Flash in the pan

Imagine the horror. You're at an event, you need the bathroom and you decide to use the conveniences. With a rudimentary understanding of toilet stall etiquette, you give each door a nudge to see if the lock is engaged. Finally, you find a door that's unlocked, it swings open and you're confronted with an image so nightmarish that it could see you living out the rest of your days with your arms tied behind your back taking your liquified food through a straw.

Courtney Love, a woman who seems to spend most of her time looking like an early make-up test for Heath Ledger's Joker, is sitting on the toilet, with her skirt around her ankles. Your eyes meet, and before you have a chance to apologise or run screaming from the room clawing at your face, she launches herself at you like a screaming banshee.

For pharmacist Sebastian Karnaby, this traumatic incident was no hypothetical scenario. He found himself face-to-sort-of-face with the one-time Mrs Cobain as he was trying to leave a party at the Standard Hotel in New York. Although Love has, in the past, been quite happy spending time in bathroom stalls with pharmacists, this was clearly a step too far, and she attacked Karnaby screaming, "I am going to get you thrown out!"

Reflecting on his brush with fame, the clearly traumatised Karnaby spoke for the entire world when he told reporters "I never wanted to see Courtney Love on the toilet. It wasn't a pretty sight."

Perhaps next time he's in a public bathroom, he'll be safer if he just calls Candyman's name five times in the mirror.