British Sex Worker of The Year looking for psychologist & clients for Channel 5

(A version of this piece was also published on the Indian news site WSN)

Charlotte Rose & T-shirt on Skype this week

Charlotte Rose recently won a British Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year.

She had just come back from Cuba when I talked to her two days ago via Skype.

“I’ve got a busy morning,” she told me. “I’ve been able to squeeze my dog into the vet’s at 9 o’clock; somebody’s coming to fix my washing machine; and then Channel 5 TV are giving me a call.”

“How was Cuba?” I asked.

“It was fantastic, but I did slice my knee and I sliced the tip of my toe off in the swimming pool.”

“A shark attack in the swimming pool?” I asked.

“There must be something there with massively over-sized teeth,” laughed Charlotte Rose, “because it really did take a chunk out of my toe. I can’t recall what happened but a lot of things apparently happen in that pool.”

“Were you in Cuba on holiday or for professional reasons?” I asked.

Charlotte in Havana with Che Guevara hat and Cuban cigar

“Holiday,” she replied “I went with a colleague that I work with. Havana is fantastic and the people are fantastic. I’ve got about nine new husbands. The old-fashioned Cadillacs – all the cars – are fantastic. And the Che Guevara Museum was amazing. But what was really interesting was the red light district. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of girls there… and lady boys and gay boys.”

“I’m amazed,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cuba, but I wouldn’t have thought the regime would allow a red light district.”

“They tolerate it,” explained Charlotte Rose. “It’s policed. If you get caught, then you’re arrested. You’ve got cameras on every corner, but there are no cameras on the red light road itself. Over there, the women are quite reserved. There’s no sex before marriage. It’s very Catholic. But, because they’re an equal society, a taxi driver will earn 25 pesos a month and a teacher will earn 25 pesos a month. Our £ is worth about 1.50 pesos and those people are getting 25 pesos a month to live on. A prostitute over there will get 25 pesos for the hour. So, in my opinion, 90% of the women over there will do it with a tourist just to top up their wages.”

“Someone like the Daily Mail ,” I suggested, “would say Oh, prostitutes. Terrible people. But you would say…?”

“I love what I do,” said Charlotte Rose. “People have their own definition of what the word stands for. But it’s how somebody does it. It’s how somebody conducts themselves.

“At the end of the day, what I do is I give the opportunity for people to feel passion and pleasure and intimacy in their lives for a certain amount of time. The bonus I get out of it is knowing I have left that person with such a huge smile on their face and I’m the reason behind that smile. But, like any industry, you get the good and the bad.”

“The Daily Mail,” I said, “would go on about girls being kidnapped in Romania, brought here and forced into prostitution… or prostitutes are all drug addicts… No girl would do it of her own volition…”

“They should come and visit me,” suggested Charlotte Rose, “and I will give them Devon’s finest GFE and I will show them my arms. Yes, we do have the bad side of the industry. Young children, drug addicts, yes, unfortunately, yes. But, if you look at the banking industry, there are nice bankers who enjoy their job and we’ve got bankers who are wankers.

Charlotte Rose tries her hand as rock guitarist Cuban style

“The stories that come out in the papers are always A prostitute was killed in Surrey. Twenty young Cuban girls… You don’t see in the paper Oh, there’s Charlotte Rose, Sex Worker of the Year Award. Fantastic the amount of work she’s doing within the sex industry. Why not?

“I’ve got a Bachelor in Science degree. I moved to Exeter to become a teacher. I realised I don’t like kids – 15-year-old kids don’t want to learn – I did my PGCE, the basic teaching qualification. My degree’s in Hospitality. I’m trained to run a 7-star, 500-bedroom hotel.”

“Why did you become an escort?” I asked.

“I’m very highly-sexed. I detest the idea of picking someone up in a bar. I think it’s dirty. I think it’s seedy. So why not join an agency and get paid for it? I absolutely loved it. I was funding my businesses and I was doing something I enjoyed. I stayed with an agency for a year and then got an apartment and went into escorting independently and never looked back.

