My neighbour, who I've known since she did a job somewhat like mine, but with audio typing, in the Bloomsbury Triangle, always seemed to have the most glamorous life. There were author parties and author lunches and famous names popping in and out of her office and dropped into our conversations like fish food to a bowl of hungry guppies. And then, since she was also married to a publisher, there were even author parties held in her kitchen, a short dance up the two times table from us and to which I was sometimes lucky enough to be invited.
She has now gone on to run her own list at another publishing house and I've moved up the ranks from restaurant critic to, erm (today) flat pack furniture assembler at the cutting edge of quality literary fiction. (And I do mean cutting - I've discovered that the bread knife makes an excellent box cutter and comes in handy for waving around in a threatening fashion when the bloody bolts won't align and the only man in the place whose salary scale is DIY appropriate informs me that all I need is an Allen key to put the sodding chair together. It's that simple. Apparently. Or he thinks I am.)
Flat pack is one of my few skills so I'm terribly frustrated that nothing is going into the right hole, as it were. I once wrote an article in the Times about how effective I felt putting together Ikea furniture - sort of Lara Croft with a Black & Decker Hammer Drill, and you can eat my dust, baby.
It usually makes me feel like I have balls, but today it has occurred to me that anyone with balls in this place is sitting on a chair, not assembling one. Having balls really means you delegate someone else to do it (or to be fair, around here it's a lot less overt than that - you simply leave it sitting around in a box until another person trying desperately to ingratiate themselves - okay me - caves in and does it for you). It's a whole new acronym - LITSE (Leave It To Someone Else as in - 'Hi, what are you doing this weekend?' 'Oh just a spot of LITSE, you know... while I'm down the pub for a swift half.')
I was struggling to force a ribbed dowel into a plinth (I hope you realise the lengths I am going to here not to resort to sexual innuendo) when Ubereditor came in and said really gratefully: 'Oh you are sweet to do this.'
'No I'm not sweet, I'm a psychotic seething pit of vicious impotent rage, I snapped as the offending orifices still refused to line up.
'Em, I assume with the furniture...' He said hopefully.
'Yes, yes, don't worry, go in peace,' I said to his back as I eventually succeeded in driving the tool home (okay, okay, I failed on the sexual innuendo front).
In the end I managed all but one fairly essential screw. For a small fee I might point out which chair you shouldn't sit in. But then again, I might not.
'So do you like working in publishing?' asks my ex-Faber friendly neighbourhood editor when I went round last night for a look-I've-got-a-proof-copy-of-my-book celebratory drink (not such a novelty to her when almost everyone she knows is an author - and we're glossing, or at least spot UV-ing over the fact that 'working' and 'publishing' in my case is perhaps not entirely accurate).
'I love it, really love it.' I say (thinking please, please don't ask what I actually do there.)
'I wondered whether I might see you at [insert any party you might have been to in the last month with the exception of the one I crashed the other night]...'
Me: incoherent, em well, yes, but, terribly busy, no time for parties, only open other people's invites, muttering, while still trying to look bright and included and really really plugged into the circuit, as oppose to really good with the rawlplugs, darling.
Then she told me she had been out the other night and won Jeremy Irons in a charity auction. As you do.
'Won?'
'Jeremy Irons?'
'Like, to keep?'
'No, just to have a bit of a drink with him...'
'Just?'
'And so what did you do with him?'
'Oh we had great crack.'
Me: Giant swill of wine and furious eating of crisps so as not to burst into tears of envy.
'So, Jeremy Irons, eh what about that?' I said eventually, stuffing even more crisps into my mouth so I wouldn't be tempted to tell her all about the sort of male booby prizes I've been pulling out of the bran tub lately, in competitions I hadn't even realised I had entered, for evenings when the male boobies don't bother to turn up.
'So what was he like?' I crunched, eventually, aiming for an airy, I-mix-with-slebs-al-the-time-darling, all-the-sodding -time, nonchalance.
'Lovely.'
'Mmn'. More and more and more crisps.
I couldn't top that.
I can't remember her ever telling me that she spent her days at Faber spreadeagled on the floor of her Ubereditor's office with a screwdriver in her hands. Surely this isn't what they mean by sitting at the feet of greatness?
No it doesn't, because the Ubereditor's gone out to lunch.
