Mm..a one word message from Gertrude: danke. Last week, I sent the manuscript to Hamburg. Dear reader, I have not been idle. These last six months I have been writing the book Axel commissioned me to write ( though at the boat party at  Christmas I overheard him saying to a rather listless Spaniard how he'd bribed me to write it ). Nevertheless, Axel has proved himself  a worthy mentor. To spur me on, he sent a few other books, including a 1st edition of Josefine Mutzenbacher, a chronicle of the life of a Viennese prostitute by Felix Salten, better known for writing the children's book Bambi. However, as the winter dragged on and I worked deeper into the book ( it was around this time that Thom and I stopped speaking ), Axel began to ask questions. He considered the book to be a work of social anthropology. Dear boy, the boat parties! The boat parties ! What about last year's Indonesian girls? But I was sticking to the brief, and I made that clear to Axel. This was a work of academic criticism about My Secret Life, a long neglected masterpiece of Victorian literature, by Sir Henry Spencer Ashbee. Yes, I would make a case for the ejaculating servant girls, I would hint at the implications of vaginal eruption, but this would not necessarily include a chapter about Axel and his boat parties. Oh dear boy, but this is our evidence! It became clear that Axel wanted a starring role in the book. Did he see himself as the ringmaster, inciting us into exertions that would shatter the last, great, last taboo? By February, in mock exasperation, I offered to write his autobiography instead. We didnt speak for two weeks. Our next communique, consisted of a brief note and fifty 6' x 4' colour photographs. I was stunned . They were all pictures taken at Axel's boat parties over the last thirty years. There was the one with Madame X off the coast of Corsica in '89, there was Dubai in '94, Monrovia in '97, there were pictures off the coast of Los Angeles in '99 ( the one Max Hardcore and his gang tried to gatecrash ), and there was even  a  picture from this year on the Caspian sea, off the Iranian coast. Mercifully, there were no pictures of me en flagrante. But there was, instead, lots of  money shots. But not the male orgasm, no. It was the female money shot. Women, shrieking, buckled over, ejaculating over Persian skylines.  And yet, there was actually a picture of me. It's from behind, fully clothed. I can be seen smoking a cigar, leaning overboard, blowing smoke over to Bandare-e-Anzali, on the Iranian coast.