Ellee Seymour

I’m sure award winning producer Sam Mendes has no idea that homeless people recruited as extras for his latest film are being way paid below the going rate.

The film makers probably think that £50 a day is fortune for these down and outs, compared to the basic rate here of £78.40 per day, or £72.50 a day for this latest Stephen Fry drama, and my husband believes he was paid £75 a day to appear as an extra in this blockbuster - three meals a day included too.

It particularly goes against the grain as the Mendes film describes the tortured life ofStuart Shorter, an alcoholic with a violent past made famous in the bestseller Stuart: A Life Backwards.

Stuart Shorter was, when his biographer Alexander Masters first saw him, sitting on a square of cardboard on a pavement in Cambridge at Christmas time in 1998, aged only 30, broken-toothed, hairy, filthy, weird looking, the sort of man people edit out of their consciousness. I’m wondering if I might have walked by himself and not given a second glance.

The crew are filming in Cambridge for two weeks and some of the city’s homeless, including a couple who knew Stuart, have been recruited to play his friends. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for them, Mendes will make a few million from it, so come on, don’t be mean, pay them the going rate.

Well it is almost as good as the real thing, Rodin’s stunningly erotic statue of The Kiss, now on show at The Royal Academy of Arts.

It seems fitting to give it a plug today, my wedding anniversary. I’m not sure whether my husband Stephen would have said “I do” if he had known 17 years ago that he was marrying an addicted blogger.

Can you imagine the vicar saying: “Do you take this blogger to be your lawful wedded wife?” He might have run a mile had he known.

Back to The Kiss, the entwined couple are the adulterous, doomed lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, who were slain by Francesca’s outraged husband. They appear in Dante’s Inferno, which describes how their passion grew as they read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together. The book can just be seen in Paolo’s hand.

A tragic ending for such passion which grew over their shared love of literature, one I can totally understand, though I would have preferred a happier ending…..