It's the office party.
2 Brydges Place and the assembled cast of Pedantic Books, all 27 of us crushed onto small kitchen chairs and jammed around three tables.
Mr T says there will be no placement this year and that we may all sit where we like. Damn it. I rely on the placement to ensure that someone actually sits next to me. After years of the Arab Charity Dinner circuit where the only empty place in the room was always beside mine, I have something of a complex about seating plans.
But I needn't have worried. A few sips of champagne later he looks at me, twitching with discomfort and asks anxiously: 'How do you feel about the placement, is it a good thing? It won't take a minute, it's all in my head...'
I nod vigourously in an encouraging manner and he scuttles off oozing relief at being able to control our dining fate, and simultaneously ensure he sits next to people he feels comfortable with.
I am in Scotch Corner with all the other company jocks. Mr T likes to isolate us for our own safety and comfort. You know why. It's that strange phenomenon whereby people catch the accent after five minutes in your company and start oching and ayeing and thinking it's charming. At least we are less likely to cuff one another, except in a familial, Saturday night after the pub sort of way.
Wine flows, we do the annual circular cracker pull. There are speeches. There are awards which, this year, as Head of the Pedantic Press Yearbook Committee, have been in my gift. There are some invisible guns aimed at my head by disgruntled employees and some real water-filled guns similarly employed (pray - who gave the bloody ubereditor a water pistol and then sat him behind me - this is your idea of a placement Mr T?) The Secret Santa presents are passed out, as do several employees. Love is in the air. There is hugging. There is kissing. There are claims of undying devotion.
'See you, Marion, see you - you're my mouth...' (this sounds kinkier than it was, I assure you) slurs one of the girls as she pins me to the bathroom wall and insists on putting make up on my face. Note to self: Never let a drunk woman put make up on you, not even one who likes you.
'No, it's fine, it's very discrete,' says the lovely Alice, patting my arm reassuringly and wiping off streaks of eyeshadow with spit as I emerge with red dots of blusher on each cheek and dark purple lipstick. I look like the pissed undead.
I'm supposed to go to my ex-husband's posh Arab cousin's house in Knightsbridge after this. How on earth am I going to rock up to their Levantine palace in a cheap red frock from New Look as the ajnabia (foreign) ex-wife who has had the misfortune to lose her husband in the last year, staggeringly drunk and with a make-over from an even more inebriated colleague? The women will all be admiring their reflections in their rubies and muttering haram under their breath thinking that it was a wonder he kept me this long.
'Sure, I was just giving you a wee bit of a shimmer. I might have been just a wee bit heavy handed, but it looks grand,' she says, grabbing my head in an arm lock.
The Ubereditor comes over and places his hands on my shoulders in what, for a second, I mistake for affection. 'Just remember that I'm the Uber and you're the Unter,' he says darkly. If this was a panto the audience would hiss.
Lest I forget, huh?
Yanking out sack after sack of old manuscripts from the office, laying out post tenderly on other people's desks, organising the Zac Goldsmith Award for Worst Carbon Footprint travel plans for trips that I never take myself, making coffee I don't drink, booking lunches in restaurants that I don't eat and fielding daily calls from tutting and, often rude, agents would not, of course, have alerted me to the fact that I was at the bottom of the pile on which others nestle supreme.
But if it had escaped my notice, I was glad to be so gallantly reminded.
Uber and Mr T then drift off to the bar, deep in conversation. I've never seen two men so entranced by each other's company. Mr T offers his little boy grin of delight in reponse to something Uber has said and replies with rapid fire delight. The laugh, they giggle, the slap each other jovially on the shoulder. I've hurt my shoulder carrying out the fricking garbage. Glamorous Editor and I watch them from the cold bar stool of Unterland. 'If a man spoke to me with that expression in his eyes, I would think he was in love with me,' I sigh, but they only have eyes for each other.
In fact, even my current love disinterest doesn't look at me like that. I just had an email from him excusing his long silence because he's had his mother staying with him for two weeks. I mean, come on - a wife I would understand - but his mother? Uber and Unter. Loud and clear.
I didn't make it to the posh cocktail party in Knightsbridge. I fear I will never be invited back into the ex-family fold. Never mind. The next novel is going to put paid to that in any case.
I'm spending Christmas at home cuddling up to my own nest of vipers, catching up on my own blog and will return, after 10 days in Salvador over New Year, on the 5th of January.
Happy everything and see you next year...
Thursday 18 December 2008
Dance me to the edge of time
Liz sent me the link to the event for something called Guilty Pleasures which she assured me was absolutely perfect for women like us.
'Are you sure? It sounds like a fetish club,' I said.
'Nooo, it's much cooler than that - lots of retro disco stuff from the seventies and full of people our age.'
'Really?' (Nothing is full of people our age except Weightwatchers, or at a pinch, AA.)
'Yes, really, I'm telling you - look at the website, they've even got Davina McCall as a special Guest Star, and it's Panto night so you can dress up if you like...'
'Erm, I think I might pass on the fancy dress.' (Suddenly the fetish club sounds a better alternative. I mean, panto? Frankly I'm not that keen on Davina McCall either.)
Nevertheless, Saturday night arrives as surely as fat women at a church hall on weigh-in day and there we are - four fortysomethings (artistic license, okay - work with me here) - a gallery owner, a journalist, an academic and me, sitting in a restaurant in Camden on our second bottle of wine, waiting for it to be late enough to turn up at the club. I'm already yawning my head off. Guilty Pleasures? Mine is going to bed with a boxed set of an The West Wing and my laptop at nine thirty.
Liz, the journalist, has brought a friend - a thin blonde who is another soon-to-be-single woman. I ask her what she does for a living.
'Oh I'm a scientist,' she says, 'I work on brain development.' She smiles. 'And you?'
Well top that girl.
A ruddy scientist? Who says that? Well, apart from real-life scientists, I suppose, sensing that the reply 'answering the phone at Pedantic Press' isn't going to trump her and so I play the creative card and bang on about my novel instead.
'You were writing a novel too, weren't you? When you were on maternity leave with your second child...' prompts Liz, intimating that Ms Scientist knocked it off as a little sideline hobby between breast feeds while, when I was having babies, it took all my brain cells to remember if I was on the left one or the right one whenever the baby cried.
'I might go back to it someday,' she says, like it's a bit of knitting she has put down at the side of her chair. We in publishing are holding our breath.
Okay, so no points there for originality, Marion. As I know - everybody is writing a freaking novel.
