No Naughty Bits?

What on earth made me say it? And having said it, WHY didn’t I retract it?

Here’s what happened.

I was interviewed by Macca last Sunday. For anyone not familiar with this legend of Australian public broadcasting, Macca’s early morning show – Australia All Over – goes out live across the country every week on ABC radio. Hundreds of thousands of people in the bush listen to Macca and it’s not just country people either. After the show I had an email from someone in Melbourne and a call from someone in Sydney.

Broadcaster and musician Ian McNamara – known affectionately to everyone as Macca

They were both too polite to mention what I shiver to recall but it can’t have escaped their notice that Macca posed the following question, part-way through the interview,

‘So, Deb Hunt, this book you’ve written then, Love in the Outback, tell me, is it…?’

Love in the Outback – for sale in bookshops in Australia/NZ and at http://www.booktopia.com.au

He left the question hanging and I responded to his raised eyebrow and quizzical smile with the following.

‘Oh no,’ I said, giggling with girlish enthusiasm. ‘There are no naughty bits in it.’

No naughty bits.

Those three words actually came out of my mouth, followed by another giggle in case any of Macca’s listeners had missed the first one.

What possessed me?? First, where did that simpering Victorian come from? And second, the book has SEX in it.

It gets worse.

CC has often suggested (jokingly) that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel when we met and he’s right, of course. I was. Thankfully though, I took my head out of the barrel for long enough to look up and realise CC was standing there, watching and patiently waiting for me to notice him.

I thought I’d share this joke with Macca…only I embellished it.

‘I wasn’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel when we met,’ I said. ‘Oh no, I’d emptied the barrel and I was searching under the nearest rock.’ Ha ha! Cue that giggle again. Cue an image of stagnant pond life in the listeners’ minds. Oh Lawks ‘a Lumley what fun we were having.

But what I failed to mention was that I DIDN’T FIND CC UNDER A ROCK. I found him when I stopped looking under rocks.

Macca didn’t seem to mind, and neither did CC, but I was in a lather let me tell you.

So if you were listening and you thought Love in the Outback was some kind of Mills and Boon romance, may I respectfully suggest that you skip pages six, eight, ten, eleven… (you get the idea) then skim over page 124 and DON’T, whatever you do, go anywhere near pages 141 to 143.

THERE ARE NAUGHTY BITS!

Holey Moley and Heavens ‘a Betsy…