ISABELLE REES

Appearances: wherever Cam is to be found

Easily the most prolific of AP's Do the Write Thing regular guests, Isabelle Rees (aka Iz, Izzy and L'Elf) became Cam's special friend in exactly the same way as that episode of Animaniacs. Letter-packed envelopes would pursue the mildly nervous Dep Ed at every turn, as Isabelle flung her thoughts into the AP office like a poking conscience with a pen that was going down a steeply raked paper hill with freely spinning brake discs. Wherever we fell down, I Rees was there to spot our grievous errors, or have a one-sided chat over three or four packets of eight or nine pages if nothing much was going on that week.

Fittingly celebrated in the Fifty Glorious Years reader special, Isabelle was nonetheless quite cross with Cam for the trickery-pokery he exhibited with her accompanying photograph.

The photo, displaying I Rees leering through the glass panel of a heavy door, fingers fanning her facial pleasedness, was doctored with an illustration of the sea, the tum-rubbing comic effect that of the famous daily scribe trapped in a room filling rapidly with water. Isabelle's pouts next month were not reversed by the explanation that Cam had originally intended this to be a permanent Isabelle Rees-o-Meter, the tidal level rising and falling with the number of letters received from her in any given ish.

J Nash feels it is now safe to reveal that the entire ploy had been his idea all along, and the Rees-o-Meter had in fact been spiked by Cam as unnecessarily cruel.

On reflection, it would probably have been quite a good idea to have mentioned this before Isabelle assassinated Cam with a curare dart in 1998 and destroyed Holland from a spaceship.