Alexis Colby Celebrates Her 40th Birthday – It’s the new 30. With a little bit of arthiritis.

My one-hour delay on Irish carrier “Nofrillsair” (how the pilots eventually make up the time in these situations still baffles me) was nothing compared to the poor experience of Speedy Gonzales and his wife, a friendly Mexican couple, who were seated next to me on the short 90-minute flight to Barcelona. Mrs G wept most of the flight, which he felt obliged to explain. In non-existent English. They had missed the lunchtime flight from Luton by five minutes because of traffic, were forced to pay again for 2 more tickets and wait 6 hours for the next flight. Poor sods. Afterwards, rather than leave me be with my new Mark Haddon book, they wanted to talk about Iraq, the Royal Family and the Falkland Islands. I told them the Falklands “War” was just an excuse to get Prince Andrew out the country. After a nice short snappy 100km bus ride from Girona, I reached a gay bed and breakfast in Barcelona around midnight, checking in with and checking out Nacho, a comical, friendly and utterly apathetic Spaniard, who rented out rooms with red duvets and red bedside lamps in a large building north of the Eixemple area. My room made me feel like an escort. There was no money on the bedside table in the morning (I am a good boy now) when I headed to the nearby resort of Sitges. The temperature inside the train was almost 30 degrees and made all the more uncomfortable by a large woman standing over me. Talk about frying pans and fire. Hot? If you’d have thrown me against a wall, I would have stuck. Permanently. I fell off the train like water through a sieve and lightly cooked, I encountered other sweltering members of the Big Brother “experience.” Dylan’s best mate Sandra, Helen, one of Brian’s old zoo buddies, Bonnie, a short-haired southern lesbian and her girlfriend, Venus Williams lookalike, Valerie. A brief supermarket sweep without Dale Winton and a ten-minute cab ride later, we opened up to a beige-bricked slice of heaven, balconies stretching out in all directions like the house was waking from a mid-afternoon siesta. A small wooden bar rested near the marine-blue pool where I grappled with lesbian Lindsay Lohan, aka the lilo, Sienna the inflatable kid’s shark defeated everyone in its path and Dylan used his rubber noodle to overcome his swimming phobia.

As posters and early “Life of Brian” memorabilia adorned the walls, the first key “event” was the smuggling of Andy into the Big Brother house, Brian’s own big brother, a surprise guest from Milwaukee, one he had not seen for two years. Brian was told Rachel had disappeared to the supermarket under the pretext of forgetting to get limes for Gin and Tonic whilst in reality she was sitting in an airport waiting, waiting and waiting for Andy’s arrival, just a few minutes apart from that of Dylan and Brian. Once at the house, Dylan sent Brian to the bar to get him a G&T and his brother just emerged like a jack-in-the-box to a chorus of cheers from us and tears from little brother, who stood there perplexed and in total shock. I was in shock too. We still had no limes and lemons are not the same. Over the next few days, though, lemons turned into lemonade in the baking sun, temperatures rarely dropping below 27. Little by little, following Andy’s example, new housemates were introduced into the house to stir things up and provide the entertainment. No-one regretted a thing as Jean-Michel arrived to bellow out Edith Piaf’s famous song, his boyfriend Andreas, who, apparently could get lost in a paper bag, took four hours to get there. Buxom party animal Anna showed up with a friend in toe, Larisse, who had signed herself off work sick with a bad back the same morning she arrived and then spent as much time as possible avoiding the possiblity of a return-to-work tan. She could have used Andreas’ thick factor 60 suncream. Scientists are thinking of smearing it on cracks in the ozone layer. The three went into the sea by the gay beach in town, which contained a thousand clones, all wearing differing shades but same size Abercrombie tops and Aussiebum bottoms. Same size equals tight. One does not need to breathe. Apparently, it’s overrated. When Anna emerged from the sea in the style of Ursula Andress, outdone by a hoard of gay men, practicing the same move, her mascara had run. Dylan told her it was fine. She looked like a Chinese panda. As we necked seafood and Sangria at Santa Maria restaurant, back at the ranch, the booze was also going down as often as Rachel into the pool. Justin and Jo argued, made up and argued some more. Helen, an inspiration in her own right, who had been fiddling with her boobs and tubes, had her kidneys seen to by Spanish doctors n the Hospital del Mar, Sandra belted out the classic “Leave Brian alone”, we all knocked out Tainted Love and obviously happy birthday as a Tiramisu cake was wheeled out during a birthday barbecue. Further treats lay in store as Bonnie wrote and performed a song to Brian to the tune of “I will survive” with adorable girlfriend and actress Valerie excelling as a backing singer as she had as a drug-dealing ho. Bonnie was far more coordinated at this task compared with the first time I met her at a barbecue when she sprayed my trousers with tomato ketchup. Wrong sausage, love. Crouched beneath the bar, and with one foot in a bag of shit, I also helped Dylan to put on an X-rated puppet show of the owl and the bear, which involved a sexual act, that did not please the stuffed and moulting bear. That’s best left alone.

With little news filtering in from the outside world, we relaxed by the pool, learned of the reasons why Brian just cannot see fat people (having had his nose broken and mullet yanked by a fat person in the 80s), why he hates being part-Belgian (they are dull and have no point) and his utter contempt for the talentless Posh Spice and Jade Goody (enough said, I can’t blame him there.) Unlike the persistent Miss Goody, Lee was the first to go/ be evicted from the Big Brother house. You are live on Channel Four, please do not swear. Fck that. Davina the taxi is coming to get you. You have thirty seconds to say your goodbyes. Possibly after that nice break, though, a few Hellos are a little more more likely. Now if you’ll excuse me, for 15K, Heat want me. Well, heat has had me and sunkissed, I got back to London 14 hours ago.