Interview

I am standing in the King's Road, Chelsea, with noted author and television presenter David Baddiel and his sometime creative partner Frank Skinner. Frank and I are conducting an impromptu interview with David, who is late for something or other. I am simultaneously Handycamming the meeting and attempting -- with variable success -- to hold a boom mike on a fibreglass pole over their heads. I'm being encouraged to chime in to the conversation when I have something to say. "Just watch how loudly you talk, you'll overload the mike," cautions the helpful Mr Baddiel, who is wearing a black leather jacket and a Radiohead t-shirt.

For some reason David -- who does not hold a driving license and has no prior experience of intercontinental navigation -- is preparing to participate with a driver he simply refers to as "José" in the Paris-Dakar Rally, the longest and most serious desert race for motorbikes and touring cars in the history of organised sports.

Somehow this is not challenged by the infamously trenchant Mr Skinner nor myself, although we have to stop filming for around five minutes whilst an elderly man pushing a pretzel cart -- pretzels do not exist as snack food in London and one cannot help but notice that the sign on the cart is somewhat mislettered -- wanders on past hollering in some unidentifiable language.

The interview winds up with Mr Baddiel producing an immense length of blue velour fabric which he wraps around his head into a considerable, heaped, formless impersonation of a turban, with one end of the fabric still tucked inside his jacket. As a parting gift, he also provides one of these garments for me, apparently producing the fabric from his shirt pocket and cutting the final length with a dainty pair of nail scissors. It is unbelievably heavy and I am very nearly immobilised, but otherwise too polite to shrug it off. With an indistinct but dire-sounding warning about taking the assemblage off before midnight, Messrs Skinner and Baddiel promptly bugger off down towards the Groucho, and not without some courtesy, leaving me standing in the Kings Road struggling with a videocamera, boommike, portable DAT record, and a goddamned unbelievably heavy turban. Which is purple.

(In spite of this humiliation, I was quite angry when I woke up and couldn't carry on dreaming. I was probably just about to get promoted.)