Forest yields writers' beds

Britain’s top two female crime writers both sleep in handmade beds fashioned from wood from the same forest. Probably not a forest in which to take a walk after dark.

The forest in question is in the grounds of the Suffolk home of Ruth Rendell, who was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in conversation with Ian Rankin, whose own bed, as far as we know, is unremarkable.

In the Great Storm of 1987, Rendell said, about 180 trees on her land were blown down. As part of the subsequent clean-up, she asked a local cabinet maker to fashion her a bed from a fallen sycamore. “P. D. James was staying,” she recalled. “She liked it. So she had one made from an ash. It was quite a bed. One of those beds like a boat, with her coat of arms on it in extraordinary detail, and the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, on the four panels.”

Sounds rather splendid. And Rendell herself sounds rather jealous.

“Not at all,” said the novelist, primly. “Mine is a four-poster.”

The Scottish film industry, evidently, is something of a village. Two actresses, overheard at the launch of the Edinburgh Film Festival at the Edinburgh College of Art, after the premiere of Jamie Bell and Tilda Swinton’s new film, Hallam Foe. Actress 1: “For once, I’m at a party for a film I wasn’t in. Are you in it?” Actress 2: “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

Yesterday, your People columnist took part in Early Edition, the satirical news review show at the Underbelly, with the comedians Marcus Brigstocke, Andre Vincent and Rich Hall. Here, he learnt that one of Brigstocke’s distant aristocratic ancestors once lost Glamorgan in a card game and that, if a Welsh element were to be added to the Union Flag, it would basically look like a sign saying “No Dragons”. It was fun. Thank you.

Will Stephen Fry ever play an action hero? “I’d rather suck faecal matter out of the a***hole of a goat,” he told a London-based bit of People at the premiere of The Bourne Ultimatum at the Odeon, Leicester Square. “It would be terrible. You’d have to jump around and off things, and have stuff shot at you and squirting out of you. And you’d have to spend the preceding three whole months in the gym.”

Abigail Burdess, wife of Robert Webb, the curly Peep Show star, is performing her stand-up show at the Pleasance sitting down in a wheelchair after a rather large doctor friend accidentally stood on her foot. “I was assured by the doctor friend it was ‘only a bruise’,” she says. It actually required surgery and will have her in a wheelchair until Christmas. What a jolly good friend he must be.

A sudden rash of people turning up in the audience of shows in which they themselves are depicted. As has been widely reported, Tony! The Blair Musical features the student Ed Duncan Smith, who plays his father, Iain. The former Tory leader, we hear, sneaked into the audience this week. We are told that the producers of Seriously, a musical about the Pet Shop Boys, are expecting the ageing lads next week.

Postscript

— An invitation to nullify your faith has caught the eye of The Tablet, the Roman Catholic weekly newspaper. “Liberate yourself from the original mumbo-jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had,” says the National Secular Society’s website, offering a bona fide “certificate of de-baptism” to help you on your way. Download it, present it to your local man-of-the-cloth and if you’re lucky, he’ll help you to renounce your faith. One avowed atheist reports that he submitted a form to his Catholic diocesan bishop who promptly signed it, had it countersigned by the chancellor of the diocese and sent it back “stamped with an ecclesiastical-looking seal”. Other secularists testify that the Church of England wasn’t as obliging. One man asked to be removed from the baptismal register but was refused and told that he’d “just have to live with it”.

— A tear of laughter was brought to People’s collective eye on reading an account by Michael Hodges, Time Out’s resident humorist, of a lifelong propensity to fall asleep at inopportune moments. “I managed it in 1990 in the Maharani Restaurant on Clapham High Street. As anyone who uses it can tell you, the Maharani is a fine establishment but all these years later I think it was remiss of them to allow a passing stag party to pour a chicken jalfrezi, diced onion, yogurt dip and a half-pint of Carlsberg down the inside of my trousers as I snoozed. It was a slow walk home that night.”

— Congratulations to Myleene Klass, the former Hear’Say singer, who gave birth yesterday to her first daughter, Ava. Her spokesman said: “Myleene felt a bit weird on the way home. She went to the hospital and they told her she was in labour.” Surely this came as no surprise?