Book 2, Chapter 37

As I approached them Jean Luc stood, pulled out a chair and beckoned me to take a seat at their table. It was clearly a windup! I checked the seat for traps, lowered my backside gingerly in anticipation of the chair being snatched away, then grabbed it firmly as I sat. There was a clean glass in front of me which Jean Luc filled with a Frascatti wine chosen I guess to complement the basket of scampi on the table. Looking across at the bar my friends were clearly not seeing me in a way reminiscent of not noticing the elephant in the room.

"Who do you want me to kill?"

"I don't want you to kill anyone yet but would you be up for a trip to to Greenwich with your sextant? There is a documentary being made on navigation from early man on the African Savannah to ships and maybe soon cars steered by autopilots that get their position from satellites. Cook's voyages were part of the development as were Harrison's chronometers which have been in the news thanks to the movie Longitude. Cook took a chronometer on his second but not his first voyage; the Americans have just made accurate GPS available to the public and you will have a GPS unit on Dumblebit, plus you can use a sextant. You're a natural for it!"

"From that hodgepodge of facts I guess it hasn’t been written yet but you want to see it made?"

"Yes but before the writing is completed I would like a little more from you than you originally signed up for. I want you to present the whole program."

"A little more! You hired me as a link item, not a presenter. I'm an 18-year-old black girl while documentary presenters are middle-aged or even old white men! What makes you think I could possibly do it?"

"It's the 21st century Venus and the world is changing. The new breed of documentary presenter is likely to be a good-looking young woman with a doctorate. I just want to take that a step further and this is a unique opportunity to do that."

"You're the boss Litara. I'll try my hardest to do it if you think I can but I presume you don't want to film tonight so what brings Jean Luc here?"

"I was in England. There was no work this weekend so I thought I would be a tourist," offered Jean Luc by way of an explanation.

Butter wouldn't have melted in his mouth as he said it but I was getting better at reading his strange motives and that is when Evan crossed the room to stand beside Jean Luc, put his arm round Jean Luc's shoulders and kiss him on the lips!

I looked at the pair of them. I looked at Litara and Simon. I looked across to the bar where my friends stood and only then did I spot the giveaway, Philip was there and smiling…

"You rotten sods! You're here to watch the rugby!"

The place erupted. I'd been set up as Jean Luc's favourite dupe. "Stop fighting it Venus. We are going to make wonderful films together so just accept I understand you better than you understand yourself."

Is that true I wondered trying to bring my blushing under control. He knew how to push my buttons but did he understand what the buttons did? Why did he seem to enjoy embarrassing me?

Litara spent a few minutes explaining that in the new programme they wanted me to be an interested person that viewers could identify with rather than a teacher but soon I made my excuses and joined the rest of the gang who were talking about prospects for a September holiday on the island of Madeira. They knew the World Big Wave Surfing Championship had been held there in February and earlier Litara had suggested that her travel arranger could get the whole gang a tremendous flight deal if they could look after themselves on the island. No mention was made of the fact that Dumblebit and I were due to be there at the same time as that would have been uncool…

Jean Luc also joined our group and stood just behind me where I sat on a bar stool that Andy had given up to me on my arrival - for all the women's liberation over the last decades we still without thinking dropped into stereotypical behaviour, with girls sitting and boys standing protectively. What would Germaine Greer think of us? Tired of talk about holiday packages I asked a leading question.

"Which of us are feminists?" I got blank expressions all round. "Madeira is Spanish and I think of the Spanish culture as macho so what does that mean for us?"

"I've been to Spain and had no trouble," volunteered Evan.

"So have I and I got beaten up," countered Philip. "Face it Evan, very few people would risk giving you trouble even if you wandered the most homophobic neighbourhood in the world in a tutu!"

"I think I know what you mean Venus." Jenny contributed. "I started to count myself as a feminist when depending on a man in New York got me in a mess so I wouldn't want to be a Spanish wife but then the male models don't get paid like the top female models and I haven't heard any complaints."

"The old feminists are a bunch of nutters," countered Martina. I've read ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘The Whole Woman’ by Germaine Greer and they made no sense. You can't define people, their rights and how they are to be treated on the grounds of gender any more than on race, religion or class. People are people and don't belong in boxes. Now I think of it, since reading The Whole Woman I've learnt that Greer and her friends got it wrong in thinking their is such a thing as genetic gender unless our Venus here is a new species."

"Are you sure this isn't France in the 1950s?" asked Jean Luc. "In the bars there it was popular to talk about Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism."

"I’ve read a bit about them Jean Luc but we are different." I contradicted. "They fretted over the meaninglessness of life and did nothing. We know that what we do might be meaningless in the grand scheme of things but believe it is worth doing as well as we can just the same. Like the others I've been to Spain where I saw Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona. Go and look at that and at the way the architecture has affected the whole city and tell me that Antoni Gaudí and the thousands of designers and builders involved since 1882 have wasted their lives.

Not every Saturday night can be the stuff of movies: sometimes it is just a group of friends getting together for a drink and a chat. Well make that a drink and a chat and a song because Gareth turned up late with his guitar which Litara borrowed so that we could teach everyone a very old song I learnt growing up, Melting Pot.