It is with great sadness that I write to inform you that Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown are going their separate ways. I spoke to Whitney on the telephone yesterday and she told me that 'she needs her own time and space to deal with her cocaine addictions and to perfect her butter-cream filling'. She asked me to pass on her best wishes and thanks to all her friends - in particular yourself - for their love and support over the last few years. She sounds in generally good spirits and the septum of her nose seems to holding firm, though she is worried about her sternum which she
says feels incredibly hard to the touch. I told her that the sternum is made of bone and is likely to feel hard to the touch, but she would not be consoled by this; hers, she said, used to be more pliable and could be moulded to any shape, and for her it is the greatest tragedy of her life, more so even than her version of 'I Will Always Love You'.

She seemed to be in a quietly nostalgic mood and spoke of the time you helped fix the leak in her Bel-Air swimming pool; how you thrashed around in the water with a blob of cement on the end of a putty knife, refusing a Westlers hot-dog until the job was done. 'Neil,' she said, 'has always shown such dedication and tenacity in the face of futility.' I agreed with her that certainly in adulthood you have raged against futility, but spoke of how, as a child, it had tormented you, almost consumed you, and that a psychologist described you - at the only tender age of six - as having a 'lust for annihilation, exacerbated by a precocious existentialist fatalism'. She found this hard to comprehend and began lamenting man's failure to understand the human heart and how we never truly know anyone let alone our selves. She was curious how this 'lust' manifested itself when you were a boy and I told of her of the time (I hope you don't mind) at Minehead, on holiday with your parents, when you had run amok on the beach kicking over children's sandcastle's, screaming that 'the buggering sea was going to eat them anyway, so what was the point.'

She began to cry at this point, saying it pained her that one so young should have such acute perceptions. I agreed, saying that I blamed your parents, and how it wasn't right to read sacred Hindu texts to a toddler one night and then a dictionary of palaeontology the next - and how, in one
so young, it could only result in a double-haemorrhage in the mind, science and religion bleeding into each other, and that it had obviously precipitated the episode on the Dorset coast when, looking at fossils embedded in the multi-coloured strata of sedimentary rock laid down by millennia, you had turned to your father and told him that you felt the weight of endless lives and eternities upon your head, much like the layers in the rock, asking your father to bury you in the sand so that you could feel that weight in a physical sense, to alleviate this abstract mental torment that had all the strength and yet fragility of a spiders web.

At this Whitney began to cry again, saying that she sympathised and she too often felt that weight upon her, before calling for her maid to 'bring some more coke you Mexican whore!'

She was quiet for a while after this, gently sobbing, only the rustle of a hundred dollar bill being rolled and some discreet sniffing, followed by rather convulsive sneezing and mutterings about her sternum being so 'damned hard, like a piece of flint.' She told me to listen carefully and knocked her knuckles against her breastbone and I had to agree that it did have a certain metallic ring to it; reminding me in fact of a rather angry Algerian I once saw in Montmatre, after a attending a memorial service at Sacre Couer for a legendary Parisian beggar; the Algerian swathed in white, walking up and down the flight of stone steps, banging an iron bar on each one whilst singing 'Doe Ray Me' and lamenting the fact that the bar wasn't in tune, asking me if I had set of tuning forks on my person.

Whitney found the connection between her sternum and the Algerian 'irrelevant but interesting' and asked me to continue with your story, how you came to be master of your own destiny, comparing you to her dear friend Oprah, though with some caveats: chiefly that Oprah was a woman and you were a man; Oprah was black and you were white. I told her that for a while you were considered a child prodigy, with a fleeting but intense period of fame and had indeed been interviewed on various television programmes by luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, who described as you as
being 'either a prophet or a demon', and a callow Melvyn Bragg who thought you, rather simplistically, 'a stroppy little git'.

'But what saved him?' she demanded to know, 'Tell me what saved Neil, that I may save myself.'

'Airfix,' I said, 'Simply a combination of Airfix, corduroy trousers and thick knitwear.' She was amazed that a solution so prosaic could be someone's salvation and actually accused me of 'an insulting degree of levity' and 'not to fuck with her nigger brain'. I calmed her down and managed to assure her that you had indeed been saved by constructing model aeroplanes and warships, though even this hadn't been without it's hidden dangers as it ignited a brief but passionate flirtation with the glamour of fascism, inspiring you too persuade the whole infants school into the re-enactment
of a Nuremburg rally in the school playground and telling them that the gymnasium changing rooms were in reality a gas chamber. The headmaster, whilst reprimanding you severely, had to admit that the sight of 200 infants goose-stepping had indeed been 'a grand spectacle worthy of Goebbels', but was more concerned with the insensitivity of coercing the little Jewish boy, Benjamin Samuels, into the role of Hitler, replete with marker-pen moustache and a pair of black wellingtons purloined from the lost property bin.

Whitney was concerned that you still nurtured fascist sentiments, but I assured her that the episode had been a one-off and you now supported democratic government elected through complicated methods of proportional representation that left the electorate confused and governments weak, without direction or leadership. Finally, when I told her that you now read the Guardian, she became convinced that you were truly a woolly-headed liberal. She said that she didn't like to think bad of people, but after watching the documentary 'Boys from Brazil', right-wing politics and eugenics had made her extremely wary. I corrected her on the fact that the 'Boys from Brazil' was in fact fiction, a movie, but she maintained that it was fact and was adamant that she had seen John Pilger's name in the final credits.

I was aware at this point that she was tired and rambling a little, so thought it best to let her rest. Before going she asked for your telephone number and wondered if you would mind, maybe in the future, when she was a little stronger, if she could come and stay with you for a few days. I said that I didn't think you would mind. (I hope this is OK; I'm sure that she wouldn't be any bother.) Apparently she is planning, as a kind of 'finding herself' experience, a speedboat trip down the pacific coast, through the Panama canal and up through the perils of the northern Atlantic to Reykjavik, where she is going to 'bump pussies', as she put it, with Bjork. She suggested that from there she may cruise over to Nottingham. I told her that Nottingham was inland and not on the coast so access by speedboat would be difficult, though there was an extensive system of disused canals that she may be able to pick up from Cardiff or Bristol that would take her within spitting distance of your home. She seemed excited by this adventure and began asking what sandwiches she should pack for the trip; I suggested egg and cress with Cadbury's mini-rolls for dessert, though you may want contact her with alternative suggestions: ham and mustard perhaps?

Anyway, Whitney sends her love and will probably be contacting you once she gets to Reykjavik. She intends to bring an Airfix kit of a Messerschmitt in the hope that you can give her instruction and inspiration and, God willing, help her to save herself.

Hope you are both well, Sean