'And I also work for a publishing company and write the blog,' I add, hoping to impress.
'Mmm,' she looks puzzled, then asks with a pained expression: 'But why do you want to externalise everything?'
I glance at Liz who shrugs in silent solidarity We're hacks. If we didn't externalise everything we'd have nothing to write about. Liz is an amazing generous and talented writer who could tackle any number of weighty subjects in searingly insightful depth, but all her editor ever asks her to talk about is her latest hair cut.
Clever birds, she seems to say, what can you do with them? I drink more wine and look at my watch as the minutes tick slowly away and the evening drags its arse like a dog with worms on through the long night of the cheapest thing on the menu, the mint tea (no caffeine, it might keep us awake) and the pudding we all say we don't want as though the idea of dessert was akin to converting to Islam (this, I know from experience, is actually much less painful than eating a bad taramisu); and in any case, it's an empty gesture because I already know that later I'm going to come home and eat all the marron glace I got for my birthday.
The Scientist, it occurs to me, is my husband in a frock, but much prettier. She's the one with passion for her work, the driven genius, the one with the intellectual brownie points and also the main breadwinner. She certainly seems to be the person with the balls in the partnership. I hear her talk about her break-up, which she's initiating, feeling inadequate, wishing I could be so adamantly decisive about what or who I didn't want instead of choking on nostalgia for a long-dead relationship and generally being that woman you see crying on the bus who makes you glad you picked up a copy of London Lite so you can hide your head in it and pretend not to notice.
She's like a different species. She commutes to London in the morning on a train full of men reading the Financial Times. She claims the journey is ideal as it allows her to get lots of work done. When not weeping on the bus, I hold a manuscript on my lap and tend to sleep.
I am stuffed full of envy, admiration and half-baked bread rolls laden with butter in equal measures, and only slightly mollified when she lights up a cigarette on the way to the club which I convince myself is the reason why she is so thin, and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she is not going to go back to her commuter belt bedroom and eat a box of candied chestnuts.
At the dance, it is indeed Panto Season. It is also, apparently, Club 13-30, and rather than being for geriatrics like us as I had been promised it is, instead, full of gum-chewing teenagers dressed in skimpy corsets from the Anne Summer's Winter Wonderland Prostitute Collection where, whatever it is that you're queuing outside Father Christmas's grotto for, it's not a Polaroid. It's like there's been a competition to see how little you can wear and still look terrible. There are legions of pretty girls descending on the roped off foyer of the old Camden Palais, none of whom seem to own overcoats or, in many cases, hosiery. There is also an alarming number of pirates.
It's like a casting session for the budget production of Peter Pan where you wear your Adidas sweatpants tucksd into your socks, chuck on a frilly shirt, an eyepatch and a hat with a feather and - hey presto - look Jim lad, there be treasure in them there hills.
I suddenly don't just feel Middle Aged, but old enough to qualify for a bus pass.
'Did you fancy a pirate?' asks Liz.
'Not so much,' I answer, as the other alternative, a man in a frock - in this specific instance a large pink tutu, wanders past all loved up and strokes my hair.
'I quite like a chunky chap, myself,' she sighs, looking wistfully at three overweight and over thirty men with bellies like John Prescot's chins hanging over their, mercifully, non Pirate-style trousers. They make me feel small and delicate. Unfortunately the chunky chap doesn't usually like women like me.'
Well, not these ones anyway. They later turn out to be part of the floor show, dressed in tiny lurex swimming shorts doing a very camp pole dance to 'I don't want a lot for Christmas'. The audience cheers at what, to them, is a novelty act, and for us older women has more or less been bedtime, but with boxers, for the last twenty odd years.
God, I'm glad this isn't my life, I think as yet another gang of young buckaneers walk past and shuffle vaguely rhythmically in a circle which, as the room fills up, and the promise of music before 1975 fails to materialise, gets smaller and smaller until the room is a veritable huddle of twitching, stomping pirates, Santa sluts and fairy whores, a wand in one hand and a Bacardi Breezer. Liz is smiling blissfully and repeatedly hailing a cab which seems to be her main dance move. I close my eyes so I can't see myself being fifty as the young, or at least those who can still focus their eyes, look at us with relief, saying to themselves, 'thank Christ you're not my mum'.
'Sorry, it's usually a much older crowd,' yells Liz at airport runway levels, which still comes over as mute mouthing given the volume of the music that, except for the odd festive blast of Wham, none of us have ever heard before. 'But it'll be great to write about in your blog,' she screams.
Indeed.
It can all be externalised in the morning.
But in the meanwhile I've missed the final of both Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor.
This is time I'm never going to get back again.
Much like my youth.
Thank *
'Are you sure? It sounds like a fetish club,' I said.
'Nooo, it's much cooler than that - lots of retro disco stuff from the seventies and full of people our age.'
'Really?' (Nothing is full of people our age except Weightwatchers, or at a pinch, AA.)
'Yes, really, I'm telling you - look at the website, they've even got Davina McCall as a special Guest Star, and it's Panto night so you can dress up if you like...'
'Erm, I think I might pass on the fancy dress.' (Suddenly the fetish club sounds a better alternative. I mean, panto? Frankly I'm not that keen on Davina McCall either.)
Nevertheless, Saturday night arrives as surely as fat women at a church hall on weigh-in day and there we are - four fortysomethings (artistic license, okay - work with me here) - a gallery owner, a journalist, an academic and me, sitting in a restaurant in Camden on our second bottle of wine, waiting for it to be late enough to turn up at the club. I'm already yawning my head off. Guilty Pleasures? Mine is going to bed with a boxed set of an The West Wing and my laptop at nine thirty.
Liz, the journalist, has brought a friend - a thin blonde who is another soon-to-be-single woman. I ask her what she does for a living.
'Oh I'm a scientist,' she says, 'I work on brain development.' She smiles. 'And you?'
Well top that girl.
A ruddy scientist? Who says that? Well, apart from real-life scientists, I suppose, sensing that the reply 'answering the phone at Pedantic Press' isn't going to trump her and so I play the creative card and bang on about my novel instead.
'You were writing a novel too, weren't you? When you were on maternity leave with your second child...' prompts Liz, intimating that Ms Scientist knocked it off as a little sideline hobby between breast feeds while, when I was having babies, it took all my brain cells to remember if I was on the left one or the right one whenever the baby cried.
'I might go back to it someday,' she says, like it's a bit of knitting she has put down at the side of her chair. We in publishing are holding our breath.
