oasis

En un artículo reciente en The independent sobre Steve Coogan, leo lo siguiente de abajo. Cuando aparece el sentido común es como un oasis.

In any case, his life appears quieter than it was in 2007 when the Daily Mail dubbed him "Coogan the Barbarian." He lives outside Brighton, near to Clare, his 16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, in a mansion he shares with Elle Basey, a 23-year-old lingerie model he met when he was guest-editing Loaded. "And there I, ah, I draw a veil," he says. "I don't like to bang on about my personal life." He spends his spare time at his house in the Lake District. "I don't like going to sunny places on holiday," he says, with a baffled sneer. "I love Britain." He walks and reads – classic-car magazines and history books. This weekend, he went cycling on the South Downs. "They are not particularly exciting things", he says. "But I like doing them."

His professional life is rather more serious, too. Comedy leaves him a bit cold these days. "You get older and you want something more. I do love comedy, I'd just rather use it as a device to do something of substance." He is already working on a new screenplay with Pope ("He's workmanlike, good at the big picture. I over-analyse, like the myopia of it.") loosely based on his childhood. And he is writing his autobiography. It will only cover half of his life, probably up to when Partridge was born.

"So I don't have to roll my sleeves up and start slagging off people I work with and upset them. I'll only have to mildly criticise my friends and family. And they won't sue me." Will it be a happy tale? "Yeah. I'll try and manufacture some sort of trauma obviously. Make it more interesting. The content will be slightly underwhelming – 90 per cent of my childhood was very happy. I wasn't buggered by a priest, no one molested me. The only thing that happened was I had to go bed early and miss Bouquet of Barbed Wire. And I wasn't allowed a new Chopper for Christmas."

He was a dreamy child, always fantasising about films, or life in London, where everyone "lived in Mayfair, in expensive apartments, and drove Bentleys." At school, he was a talented mimic, but a reluctant one. "I wasn't the performing monkey. There were people in my class who goofed around and I thought they were idiots," he says. He is not sure what he would have done, had he flopped in showbusiness. "I dread to think. I probably would have drifted into teaching. God knows, I've never had a proper job."