Don't Mention The...

Although I was unsurprisingly not invited back for more shifts at the cafe where I was so relentlessly rubbish, I was asked to be photographed again. This time, I could keep my trousers on: they asked me to pose as a man with a scar on his chest following a heart bypass, and a corpse.

I'm delighted to say that as you might expect from a German agency, they're taking their brief unrelentingly literally. They've been commissioned to produce pictures that will deter people from smoking. So far I've seen (or been involved in): man lying on the bed looking sad; man touching scar looking sad; woman in wheelchair looking sad; man blowing smoke into sad-looking child's face; and, finally, melancholy corpse.

The shoot took place in a disused hospital on the edge of the city. The building disconcertingly gives the impression that it was deserted in a hurry; that everybody just went home one day and didn't come back. The staff rota is still on the wall, as is the mobile number of the stand-in nurse. The cupboards are full of prescriptions. Most of the beds are made. I kept thinking I was going to walk into a room and find a patient still there, mouldering quietly away.

From somewhere in this bizarre building, they'd dug out a body bag to photograph me in. "Don't worry," said the stylist. "I cleaned it."

They put me in and zipped me most of the way up. The photographer leaned over me menacingly. "This is for Dresden," he said, and zipped the bag up to the top.

So there's another of my questions answered. You can make jokes about the war.