Okay, so no points there for originality, Marion. As I know - everybody is writing a freaking novel.
'And I also work for a publishing company and write the blog,' I add, hoping to impress.
'Mmm,' she looks puzzled, then asks with a pained expression: 'But why do you want to externalise everything?'
I glance at Liz who shrugs in silent solidarity We're hacks. If we didn't externalise everything we'd have nothing to write about. Liz is an amazing generous and talented writer who could tackle any number of weighty subjects in searingly insightful depth, but all her editor ever asks her to talk about is her latest hair cut.
Clever birds, she seems to say, what can you do with them? I drink more wine and look at my watch as the minutes tick slowly away and the evening drags its arse like a dog with worms on through the long night of the cheapest thing on the menu, the mint tea (no caffeine, it might keep us awake) and the pudding we all say we don't want as though the idea of dessert was akin to converting to Islam (this, I know from experience, is actually much less painful than eating a bad taramisu); and in any case, it's an empty gesture because I already know that later I'm going to come home and eat all the marron glace I got for my birthday.
The Scientist, it occurs to me, is my husband in a frock, but much prettier. She's the one with passion for her work, the driven genius, the one with the intellectual brownie points and also the main breadwinner. She certainly seems to be the person with the balls in the partnership. I hear her talk about her break-up, which she's initiating, feeling inadequate, wishing I could be so adamantly decisive about what or who I didn't want instead of choking on nostalgia for a long-dead relationship and generally being that woman you see crying on the bus who makes you glad you picked up a copy of London Lite so you can hide your head in it and pretend not to notice.
She's like a different species. She commutes to London in the morning on a train full of men reading the Financial Times. She claims the journey is ideal as it allows her to get lots of work done. When not weeping on the bus, I hold a manuscript on my lap and tend to sleep.
I am stuffed full of envy, admiration and half-baked bread rolls laden with butter in equal measures, and only slightly mollified when she lights up a cigarette on the way to the club which I convince myself is the reason why she is so thin, and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she is not going to go back to her commuter belt bedroom and eat a box of candied chestnuts.
At the dance, it is indeed Panto Season. It is also, apparently, Club 13-30, and rather than being for geriatrics like us as I had been promised it is, instead, full of gum-chewing teenagers dressed in skimpy corsets from the Anne Summer's Winter Wonderland Prostitute Collection where, whatever it is that you're queuing outside Father Christmas's grotto for, it's not a Polaroid. It's like there's been a competition to see how little you can wear and still look terrible. There are legions of pretty girls descending on the roped off foyer of the old Camden Palais, none of whom seem to own overcoats or, in many cases, hosiery. There is also an alarming number of pirates.
It's like a casting session for the budget production of Peter Pan where you wear your Adidas sweatpants tucksd into your socks, chuck on a frilly shirt, an eyepatch and a hat with a feather and - hey presto - look Jim lad, there be treasure in them there hills.
I suddenly don't just feel Middle Aged, but old enough to qualify for a bus pass.
'Did you fancy a pirate?' asks Liz.
'Not so much,' I answer, as the other alternative, a man in a frock - in this specific instance a large pink tutu, wanders past all loved up and strokes my hair.
'I quite like a chunky chap, myself,' she sighs, looking wistfully at three overweight and over thirty men with bellies like John Prescot's chins hanging over their, mercifully, non Pirate-style trousers. They make me feel small and delicate. Unfortunately the chunky chap doesn't usually like women like me.'
Well, not these ones anyway. They later turn out to be part of the floor show, dressed in tiny lurex swimming shorts doing a very camp pole dance to 'I don't want a lot for Christmas'. The audience cheers at what, to them, is a novelty act, and for us older women has more or less been bedtime, but with boxers, for the last twenty odd years.
God, I'm glad this isn't my life, I think as yet another gang of young buckaneers walk past and shuffle vaguely rhythmically in a circle which, as the room fills up, and the promise of music before 1975 fails to materialise, gets smaller and smaller until the room is a veritable huddle of twitching, stomping pirates, Santa sluts and fairy whores, a wand in one hand and a Bacardi Breezer. Liz is smiling blissfully and repeatedly hailing a cab which seems to be her main dance move. I close my eyes so I can't see myself being fifty as the young, or at least those who can still focus their eyes, look at us with relief, saying to themselves, 'thank Christ you're not my mum'.
'Sorry, it's usually a much older crowd,' yells Liz at airport runway levels, which still comes over as mute mouthing given the volume of the music that, except for the odd festive blast of Wham, none of us have ever heard before. 'But it'll be great to write about in your blog,' she screams.
Indeed.
It can all be externalised in the morning.
But in the meanwhile I've missed the final of both Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor.
This is time I'm never going to get back again.
Much like my youth.
Thank *
Saturday 13 December 2008
I found my horn
Sheila's friend has written a play.
'It's in some theatre in Soho,' says Eva. 'Do you want to go?'
'Yes,' I reply.
I say yes to everything these days; another drink, a rave in Tufnell Park (which turns out to be an investment banker with decks in his sitting room and the St Paul's school chess club circa 1975, grown up and living in North London), 'optional' Karaoke for a friend's book launch which I fear will quickly become obligatory, and dinner with my ex-husband. Of these, only the last was a really bad idea. And another drink? Keep them coming.
So yes, a play what I wrote by a friend of Sheila. Why not?
'Apparently, it's about him taking up the trumpet,' elaborates Eva.
Oh my. The trumpet. I'm having second thoughts. My throat hurts. I may be coming down with something. It's about a trumpet? Chess geeks are metamorphosing into Band Geeks and I'm going to watch a man play a brass instrument in a small enclosed space in Soho, and this, this is my social life...?
In fact, it's the French Horn (ah well then, that makes it sooooo much more fun, forget I ever had reservations).
In fact, Sheila's friend has written a book called I Found my Horn about learning to play the French Horn which was a Radio 4 book of the week that has been turned into a play.
In fact, Sheila's friend, it turns out, is also an arts correspondent for big masthead newspapers and the author of several other books of boy's own adventures. And - I'll slip this, hidden here at the end of a paragraph instead of giving it one of its own - finally... Sheila's friend is also rather good looking in a choir-boy, captain of cricket, Evelyn Waughish sort-of-way.
'But apparently, he only likes really thin women,' says Eva in the bar where the four of us assemble, three lost wifes and Liz, a no-thank you, never fancied it journalist for the Evening Standard. Sheila is the only one of us who might squeeze into that category, so none of the rest of us even bother sucking in our stomachs or our cheeks. We're over it. Though more tact might have been called for Eva.
