I Have to Have Liver

I'm not a well woman. I've got bronchitis. I took to my bed for a few days (oh, all right, four glorious days of sleep, meals on trays, antibiotics, listening to the radio, watching the clouds and doing nothing). The coughing was a damned nuisance to me and everybody else in the house, and at times I felt very poorly and was damp-eyed with horrible self-pity. But I have to admit that I enjoyed myself enormously.

My husband cooked me the type of meal that used to be served up to Edwardian invalids: huge quantities of comfort food, gravy and custard. He even lined the tray with a clean tea towel. I ate every last crumb. I was like a wolf woman. In fact, one day at 3 a.m. I woke in a bronchitic sweat to find my husband in an exhausted sleep beside me (it's not easy cooking for Wolf Woman), and I had to have liver – nothing else would do.

I staggered downstairs and rummaged through the never-to-be-eaten food at the bottom of the freezer. Eventually I found it – a packet of lambs' liver. It was encrusted in icicles, and must have been there since Mario Lanza topped the hit parade. I averted my eyes from the use-by date and slung the icy bag into the microwave. While it spat and melted I hacked at an onion and some potatoes. It was the SAS Brutalist School of Cookery.

When the liver was reasonably defrosted, I threw it into a roasting tin and chucked it in the oven. Then I paced up and down and waited for it to cook. Half an hour later, I wiped my wolf chops of liver and onions and mashed potato and went back to bed. My husband was baffled by the evidence of my early morning saturnalia. ‘Why liver?’ he asked. ‘It needed using up,’ I said feebly, between coughs.

An illness of some kind had been predicted for me by friends and family ever since I announced that I was going to Australia for seven days and would be visiting three cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. Max Stafford-Clark, the theatre director, and I had business out there, setting up an Australian tour of The Queen and I. Because of my addiction, I couldn't face twenty-three hours without a fag, so I petitioned to fly with Malaysia Airlines, which still allows a few social deviants to sit at the back of the plane and puff on the deadly weed.

Max sat in the middle of the plane, guarding his clean lungs, but we met up in Kuala Lumpur at Dunkin' Donuts, where we tried to decide whether the fiery red ball in the sky was the sun going down or the sun coming up. Incidentally, the duty free shopping mall at Kuala Lumpur stretches as far as the eye can see, but after walking its length and breadth with a fistful of credit cards, I emerged with nothing – not a thing. I should have taken this as a symptom of serious illness and demanded to see a doctor. Shopping isn't really my middle name – it's Lilian – but it's an activity I'm very fond of, though just lately the only things I seem to buy are nailbrushes and cushions.

Australia was wonderful – too wonderful as it turned out. Max and I were looking for a suitably squalid location in which to exile the Queen (my fictional Queen). Most normal people want to see the sights, areas of outstanding beauty, etc. Not us. ‘We want to see a poor, run-down area,’ said Max to the cab driver in Melbourne. God knows the man did his best, but after driving through what looked to us like endless affluent suburbs, he knew he'd failed us. It was the same story in Sydney and Adelaide.

Of course, there was comparative poverty, but nothing like Britain's grey, cold council estates. However, I did discover a new scene for the Australian version of the play in a pub in Sydney. We saw a list of coming attractions. ‘Barmaid's Jelly Wrestling. Monday Night. Five Dollars’. Then, in brackets, ‘First Two Rows Free’. A jelly-wrestling scene involving a younger member of the Royal Family would give the play a gritty Australian authenticity, we decided, and jelly was so redolent of aristocratic nursery teas. I can hear nanny now: ‘Diana, eat your bread and butter first and then you can wrestle in your jelly.’

I've just realized that it's at least two hours since I had a good cough. This is a serious blow. It means I'm getting better. I may have to cook tonight.