“I have a certain minimum that I see each day. I’ve built-up fantastic rapports with lots of my clients. I do a lot of sexual training and relationship coaching. I have clients who see me for troubles in their own relationships. They’ve got me on a retainer. If they have an argument at home, they can phone me and I can coach them. I have clients who come and see me for social skills, because they’re too afraid to do basic chit-chat with people.

“Every fantasy and fetish gets thrown at me and, if it’s something that I can accommodate, I will. It all boils down to If I can make somebody happy, then I will.”

“So,” I said, “you recently won this Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year. Why did you get that?”

Charlotte & Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year

“Because I’m awesome!” laughed Charlotte Rose. “I really love my job and it shows. I’m very passionate about people. I work a lot with disabled people. I work with anybody that wants and needs intimacy and passion in their lives. That’s one of the things I push my business towards. I’m not an escort for a quick fuck for fifteen minutes. My minimum term is an hour. We have a cup of tea together, sit down and talk, get to know each other, relax, then shower and enjoy each other’s company. If I can give somebody the opportunity to feel intimacy, pleasure and passion in their lives, then that’s me happy. I say I work with the three Ps – I work with passion, professionalism and people.”

“Have you reaped any benefits from your Erotic Award?”

“Well, all the regular people I work with think it’s fantastic and I should be working with Channel 5 in the up-and-coming months with regards to the sexual training I offer. So everything’s getting there. Exciting stuff. I was supposed to have worked with Channel 4 on the Sex On Wheels programme, but I pulled out at the last minute because I do have a family and the things that I do… It just wasn’t ready at that point in my life able to go nationally public. But the way things are going now…

“I’m hopefully working with the National Ugly Mugs scheme in regards to my time wasters website.

“The National Ugly Mugs scheme sends out information about dangerous clients to people, but it doesn’t record people who waste your time and having that information is just as valuable. If a client genuinely messes me about, I can upload his phone number onto the website. If he then tries to book with someone else, she can look up his number on the website and it won’t show his number but it will say whether he’s been entered as a time waster. It also has a star system on it to tell you how many times the man has been entered.

“I’ve also got my English Courtesan website and I’ve got a new Sexual Training website which will be online soon and that’s what I’ll be pushing in the Channel 5 programme.”

“What’s the idea behind the Sexual Training website?” I asked.

“To give sexual training,” laughed Charlotte Rose.

“In what way?” I persisted.

“It’s more to do with sexual surrogacy,” she explained. “I’ve been working with ICASA (the Centre for Intuition, Consciousness And Self Awareness) in regards to erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation. There was a client of mine who suffered with premature ejaculation. Just a simple stroke of the arm could make him explode. But, using different therapy techniques, we’ve gone from 3 seconds to 17 minutes.

“I’m not trained in psychology but I am, at the moment, looking for a psychologist I could possibly work with in the future.”

“The Channel 5 show should get you a bit of publicity,” I said.

“We are looking for people to be on the show,” said Charlotte Rose, “but I don’t want it to damage the discretion I have. We are looking for a man in his 40s who has never had sex; a couple; and a disabled client.”

“I don’t think I count for any of those,” I said.

“You could mention in your blog that there’s going to be a TV show on sexual surrogacy and Channel 5 is looking for those three types of people…

“I just think it’s absolutely fantastic that I’ve got an award for what I do. You get all these achievements for the Best Teacher of the Year, the Best Accountant of the Year and people in my profession go un-noticed. It’s only the bad that gets noticed. The message I want to get out is that I’m proud of what I do.”

“And you’ve a busy life,” I said.

“Yes,” said Charlotte Rose, “I’m going to have to put a note on my door to the guy who’s fixing my washing machine to say I’m on an emergency run to the vet.”

UK comedian Matt Roper has ended up in a wheelchair in a hospital in Saigon

Matt Roper in hospital yesterday in Saigon (Photograph by nurse Than Thiet Sang)

Oh the joys of modern communication via the internet.

The last I heard from British comedian Matt Roper was just over a month ago when I blogged that he had diarrhoea in India after a rather too enthusiastic encounter with a local drink called Fenny.

Imagine my surprise then, yesterday, when I received an e-mail from Saigon… and the cyber conversation that ensued.

MATT: I am hospitalized in Saigon. God giveth but he doesn’t piss about when he takes it away again… But I thank him for Cuban trained nurses and free wi-fi! Hope you are well!

