In Bed With Lord Byron

personality. Anthony who thought I was shagging another guy, too busy to even phone him back. I felt tears burn behind my eyes.
Oh God, what timing.
    ‘I need to make a phone call,’ I said.
    ‘But what
is
this?’ Lord Byron seemed to have realised my patience had run out and was now gesturing at the television, waving about the ruined remote control.
    ‘You’ve broken it now,’ I said tartly, snatching it back. ‘Oh here, I’ll switch it on.’ I flicked on the button by hand; at least it would keep him quiet.
    Byron looked puzzled.
    ‘What is this?’
    ‘Entertainment,’ I said wryly.
    ‘But it’s just a screen of coloured dots,’ he said, frowning. ‘What a strange way to entertain yourselves. You have replaced poetry and opera and fine art – with
this
?’
    I suddenly remembered reading an article which described an experiment where jungle tribes were shown TVs and, like Byron, could not see a picture. Their minds took some time to make the leap
and connect the dots together; at first sight a TV was such an extraordinary thing to them, they couldn’t quite compute.
    Byron’s imagination had been set alight. He started picking up all the mechanical and electrical objects in my house, demanding explanations. As I showed him how a blender worked, and what
the fridge did, and the crucial difference between a fridge and a freezer, I felt like a bloody saleswoman at Currys. Besides which, the moment I turned my back, he kept breaking things – or
worse, forgetting how they worked. After he failed to put the lid on the blender, my ceiling rapidly became covered in strawberry and banana splat. Then he discovered a packet of condoms in a
drawer.
    ‘What are these?’ he asked, curiously stretching one into a milky-coloured balloon.
    ‘If you really want to know, you put them on during sex,’ I said, feeling horribly like a biology teacher. ‘You can get different flavours and sizes. Now –
please
,’ I went on, ushering him back into the living room and sitting him in front of the TV like an irate babysitter. ‘Just behave, OK! Please, can you just look at the dots. I
desperately have to make a call, all right?’
    Over the next hour, I tried and failed to get hold of Anthony. His personal line was permanently engaged and on voicemail, and I definitely wanted to avoid dealing with his evil secretary. In
the mean time, Lord Byron sniffed, prowled and shifted his way through my twenty-first-century home. I began to curse him silently, then caught myself. How crazy it seemed that just a few weeks ago
I thought I was in love with him. All his flaws had seemed so endearing; now they were just infuriating. How strange that such a deep passion could become such a deep indifference. Was love just a
fantasy bubble, waiting to be burst? Would I ever feel this indifference for Anthony?
    I tested my love, prodding and poking it once again. No, I thought, what I felt for Anthony wasn’t just passion. It was so much deeper than that. My love for Lord Byron was just a
butterfly; after a long cocoon of fantasy, the reality only flitted about for a day. My love for Anthony, however, had been putting down roots, slowly but surely, and was now ready to grow . .
.
    When I emerged from my bedroom, I discovered that Lord B. was now in the process of exploring my hoover by taking it to bits.
    ‘Byron!’ I cried, close to tears, ready to snap. ‘Look, you just have to stop this! I’m really broke, OK.’
    ‘I haven’t laid a finger on you,’ Byron shot back.
    ‘No – I mean broke as in poor. It’s a twentieth-century expression. It means I am in a lot of debt and I don’t have much money and I can’t afford to have a mad poet
mucking up my hoover because I don’t have another hundred-odd quid to buy another one.’
    ‘The English language, ’tis a whore,’ Byron mused mistily. ‘I thought a second Great Vowel Shift might have taken place, since you speak so strangely.’
    ‘Oh no, the vowels have stayed put.’
    ‘It seems the English language has been cruelly raped by modern man. Raped and left for dead.’ He shuddered.
    ‘Hmm, well . . .’ I looked down at my hoover, the disembowelled bag spewing yellow dust. Byron’s imagination, however, was caught by the subject. He asked me to tell him more
modern words.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said tiredly. ‘Fuck. Um, bootylicious. That means gorgeous, sexy.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘Or coolio. That means cool. When we say cool, we don’t