“Wiping crumbs, genitalia and other preoccupation’s (sic)” was the topical title of a painting in the final degree show at Brighton Polytechnic. Bereft of babysitters, we had to take all four children with us to the private view on Friday night; you would think they would welcome the opportunity for some late-night carousing, but the word `art’ or ‘gallery’ is guaranteed to bring mine out in terminal sulk mode. They have seen naked men in glass cases at the Hayward, a wall of willies at the Serpentine and still they insist that art is boring. But then perhaps we have been too liberal – my childhood exposure to art was, after all, limited to furtive searches for bare bottoms in a book of Ingres. Blair is in a privileged position when you think about it – who needs to be a fly on the wall when you can do some presidential bonding over the urinals? There must be an absolute stampede for the gents’ lavatory when Clinton responds to the call of nature.

But I thought Tony Blair acted like a seasoned diplomat the other day when he greeted Clinton in Washington, pointing up at something above their heads in exaggerated fashion, obviously to avoid the horrible possiblity of his gaze dropping below the belt. After all, she presumably only had a few seconds to stare at it before recoiling in horror, whereas I’ve had over twenty years to commit my spouse’s tackle to memory and I’m honestly not sure I could give a blow-by-blow description in a court of law. But I’ve thought long and hard about it, and it stands to reason that it must have been pretty spectacular. Man goes to doctor because wife not giving it to him, if you know what I mean …”. I can’t stop thinking about President Clinton’s trousers, and what lies therein. Maybe I read the wrong newspapers but there seems to have been remarkably little speculation as to exactly what it was that made Paula Jones’s eyes pop like that.

A perky brunette in a tight, short-sleeved purple sweater is now sitting in that chair. When I interrupt to say goodbye, he gives me a big bear hug and a kiss, but then quickly gets back down to business “So, you like me? I tell you this good joke. Probably, he’s not even aware you can live life any other way.Anyway, before I go I note the Sri Lankan woman has gone To keep that appointment? Perhaps But Ilie is not downhearted. He would not think of his life as sad or lonely or superficial because he’s never lived any other way. But I live with her for two years and she wants to marry and her parents want her to marry.”If Nastase goes the whole way with the women he encounters on the road, I do not think he would see it as infidelity as such It’s just what you do when you are on these tours. My daughter [Natalie, now 23] is a baby one day and then she is 14, 15 and I never see her grow up.”He is now married to Alexandra, an American beauty, and has a further two children, Nicholas and Charlotte I wonder why he married again “I didn’t want to.

(I thank God I am very much a trousers sort of woman.)How many women has he slept with? “I don’t know. Too difficult to count, I think.” He can concentrate on sex, then, at least? “Ha Yes I concentrate better on the sex than the tennis. I not first have sex until I was 19, 20, but then I catch up fast and become very good professional. The women always say to me oh baby, you good.”His first marriage, to Dominique, a Parisian beauty, took place when he was 26 It collapsed for the reasons most tennis marriages collapse “I travel, travel, travel all the time This is OK for one year, or two, but not for 10. He is much heavier and slower than he was, and lopes away like some big old bear.In fact, he is only truly interested or animated when talking about sex, which he does in a very pre-teenage way He has loved women for ever, he says.

When he was at school, even, he would put mirrors on the tips of his shoes so he could look up girls’ skirts to see if they had knickers on or not. He can’t fill up his evenings with books or films because his attention span is so limited he can never get to the end of them. Our interview, if you can call it such, is a very stop- start affair, because mid-question he will suddenly get up and wander off. He is open, eager to please, very much someone who lives in the moment But in other ways, it’s a handicap. To cut a long story very short, he was Romania’s child champion at 12 and junior champion at 15, left Romania pretty much for good at 17, and was number one in the world when computer rankings started in 1973.There was never any time for puberty or adolescence or any of that stuff, which may go some way towards explaining why Ilie Nastase still seems such a childlike creature today In some ways, this is endearing. But I would always have to give it to my mother.” I wonder what it felt like when, later, all that prize money started rolling in? “It very nice I invite everyone for dinner I buy myself nice cars.