'I wasn't auditioning. I was merely commenting. He's also about twelve.' I protest (and I'm not that fat. I could lose weight.)
And succesful, I might have added. Since the Italian has gone to live in Paris where he's having 'a very very stressy life...difficult times...very difficult' (nice to know some things never change) I seem to meet only retired men who have opted out of meaningful work and already opened a bottle of red and knocked out their pipe for the long evening of the rest of their lives.
At my party last week several of the women came up to me during the course of the evening asking; 'Is that the Italian?' of my painter friend Lino who is, indeed, Italian but does not come with the prefix the. 'So what's wrong with him? He's single.'
Unfortunately he's not. Like every other man, except the retired ones, he has a girlfriend. I feel like one of those out of work actors at a Hollywood party who walks off in mid conversation every time he discovers that his interlocutor works in human resources or catering instead of being a producer or a casting director. Though in my case it's that second sentence that begins with the word 'we' and is usually followed by 'can't get a babysitter', 'live in the country' or 'have just come back from a year in Nepal' that gets me on hte move like Aslan. Unless the 'we' is called Jeremy or Klauss. Thank God for gay men. Not a popular refrain in the bible belt I guess, but if I were a country and western singer it would be my current theme tune.
Sheila's friend also has a friend. A man. Out on his own on a Friday night. But here it comes, second sentence, as regular as clockwork: 'We were both supposed to come but my wife is at home waiting for the Christmas tree to be delivered'. Now why didn't I think of that excuse?
The play, of course, was funny, witty, touching in parts (okay the parts where he's looking at old wedding photos - I have all my family albums in the attic locked up like the last strain of TB) and a great performance by actor Jonathan Guy Lewis. I smiled so much my cheeks hurt and left the theatre feeling a lot happier than I had when I went it. Though another drink was still a good idea. There is something intrinsically tragi-comic about hearing any musical instrument played badly - you laugh even though you know you really shouldn't, but you can't help it.
Once, when I was married, we went to my husband's cousin home for dinner. They lived across two apartments knocked together in the Nash Terraces overlooking Regent's Park in a palace of marble and looted Arabic treasures from Syrian palaces and Indian temples. There were ancient Moorish doors mounted on carefully reproduced mosaic walls from Tunisia that led nowhere, and other studded Turkish gates turned into coffee tables on which were silver coasters and bonbons in elaborate gilded bowls. Drink flowed and cigarettes were circulated. Food came out of the kitchen in wave upon wave of deliciousness, and in the midst, perched on one of the overstuffed sofas, of which there were about ten, sat the cousin's plastic wife, her lips that merely twitched instead of smiled ringed with dark lip-liner, her eyes elaborately made up, and her hair, like her brow, that never moved.
'Zo Marrrion, How are zee cheeldren?' She would ask every time we met.
'Fine,' I'd reply and stuff another handful of fustuk into my mouth (nuts to you and me)
'Ah good, good, very nice...' She would nod and that would be that for the rest of the night.
Until one evening the cousin announced that his wife had been taking piano lessons and sure enough, at the far and distant L of the room sat a huge glistening grand Bechstein. He also insisted she play for us.
'How wonderful,' we exclaimed, politely as she rose, smoothed her skin-tight leather skirt and tiptoed in her Jimmy Choos towards the piano, removed a hundred silver framed pictures of her husband with every tea-towel head Arab Princeling and Potentate you can think of, and then sat down.
A few scales followed and then, haltingly she began to play Fleur de Lis.
You know how it goes, hum it in your head to the end of the first phrase and then segue into Feelings by Morris Albert, and don't hit a right note more than one in every five. Repeat and continue for three years.
We were sitting at the end of the salon, out of sight of the performer, but her husband was opposite us on the Turkish divan, littered with tiny tassled cushions, oblivious to the crashing notes, the flats, the sharps, the chords in places where no chords existed, the absence of melody, and merely nodded at us, smiling proudly, God bless him.
I held my breath, willing her on, longing for her to hit her stride like the actor on the stage who finally climbed the K477 but no, she just kept slipping down the hillside and inevitably, I began to giggle. More nuts, quickly. Then my husband began to giggle with me. I swallowed some vodka, and pretended to be smiling, manically, and my husband lit a cigarette and walked to look out the window, as though in shoulder-shaking contemplation of the trees in Regent's Park. Meanwhile the cousin was still grinning and began conducting her; ' Ya habibti, b'janin, mabruk...' he called out over the massacre. (My love, it's beautiful, well done - love is deaf as well as blind.)
I stuffed more and more nuts into my mouth and thought about the things men are supposed to think about to delay sex - dead babies, goal averages (not helpful if you know nothing about football) and anyway delaying sex was not my problem, it was laughing out loud that I was worried about...that at not spraying pistachios across the table, or inhaling them and choking to death.
Mercifully it stopped and we clapped enthusiastically, and I said something inane which I pretended to find funny just to get out all the stored up laughter and my husband joined in as though he was insane.
During the play, however, the belly laughs were positively encouraged.
I have the oddest feeling that Sheila's friend was counting them.
'It's in some theatre in Soho,' says Eva. 'Do you want to go?'
'Yes,' I reply.
I say yes to everything these days; another drink, a rave in Tufnell Park (which turns out to be an investment banker with decks in his sitting room and the St Paul's school chess club circa 1975, grown up and living in North London), 'optional' Karaoke for a friend's book launch which I fear will quickly become obligatory, and dinner with my ex-husband. Of these, only the last was a really bad idea. And another drink? Keep them coming.
So yes, a play what I wrote by a friend of Sheila. Why not?
'Apparently, it's about him taking up the trumpet,' elaborates Eva.
Oh my. The trumpet. I'm having second thoughts. My throat hurts. I may be coming down with something. It's about a trumpet? Chess geeks are metamorphosing into Band Geeks and I'm going to watch a man play a brass instrument in a small enclosed space in Soho, and this, this is my social life...?
In fact, it's the French Horn (ah well then, that makes it sooooo much more fun, forget I ever had reservations).
In fact, Sheila's friend has written a book called I Found my Horn about learning to play the French Horn which was a Radio 4 book of the week that has been turned into a play.
In fact, Sheila's friend, it turns out, is also an arts correspondent for big masthead newspapers and the author of several other books of boy's own adventures. And - I'll slip this, hidden here at the end of a paragraph instead of giving it one of its own - finally... Sheila's friend is also rather good looking in a choir-boy, captain of cricket, Evelyn Waughish sort-of-way.