JOHN: You are hospitalised? Seriously? With what? Are you insured? Are you OK? If there is a ceiling fan, you can live the start of Apocalypse Now! – “Saigon… Shit, I’m still in Saigon…” Are you OK? (Given that you are in hospital) Actually, yes, Cuban levels of healthcare will be a bonus point.

MATT: Cubans train some of the finest doctors and nurses in the world. Latin America is very, very lucky to have them. Some of the staff here trained in Cuba, Vietnam being communist and all, the two countries have a strong relationship. They’re amazing with me.

JOHN: So how are you?

Matt is in the Franco-Vietnamese Hospital – officially in Ho Chi Minh City – but it is still called Saigon by almost everyone

MATT: I’m fine but for my right leg. Deep vein thrombosis. Specialist reckons it can be healed back to normal 100%. But then she also thinks footballer Wayne Rooney is the British prime minister. I’m in a fucking wheelchair and on a drip. But strangely enjoying being waited on and given the opportunity to rest as much as I want. Franco-Vietnamese Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City. Fully covered for travel insurance. Thank fuck.

JOHN: How/why are you in Saigon? Your trip was to India.

MATT: I don’t fucking know. Why does the sun rise in the morning and then set again in the evening? Life leads me John and not the other way around.

JOHN: Deep vein thrombosis? Jesus. That’s the thing you’re supposed to get from long-distance flights, isn’t it? Keep a diary of your stay. It could be an Edinburgh Fringe comedy show.

MATT: That remains to be seen.

JOHN: Have you been elsewhere in SE Asia? Laos is interesting.

MATT: I spent a week or so in Bangkok. From there I came here. First time in Vietnam for me. When a new nurse comes to deal with me they ask if I live here in Saigon. When I say “Just a holiday” they sort of throw their heads back and laugh. What luck I have! What sort of a man gets deep vein thrombosis from a 90 minute flight? I ask you.

JOHN: What are your impressions of Saigon?

MATT: The ceiling in my room. The pisspot by my bed. The steady wheels of the commode, gliding gently across the polished floor of the ward. Seriously, the night before I was in the hospital, I was in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel sipping coffee, looking out over the rooftops of the city, my heart filled with joy. Isn’t there an Arabic proverb? One minute your hand is in your pocket, the next it’s up your arse… ?

Saigon as it was in 1989, from the roof of the Rex Hotel

JOHN: I was in Saigon in 1989. I remember having drinks atop the Rex Hotel.

MATT: During the Vietnam War (it’s called the American War here) the Caravelle Hotel was the base for all the foreign journalists. That hotel was bombed, they managed to hit one of the rooms, but they reckon if they’d have targeted the bar instead they would’ve taken out every last one of the hacks.

JOHN: How did the hospitalisation happen?

MATT: I thought I’d torn my calf muscle. After three days I couldn’t walk, so I ended up coming in for a check-up. They gave me an ultra-sound scan and it turned out to be thrombosis. A public statement to the fact that I am suffering and I continue to suffer. Even Lewis Schaffer couldn’t lay claim to this.

JOHN: I wouldn’t be so sure.

MATT: I have only just let go of the notion that actually they’re going to amputate my leg. The things that have crossed this restless mind… If they did amputate it, would they show it to me afterwards? Would I want to see it? I doubt it. But, on the other hand, my chances of getting a series with the BBC would increase tenfold.

JOHN: I will blog about this tomorrow. Do you have a picture of yourself in a wheelchair or similar?

MATT: You’re a sick man, Fleming.

Modern-day Saigon, fortunately with Cuban-trained nurses

JOHN: Seriously. Send me a photo. When are you out?

MATT: When I’m allowed out. I don’t know. I think maybe a week or so more. I still can’t walk proper, so…

JOHN: Are you going elsewhere? Or coming straight back to the UK?

MATT: I really don’t know. I have either to stay put in Vietnam as they need to monitor my blood regularly or get back to Bangkok overland until it’s safe for me to fly again. Still, there’s stacks of material. Stacks of the stuff.

JOHN: It is an Edinburgh Fringe show. Trust me.

