"Is That You, Rumpole?"

Great Heavens! Who even knew that John Mortimer was still alive, much less still writing Rumpole stories?

Mortimer still travels the country with his one-man shows and recently did a three week stint at the famously uncomfortable Kings Head theatre in London.

Yet he cannot stand up- due to a broken leg- and he barely eats. A broken wrist recently stopped him writing and thus drove him mad. His health is obviously failing but yet he still pushes himself so hard – why?

"Oh God, I’d be bored to death if I didn’t perform. I know it’s madness but I love performing and I have always written. When I was young, my father- before he went blind- would read me Shakespeare. I had a tiny toy theatre and I would write plays for it."

But now people are writing about him. Last year an unauthorized biography by Graham Lord – the man Mortimer calls "that little shit" – was published and this October Valerie Grove’s authorized biography will appear at the same time as Mortimer’s latest Rumpole, The Anti-Social Behavior of Horace Rumpole.

Well, well. I'll have to open a bottle of Chateau Thames Embankment with She Who Must Be Obeyed and toast the arrival of another installment of the Rumpole chronicles. (I've read some of Mortimer's novels - Paradise Postponed, Titmus Regained and Summer's Lease - and frankly found them not as interesting as the Rumpole stories, although I recall that Sir John Gielgud is screemingly funny in the tee vee version of Summer's Lease.)