'But apparently, he only likes really thin women,' says Eva in the bar where the four of us assemble, three lost wifes and Liz, a no-thank you, never fancied it journalist for the Evening Standard. Sheila is the only one of us who might squeeze into that category, so none of the rest of us even bother sucking in our stomachs or our cheeks. We're over it. Though more tact might have been called for Eva.
'I wasn't auditioning. I was merely commenting. He's also about twelve.' I protest (and I'm not that fat. I could lose weight.)
And succesful, I might have added. Since the Italian has gone to live in Paris where he's having 'a very very stressy life...difficult times...very difficult' (nice to know some things never change) I seem to meet only retired men who have opted out of meaningful work and already opened a bottle of red and knocked out their pipe for the long evening of the rest of their lives.
At my party last week several of the women came up to me during the course of the evening asking; 'Is that the Italian?' of my painter friend Lino who is, indeed, Italian but does not come with the prefix the. 'So what's wrong with him? He's single.'
Unfortunately he's not. Like every other man, except the retired ones, he has a girlfriend. I feel like one of those out of work actors at a Hollywood party who walks off in mid conversation every time he discovers that his interlocutor works in human resources or catering instead of being a producer or a casting director. Though in my case it's that second sentence that begins with the word 'we' and is usually followed by 'can't get a babysitter', 'live in the country' or 'have just come back from a year in Nepal' that gets me on hte move like Aslan. Unless the 'we' is called Jeremy or Klauss. Thank God for gay men. Not a popular refrain in the bible belt I guess, but if I were a country and western singer it would be my current theme tune.
Sheila's friend also has a friend. A man. Out on his own on a Friday night. But here it comes, second sentence, as regular as clockwork: 'We were both supposed to come but my wife is at home waiting for the Christmas tree to be delivered'. Now why didn't I think of that excuse?
The play, of course, was funny, witty, touching in parts (okay the parts where he's looking at old wedding photos - I have all my family albums in the attic locked up like the last strain of TB) and a great performance by actor Jonathan Guy Lewis. I smiled so much my cheeks hurt and left the theatre feeling a lot happier than I had when I went it. Though another drink was still a good idea. There is something intrinsically tragi-comic about hearing any musical instrument played badly - you laugh even though you know you really shouldn't, but you can't help it.
Once, when I was married, we went to my husband's cousin home for dinner. They lived across two apartments knocked together in the Nash Terraces overlooking Regent's Park in a palace of marble and looted Arabic treasures from Syrian palaces and Indian temples. There were ancient Moorish doors mounted on carefully reproduced mosaic walls from Tunisia that led nowhere, and other studded Turkish gates turned into coffee tables on which were silver coasters and bonbons in elaborate gilded bowls. Drink flowed and cigarettes were circulated. Food came out of the kitchen in wave upon wave of deliciousness, and in the midst, perched on one of the overstuffed sofas, of which there were about ten, sat the cousin's plastic wife, her lips that merely twitched instead of smiled ringed with dark lip-liner, her eyes elaborately made up, and her hair, like her brow, that never moved.
'Zo Marrrion, How are zee cheeldren?' She would ask every time we met.
'Fine,' I'd reply and stuff another handful of fustuk into my mouth (nuts to you and me)
'Ah good, good, very nice...' She would nod and that would be that for the rest of the night.
Until one evening the cousin announced that his wife had been taking piano lessons and sure enough, at the far and distant L of the room sat a huge glistening grand Bechstein. He also insisted she play for us.
'How wonderful,' we exclaimed, politely as she rose, smoothed her skin-tight leather skirt and tiptoed in her Jimmy Choos towards the piano, removed a hundred silver framed pictures of her husband with every tea-towel head Arab Princeling and Potentate you can think of, and then sat down.
A few scales followed and then, haltingly she began to play Fleur de Lis.
You know how it goes, hum it in your head to the end of the first phrase and then segue into Feelings by Morris Albert, and don't hit a right note more than one in every five. Repeat and continue for three years.
We were sitting at the end of the salon, out of sight of the performer, but her husband was opposite us on the Turkish divan, littered with tiny tassled cushions, oblivious to the crashing notes, the flats, the sharps, the chords in places where no chords existed, the absence of melody, and merely nodded at us, smiling proudly, God bless him.
I held my breath, willing her on, longing for her to hit her stride like the actor on the stage who finally climbed the K477 but no, she just kept slipping down the hillside and inevitably, I began to giggle. More nuts, quickly. Then my husband began to giggle with me. I swallowed some vodka, and pretended to be smiling, manically, and my husband lit a cigarette and walked to look out the window, as though in shoulder-shaking contemplation of the trees in Regent's Park. Meanwhile the cousin was still grinning and began conducting her; ' Ya habibti, b'janin, mabruk...' he called out over the massacre. (My love, it's beautiful, well done - love is deaf as well as blind.)
I stuffed more and more nuts into my mouth and thought about the things men are supposed to think about to delay sex - dead babies, goal averages (not helpful if you know nothing about football) and anyway delaying sex was not my problem, it was laughing out loud that I was worried about...that at not spraying pistachios across the table, or inhaling them and choking to death.
Mercifully it stopped and we clapped enthusiastically, and I said something inane which I pretended to find funny just to get out all the stored up laughter and my husband joined in as though he was insane.
During the play, however, the belly laughs were positively encouraged.
I have the oddest feeling that Sheila's friend was counting them.
What would make you run?
After jumping in a taxi I finally got out 10 minutes and 7 quid later, ten yards from where I had hailed it and just ran, in three inch heels, all the way to Centrepoint where my friend Pierre was supposedly waiting for me in his club Paramount on the 32nd Floor. Except that he wasn’t. And another fifteen minutes later it occurred to me the guy on reception hadn’t told him I was there, so we did the modern thing and texted each other from either side of the same ruddy bar, and eventually another minion came and walked me to his table where we enjoyed a glass of wine and the view.
But the evening was already backed up like the runway at Heathrow. I was late, he was late, I was going to be even later getting to literary friend’s party, so I knocked the wine back like it was a shot of tequila and was outside in the street before I could say ‘where’s your wife?’, looking for another cab to sweep me down to Shaftesbury avenue.
Yet another cab and £5 later, I ended up walking.
Briskly.