MATT: Nurse Than Thiet Sang must be credited for taking the attached photos of me. She was on a mission checking blood pressure before she was stopped to take these. If you really want a wheelchair shot you will have to wait until the male nurse who wheels me out for a strictly forbidden cigarette is on shift (later today).

JOHN: Too late. I will survive. I hope you do too.

Dangerous holidays in quirky places

The most dangerous place I was ever on holiday was Bogota in Colombia in 1983, at a time when the Medellin and Cali drug cartels were on the rise. At that time, the presumption in Bogota was that any white Westerner speaking English was carrying large amounts of cash to use in major drug deals.

About an hour after arriving in the city, I was crossing a central road junction when I heard a slight scuffle behind me. My companion, walking about four steps behind had been mugged by two men.

“They held two knives at my throat, so I gave them my wallet,” he told me, slightly surprised. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” It must have taken all of four seconds.

I remember, one Sunday morning, the two of us walking down a main street in the city – walking on the actual road, not the pavement, because it seemed safer to risk being hit by a car than walking close to narrow alleyways and shop doorways. It was less paranoia than common sense. A week or so later, in Lima, Peru, I got chatting to a young American in the bar of the Sheraton hotel.

“Yeah, Bogota is dangerous,” he agreed. He told me he visited the city quite often.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m in the import/export business,” he told me.

“Ah,” I replied.

I like interesting places but not dangerous ones.

Yesterday I went to the Destinations holiday exhibition at Earls Court in London, courtesy of the wonderful travel company Regent Holidays. In 1979, I went with them to Albania, largely because I had read the country had no motorised traffic and was dotted with pillbox bunkers in case they got invaded by unspecified other nations. “Dotted with pillboxes” turned out to be an understatement. Albania had concrete pillboxes like a pointillist painting has dots – and they were white curved things which could be clearly seen from a distance (surely not a good idea for a pill-box).

Albania in 1979 was a restful country – said to be the poorest in Europe – and, indeed, it had virtually no motorised vehicles. Occasionally you might spot a military truck or a Mercedes-Benz limo belonging to the Party; other than that it was horse-drawn carts and people walking. It was ruled by the admirably OTT Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha who was said to always carry a pistol on his hip and once shot a member of his government over a dinner argument.

Now that’s my kinda ruler!

You can imagine Boris Johnson, given a tiny bit more power, doing that sort of thing.

Albania in 1979 was the most eccentric place I had been until I wisely went to North Korea with Regent Holidays in 1985. I recommend the country highly. When I went, it was ruled by The Great Leader (that was his official title) Kim il-sung about whom I’m saying nothing as I might want to go back there sometime. All I will say is that I went in 1985 and 1985 was a year late for North Korea’s definitive year. It was illegal for individuals to own a radio: the simplest effective piece of state control over people’s thoughts I have ever heard of.

Regent Holidays specialised then and specialise now in unusual destinations and, during the Cold War, that often meant extreme Communist regimes. I do lament the passing of widespread hardline Communism because you were always safe travelling to communist countries and right wing dictatorships. If anyone messed with foreign-currency-carrying tourists in those countries, the perpetrators tended to end up being thrown in a cell and the key thrown away or being shot in a football stadium. This tended to minimise casual street muggings.

I went to a lot of Communist countries during the Cold War because I was sadly too late for all the truly great right wing dictatorships. The only right wing dictatorship I did visit was Paraguay under General Stroessner. He is reported to have been ousted in 1989 because his military chiefs feared he would be succeeded either by his son Freddie, a cocaine addict, or by his son Gustavo, “who was loathed for being a homosexual and a pilot”. Bigotry apparently ran deep in Paraguay.

People have always told me I should go to Cuba and maybe I should, but I never felt it was extreme or eccentric enough. Fidel Castro always seemed to me a decent sort-of chap though, like comedian Ken Dodd, he tended to drastically over-run on his allotted stage time. He (I mean Fidel, not Doddy) ousted a particularly nasty dictator in Batista; this understandably annoyed the American Mafia, in particular Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky – and it is never a good idea to annoy powerful chaps like them. The modern-day equivalent might be a pub singer annoying Simon Cowell.

