian lads - from the nearby town which had been the home of the Bey of Tunis, before pairing off and retiring to our respective bedrooms.)

I asked my diplomat chum if there was any way he could establish the fundamental truths of this matter. He kindly sent a friend (non-Embassy. otherwise it could have been embarrassing) to visit O, who was indeed in prison, apparently over a car accident in which someone had been injured. Same embassy chum, from previous experience with his own paramours, was able to assure me that paying to get out was normal practice. So I sent the lolly via the chum (rather than directly to parents, who might just have spent it on extra couscous), O was released, and was very loving when he returned to Europe.

Trouble was, he’d given in to parental pressure, got married to an ugly breeding cow, settled in Paris