Now, the coat I was wearing is just about warm enough for an hour’s seated journey in a draughty bus, but soon starts to feel like one woman’s answer to global warming when I actually have to move in it. So, between the plush fake fur and the rapidly necked glass of wine, and my heels which were clomping down the street like a Nazi March Past, I must have looked simply glowing and bristling with purpose as I walked, ran, walked, teetered, walked ran, all the way to Chinatown.
Inside, well…
Party amnesia, which I hsd been suffering from until that very second, vanishes, and I suddenly awake from the deep coma of benign love of humanity, standing in a room crammed with people, silently screaming – where in God’s name am I, who are you all, why did I come?
Luckily, literary friend is standing in the doorway with a bottle of Bolly talking to a fantastic woman, who is funny and sharp and clever and subversive, and also has the kind of chest that would make Nigella feel inadequate and stop men from ever watching your lips move. Actually forget men – who in any case were mostly standing around in clumps, riveted by each other – I was entranced, and just as riveted by the twins in all their cashmere clad, ten-past two glory.
I didn't even feel jealous - well not for more than about ten minutes. I mean. there’s no point (or maybe it’s precisely because of the points). It would be like meeting Madonna and whimpering because your leotard doesn’t divide you neatly into three Kraft Cheese slices. It just doesn’t, okay? That’s not you. Never will be. You’ve entered a different world of different beings and all you can do is salute in admiration.
Every now and again, someone would push past and Mary-Kate would brush against me, and it seemed as though each time I lifted my glass to my mouth my knuckles would inevitably brush against Ashley. It was like being in a goose down pillow fight. I was, quite simply, in a cocoon of bosoms, none of which belonged to me.
Forget what I said when I was reading Sorrows of an American, I get it, I finally get breasts… What I don’t know is why so many men deal with them as though they are balancing the pressure on the central heating,
Sadly, I also get pushed out of my comfort zone when a new girl arrives and I reluctantly have to cede my spot in the sun and go to the cold nether reaches of the room where, at least, there is food.
But darn it, Jeremy Paxman is standing in the the corner next to the sausages which I deeply resent.
I feel if you are a famous television personality, it really behoves you not to park yourself next to party food which the timid, monosyllabic mini-brains such as myself long to eat but are then afraid to approach lest they look like sycophants.
‘Oh a teeny chipolata and ketchup, how wonderfully retro and delicious, and… my goodness.. what a surprise, Jeremy, how are you darling, here’s my starter for ten…’
Only the brave and David Willets, one of our Pedantic Press authors, dared crest the hill, but Willets was dazzling him with book ideas and all I wanted was a sausage.
I watch wistfully from afar until I found literary friend gently blowing smoke into the blissfully smiling face of a historian who, even with his eyes closed in what can only be described as rapture, I recognised from last year’s party (I’m a loss to the Scotland Yard Line up with my powers of facial recall). He was one of the people who spoke in fluent Xhonsa and clicked a lot about Hungary while I thought, please, please, please, don’t ask me to comment intelligently.
I reintroduce myself and amazingly he remembers me from the previous year and not because I had a strong Scottish accent and guacamole on my nose (or at least, he failed to point either of these out). Instead we bond on our similar ages and the discovery that he had gone to the same primary school my kids attended (one way or another we chattering classes always get on to schools) and so I can only assume he too learned to go to the bathroom while wearing a big key around his neck on a ribbon.
I was so pleased to meet him I offered him a lift home in my taxi.
My new friend in his Van Morrison hat said that though this was very kind of me, he didn’t want to do the ‘Scotch fumble’ and had left his wallet at home.
‘I am Scottish you remember,’ I said, somewhat unnecessarily, given my diction.
And then, poor thing, he was embarrassed and left me to taxi home (mercifully hangover free thanks to all that good fizz) alone.
No wonder I’m on the ruddy shelf…
At all good branches of WH Smiths, Waterstones and Asda.
But the evening was already backed up like the runway at Heathrow. I was late, he was late, I was going to be even later getting to literary friend’s party, so I knocked the wine back like it was a shot of tequila and was outside in the street before I could say ‘where’s your wife?’, looking for another cab to sweep me down to Shaftesbury avenue.
Yet another cab and £5 later, I ended up walking.
Briskly.
Now, the coat I was wearing is just about warm enough for an hour’s seated journey in a draughty bus, but soon starts to feel like one woman’s answer to global warming when I actually have to move in it. So, between the plush fake fur and the rapidly necked glass of wine, and my heels which were clomping down the street like a Nazi March Past, I must have looked simply glowing and bristling with purpose as I walked, ran, walked, teetered, walked ran, all the way to Chinatown.
Inside, well…
Party amnesia, which I hsd been suffering from until that very second, vanishes, and I suddenly awake from the deep coma of benign love of humanity, standing in a room crammed with people, silently screaming – where in God’s name am I, who are you all, why did I come?
Luckily, literary friend is standing in the doorway with a bottle of Bolly talking to a fantastic woman, who is funny and sharp and clever and subversive, and also has the kind of chest that would make Nigella feel inadequate and stop men from ever watching your lips move. Actually forget men – who in any case were mostly standing around in clumps, riveted by each other – I was entranced, and just as riveted by the twins in all their cashmere clad, ten-past two glory.
I didn't even feel jealous - well not for more than about ten minutes. I mean. there’s no point (or maybe it’s precisely because of the points). It would be like meeting Madonna and whimpering because your leotard doesn’t divide you neatly into three Kraft Cheese slices. It just doesn’t, okay? That’s not you. Never will be. You’ve entered a different world of different beings and all you can do is salute in admiration.
Every now and again, someone would push past and Mary-Kate would brush against me, and it seemed as though each time I lifted my glass to my mouth my knuckles would inevitably brush against Ashley. It was like being in a goose down pillow fight. I was, quite simply, in a cocoon of bosoms, none of which belonged to me.
Forget what I said when I was reading Sorrows of an American, I get it, I finally get breasts… What I don’t know is why so many men deal with them as though they are balancing the pressure on the central heating,
Sadly, I also get pushed out of my comfort zone when a new girl arrives and I reluctantly have to cede my spot in the sun and go to the cold nether reaches of the room where, at least, there is food.
But darn it, Jeremy Paxman is standing in the the corner next to the sausages which I deeply resent.
I feel if you are a famous television personality, it really behoves you not to park yourself next to party food which the timid, monosyllabic mini-brains such as myself long to eat but are then afraid to approach lest they look like sycophants.