Having gained power, Fidel did approach US American President Eisenhower for aid and a meeting and was rebuffed. So it always seemed to me that Fidel was a decent bloke and the Americans brought on their own heads what followed. I mean, honestly, chaps in Langley getting CIA operatives to try to kill Fidel with an exploding cigar or to discredit him by trying to make his hair fall out… well, it’s the basis for a good comedy movie and I admire the lateral thinking, but leave the poor man alone.

I prefer holidays in quirky countries with eccentric dictators and there are precious few at the moment.

I did go to Turkmenistan in 1995 because President Saparmurat Niyazov sounded doolally. Sadly, he wasn’t, at that time, eccentric enough for my taste, though he did go slightly more impressively barking a little later: re-naming months of the year after members of his family and officially replacing the Turkmen word for “bread” with the name of his mother.

I like countries in a state of flux which will have changed utterly in 20 years time. Where is there to go now? Chechnya? Ingushetia? I’m not that mad. Somalia? You’re joking.

At Earls Court yesterday, the most interesting stand by far was Hinterland Travel, who were selling holidays to Afghanistan – their brochure was sub-titled “Discerning Adventures” which I don’t think anyone could dispute.

Around 1989, a friend suggested we go on holiday to Afghanistan because, she claimed,  “it’ll be safer in a couple of years or so”. It never did get safer. At the time she suggested it, I read that commercial jets were landing at Kabul Airport by making very tight spiral descents in an attempt to confuse any in-coming heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. There comes a point where “interesting” strays into “fucking dangerous” and, call me a wimp, but this was well over that line.

On 15th October this year, Hinterland Travel are offering a 14-day trip starting in Afghanistan costing £2,100. This adventure holiday for discerning travellers who are attracted to something slightly different from a Spanish beach holiday is called “The Retreat”. It starts in Kabul and aims to recreate the retreat of the British Army from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842.

A note at the back of the leaflet says: “We do insist that you take out some form of insurance… principally health and repatriation cover while recognising that you will not be covered for Afghanistan re War and Terrorism.”

Suddenly Bogota in 1983 doesn’t seem so dangerous.

Russian & Soviet sleeper agents in Western Europe and the death of Ché Guevara

British newspapers are getting their knickers in a twist over Katia Zatuliveter who was working as a Parliamentary Assistant and Researcher for Mike Hancock, the Liberal Democrat MP who is currently on police bail over an alleged indecent assault against a female constituent; he also sits on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Russia as well as the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. The Security Service aka MI5 apparently reckon Katia Zatuliveter is a Russian agent. Stranger things have happened.

WikiLeaks have also recently released documents claiming modern-day Russia is, in effect, run by the Russian Mafia.

In 1995, when I was in Turkmenistan, I met and later almost wrote the biography/autobiography of a man who had been a Soviet ‘sleeper’ agent working in South America and Western Europe during the Cold War. He had been part of a network of agents run on behalf of the Soviets by East Germany’s ‘Economic Planning Minister’ Erich Apel. But then something happened and, in this extract from tape recordings, he tells what happened to him one dark night in East Germany back in 1967, when cracks were starting to appear in the Soviet Union…

*** *** ***

It was all falling apart. Ché Guevara was abandoned on his operation in Bolivia in 1966/1967 and then killed by the Americans. Between 1965 and 1968 – between the ousting of Khrushchev and the attack on Prague – the Soviet Union was closing itself in and creating a big, expensive conventional army and a shadow economy. It was closing down its destabilising operation around the world.

By 1967, most of the people I had worked with in the Soviet-backed Network had already been caught – they had ‘disappeared’ – some had been captured by the West, some had been disposed of by the East. I was the last one left of those I knew. I was in West Berlin and had been asked to deliver an envelope to a town in East Germany. I knew the envelope contained microfilm, because I had made the same delivery before. I had no overnight visa for East Germany, so I had to get a train back to East Berlin by 11.00pm and return through the Friedrichstrasse security checkpoint into West Berlin before midnight, otherwise I was in trouble.