‘Oh a teeny chipolata and ketchup, how wonderfully retro and delicious, and… my goodness.. what a surprise, Jeremy, how are you darling, here’s my starter for ten…’
Only the brave and David Willets, one of our Pedantic Press authors, dared crest the hill, but Willets was dazzling him with book ideas and all I wanted was a sausage.
I watch wistfully from afar until I found literary friend gently blowing smoke into the blissfully smiling face of a historian who, even with his eyes closed in what can only be described as rapture, I recognised from last year’s party (I’m a loss to the Scotland Yard Line up with my powers of facial recall). He was one of the people who spoke in fluent Xhonsa and clicked a lot about Hungary while I thought, please, please, please, don’t ask me to comment intelligently.
I reintroduce myself and amazingly he remembers me from the previous year and not because I had a strong Scottish accent and guacamole on my nose (or at least, he failed to point either of these out). Instead we bond on our similar ages and the discovery that he had gone to the same primary school my kids attended (one way or another we chattering classes always get on to schools) and so I can only assume he too learned to go to the bathroom while wearing a big key around his neck on a ribbon.
I was so pleased to meet him I offered him a lift home in my taxi.
My new friend in his Van Morrison hat said that though this was very kind of me, he didn’t want to do the ‘Scotch fumble’ and had left his wallet at home.
‘I am Scottish you remember,’ I said, somewhat unnecessarily, given my diction.
And then, poor thing, he was embarrassed and left me to taxi home (mercifully hangover free thanks to all that good fizz) alone.
No wonder I’m on the ruddy shelf…
At all good branches of WH Smiths, Waterstones and Asda.
Friday 12 December 2008
Tis the season to be jolly, but I didn't get the memo
The slush is building up around my desk and I'm swithering about the best way to deal with it. Reject it all now and ensure that the recipients of the standard letter have a miserable Christmas, or wait until January and kick off their new year to a dejected start? I can't bear to do either so I leave them; survivors - for now - of the purge that sweeps the office as old manuscripts burst out of their perished elastic bands like fat men from their belts after eating a good meal, and a ticker tape parade of post it notes flutter around the office before meeting their dark fate inside a hundred oily black plastic bags. I'm wearing my bookbinding apron, usually bristling with paste brushes and hammers and bone folders and scalpels, which I often forget to retract and end up stabbing myself in the guts as I bend, but today there are only scissors as I do the opposite activity and disembowel old proof copies from their utilitarian paper covers, ripping the spines out of them like gutted fish before tossing them with their brothers into garbage sacks.
During a brief moment of inattentiveness when an unsuspecting Chief stepped out of his office for a quiet contemplative smoke on the Marlborough pipe of peace, three of us swooped into his room like Charlie's Angels, with Pledge, Air Freshener and Insect Repellent at the ready, and slowly, slowly began transforming it from a teenage bedroom, complete with stuffed animals, CDs, clothes and teetering ziggaurats of crap into a bastion of literary genius, fortified by towers of orderly manuscripts at various stages of the editing process. I resist the urge to alphabetise them. He's off on holiday next week. That OCD pleasure can wait.
Ah the glamour of working for a publishing house with 'a world-wide reputation for quality, originality and breadth'... especially when that work involves a duster.
I'm going to my literary friend's Christmas drinks' party tonight and I can only imagine the conversations I might have with her other guests who, last year, might as well have been talking to me in clicks for all the sense I made of it. While they talk about their latest scholarly tomes, all I can offer in exchange is a description of my day at the office cleaning out shelves and collecting printer cartridges abandoned on high shelves and stuck down the back of radiators.
...well, unless I mention my finished copies which arrived today, and the staggeringly large order put in by a high-street supermarket that so surprised me I almost had to ring my editor back and check I hadn't misheard.
This is the life of a published author: The book for which you've waited three years and most of your life comes in all its spot-varnished, embossed glory, exactly as it is going to look in the bookshops, a real actual thing, and you look at it and think...
Um.
Now what?
The Indians gather round and whoop and I'm bloody glad I have them to cheer because, in truth, I feel a bit numb as I look at the cover with my name picked out in pink metallic lettering. So much has happened over the past two years, and little of it has been good. At another time I would have gone home and called my husband in from his study and we would have celebrated, but the study is empty, just a bare desk that I have pitifully tried to colonise with all my art materials but can't bring myself to use. The dedication that I wrote before he left, crossed out and reinstated is there on the first page of the book, but he's not. Instead there's a clone of him who walks and talks just like the old husband but seems to have been programmed with stock answers instead of speech, and silence instead of emotions.
And so I can only be grateful that rather than going home to the horrible anticlimax, I'm going to put on my slutty dress and go to a party where I'll know nobody apart from the people serving drinks, my box of brand, spanking new novels stored under the desk with three pairs of shoes and the world's largest ball of twine, 50 light bulbs and a box of padded envelopes - just bits of paper, held together with glue and optimism, and not, after all, the answer to all your prayers.
I sign a copy for Mr T and leave it amongst the other coals on the Newcastle of his desk. He comes in, finds it, exclaims, strides forth from his office holding the book, and as I walk forward for his congratulatory hug there's the sound of sniper fire or anti-aircraft guns (both of which I've actually flinched from in my time) pop pop pop pop pop, exploding at my feet. The sound of dreams, illusions and joyful expectations bursting?
Don't be daft. I'm not that mawkish. It's just the bubble wrap that has fallen out of the box.
During a brief moment of inattentiveness when an unsuspecting Chief stepped out of his office for a quiet contemplative smoke on the Marlborough pipe of peace, three of us swooped into his room like Charlie's Angels, with Pledge, Air Freshener and Insect Repellent at the ready, and slowly, slowly began transforming it from a teenage bedroom, complete with stuffed animals, CDs, clothes and teetering ziggaurats of crap into a bastion of literary genius, fortified by towers of orderly manuscripts at various stages of the editing process. I resist the urge to alphabetise them. He's off on holiday next week. That OCD pleasure can wait.
Ah the glamour of working for a publishing house with 'a world-wide reputation for quality, originality and breadth'... especially when that work involves a duster.
I'm going to my literary friend's Christmas drinks' party tonight and I can only imagine the conversations I might have with her other guests who, last year, might as well have been talking to me in clicks for all the sense I made of it. While they talk about their latest scholarly tomes, all I can offer in exchange is a description of my day at the office cleaning out shelves and collecting printer cartridges abandoned on high shelves and stuck down the back of radiators.