East German Security was separate from the police. Everything was separate. Everything was chaotic. There were so many different agencies all working separately from each other – sometimes in competition with each other. I didn’t have full coverage. It wasn’t as if I was officially working for the East German secret service. I was working for the Network but the complete implications of that were uncertain. I knew my network was handled by part of a section of East Germany’s security system and was linked to the Soviet Union, but things had changed when Erich Apel ‘committed suicide’ in 1965.

When Apel was made to die in 1965, it sent a signal to all marginal people like me. Apel had been one of the masterminds and controllers of our subversion operation and when it was said he ‘shot himself due to depression’ it was clear something was changing very fundamentally. Our entire project of undermining and fighting American power in the Third World – and ultimately in Europe – was falling apart.

I took a metro to Friedrichstrasse, then a cab to another station. At about 3.30pm, I stepped into the very last carriage of a train, despite orders that I should board a carriage in the centre. The train arrived in the German town of Frankfurt an der Oder at about 4.30pm, when it was already getting dark. Because I was in the last carriage, I didn’t get out directly in front of the station building as ordered. Instead, I walked along the platform and discretely down the side of the station building. There were three men in expensive leather coats waiting inside the station; there was a black saloon car waiting behind the station with its engine running. I went silently back to the railway line and walked along the tracks away from the station.

Then the men came looking for me.

When they couldn’t find me, they sent for the soldiers – the VoPo.

I was an irregular; I was a Westerner. I was not supposed to be there. I had an envelope with microfilm showing heavens knows what. The soldiers started to close in on where I was hiding. There was a little passage for water under the railway tracks – something just a little bigger than a pipe. I pulled my dark sweater up to cover the white collars of my shirt. I crawled into the narrow little culvert and held myself up in the top of the passage by pressing my hands and feet against the vertical side walls. It was totally dark outside the culvert. I heard the boots of the soldiers coming closer on the stones by the railway track and I was terrified because, by then, I knew I had been sent by my Controller into a trap. My own side were going to catch, imprison, torture and possibly shoot me.

The muscles in my arms and legs were straining, I was aware of my own heart pounding. I saw an armed VoPo soldier come to the end of the darkened passage in which I was hiding. The VoPo man was outlined by the lights behind him. He held a sub machine-gun in his hands, wore an East German uniform and his dull metal helmet reflected no light. I was hiding about six feet into and up in the roof of the passage. The armed soldier squatted down and silently looked in, waiting until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then he saw me, took one step into the passage, looked me in the eyes, pointing his gun at me, and did something very strange. He took his machine-gun and turned it behind his back, which was a very dangerous thing for him to do. I could have been armed, although I was not. He took a few more steps into the passage, completely unprotected, and looked up into my face. We could see each other’s eyes and he said to me in German:

“I am your contact. I have the stuff.”

He gave me the password and, at first, I didn’t believe it.

I gave him the envelope with the microfilm in it.

“But who are you working for? I asked him.

“The other side,” he told me.

“What other side?”

“It’s neither of the two you’re thinking of. The Americans. The Brits.”

Even as early as 1966 or 1967 the Soviet system was disintegrating. They had started to fight each other within the system. There was money from oil, money from gas, blackmailing. The Red Army became more important than the networks…

Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union decided it no longer wanted to be leader of the Third World or to convert and subvert other countries to socialist ideologies. Nor to become the world’s industrial leader. What became important was to keep power internally by having a strong army – the biggest army and navy in the world – and to sell resources for hard currency. Russia is a country full of natural resources. Why bother becoming a rich industrial nation or risk giving power to the workers? With the profits from the sale of natural resources, the Soviet Union could buy industrial products from other countries. Better clothes, better cars. Give the people enough to keep them quiet and pocket most of the vast profits yourself.

Politicians under Brezhnev could become personally immensely rich by selling gold, oil and gas. The Party of the Russian People became the Party of the Russian Mafia. Under Brezhnev, the shadow economy became more important than the real economy. Eventually, it ruined the country.

To disguise the fact they had opted out of Third World subversion, they armed everyone they could. They sent huge stockpiles of weapons to Mozambique, Egypt, Nicaragua so that the locals could fight their own wars without involving the Russian Army or Soviet-backed irregulars run by the East Germans, Czechs or Cubans.

As part of this process, Ché Guevara was betrayed by the Russians in 1967.