...well, unless I mention my finished copies which arrived today, and the staggeringly large order put in by a high-street supermarket that so surprised me I almost had to ring my editor back and check I hadn't misheard.
This is the life of a published author: The book for which you've waited three years and most of your life comes in all its spot-varnished, embossed glory, exactly as it is going to look in the bookshops, a real actual thing, and you look at it and think...
Um.
Now what?
The Indians gather round and whoop and I'm bloody glad I have them to cheer because, in truth, I feel a bit numb as I look at the cover with my name picked out in pink metallic lettering. So much has happened over the past two years, and little of it has been good. At another time I would have gone home and called my husband in from his study and we would have celebrated, but the study is empty, just a bare desk that I have pitifully tried to colonise with all my art materials but can't bring myself to use. The dedication that I wrote before he left, crossed out and reinstated is there on the first page of the book, but he's not. Instead there's a clone of him who walks and talks just like the old husband but seems to have been programmed with stock answers instead of speech, and silence instead of emotions.
And so I can only be grateful that rather than going home to the horrible anticlimax, I'm going to put on my slutty dress and go to a party where I'll know nobody apart from the people serving drinks, my box of brand, spanking new novels stored under the desk with three pairs of shoes and the world's largest ball of twine, 50 light bulbs and a box of padded envelopes - just bits of paper, held together with glue and optimism, and not, after all, the answer to all your prayers.
I sign a copy for Mr T and leave it amongst the other coals on the Newcastle of his desk. He comes in, finds it, exclaims, strides forth from his office holding the book, and as I walk forward for his congratulatory hug there's the sound of sniper fire or anti-aircraft guns (both of which I've actually flinched from in my time) pop pop pop pop pop, exploding at my feet. The sound of dreams, illusions and joyful expectations bursting?
Don't be daft. I'm not that mawkish. It's just the bubble wrap that has fallen out of the box.
Wednesday 10 December 2008
Wrestled to the floor
At the book group the other week the other women were discussing which plays they had been to recently. It was all National Theatre this and Barbican that, with one of our members, who works in the theatre, cleaning up on the culture quota by having seen every obscure production in the capital. Nel's announcement that she and I were going to the masked Mexican wrestling this weekend went down like Giant Haystack at a ballet recital. She might as well have belched out the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O. There were a few politely bemused murmurs and then the subject quickly turned to Opera.
Nevertheless, there we were clutching our tacos and tequila slammers at the ringside of Lucha Libre at the Roundhouse, within splatter distance of such Mexican legends as Mystico de Juarez and the Blue Demon... Where outside of a gay fetish club are you going to get cross-dressing exoticos in high-cut leotards, or muchos rudos oiled-up muscle men in very short spangly shorts wearing bondage masks that tie up the back of the head, rolling around on the floor together?
Ding-ding-ding.
Back at work one of my projects was postponed until next year together with a nice chunk of my projected income but as I was getting up from the punch, blearily trying to look on the bright side (weekends off - meaning a renewed relationship with Strictly Come Dancing; novel resurrected - meaning I now have to write the damn thing; thirty hours of transcribed taped conversations - meaning that by the time the project kicks off again next year I will have to redo all the work: yippee a real win-win situation all round) there was a small ray of consolation. One of our starriest authors was coming in and, indulgently, I was told I could sit in on the meeting, just to bathe in the reflected glory.
Silver lining? I don't know. I mean looking gormless at a meeting where I have no function might not be everybody's idea of a good time, but pathetic drone that I am, I was really excited.
And then the fateful day arrived. I wore mascara - that's how prepared I was. I cancelled my own appointments in the afternoon and then, since I was staying at work all day, the MD invited me to the Alliance Christmas Party that evening at Faber. All this and heaven too, huh? That mascara wasn't going to waste.
I got back to my important job of organising the office Secret Santa. This had, in fact, been done the previous week while I was off doing my version of Extreme Home Makeover - Party Edition (which basically consists of hiding the mousetraps). Unfortunately the envelope with the unpicked names nestled in its depths had been left on the desk of an unsuspecting member of staff who had then filled it with manuscripts and sent it off to a reader. The reader then opened the envelope sprinkling staff names around her study like confetti and since she didn't plan to buy novelty gifts for the rest of us, we had to repeat the draw.
I was just on my third pick to find someone I could palm off the wind-up nun that someone gave me for my birthday (oh don't you just love the jokey present that costs the same as a perfectly nice box of chocolates) when a Chief came shooting out of his office in his customary Tasmanian Devil rush and announced in the kind of booming voice perfectly honed for public speaking: 'Did I ask you to come to this meeting today?'
Me (uncomfortably aware that Indians all around me had fallen silent and were hurriedly whittling arrows out of pencils): 'Yes...'
'Why?' he bellowed.
It was a good question, and one I had also asked myself but, being unwilling to look a gift meeting in the mouth, had left unanswered. 'Erm, I think you were just being nice?' I stammered uncomfortably (well so much for that idea.)
'Well, look don't come, because...' and he gave a perfectly good and plausible reason that I didn't properly hear because by then I was back on the floor, out for the count - crushed.
It occurs to me that office life isn't actually so different from wrestling. There you are standing in the middle of the ring when a man leaps on you from above and flattens you in front of an audience - except that in the office none of the men wear sequins on their pants.
Ouch!
Guess who's getting the wind up nun from their Secret Santa this year.....
Nevertheless, there we were clutching our tacos and tequila slammers at the ringside of Lucha Libre at the Roundhouse, within splatter distance of such Mexican legends as Mystico de Juarez and the Blue Demon... Where outside of a gay fetish club are you going to get cross-dressing exoticos in high-cut leotards, or muchos rudos oiled-up muscle men in very short spangly shorts wearing bondage masks that tie up the back of the head, rolling around on the floor together?
Ding-ding-ding.
Back at work one of my projects was postponed until next year together with a nice chunk of my projected income but as I was getting up from the punch, blearily trying to look on the bright side (weekends off - meaning a renewed relationship with Strictly Come Dancing; novel resurrected - meaning I now have to write the damn thing; thirty hours of transcribed taped conversations - meaning that by the time the project kicks off again next year I will have to redo all the work: yippee a real win-win situation all round) there was a small ray of consolation. One of our starriest authors was coming in and, indulgently, I was told I could sit in on the meeting, just to bathe in the reflected glory.
Silver lining? I don't know. I mean looking gormless at a meeting where I have no function might not be everybody's idea of a good time, but pathetic drone that I am, I was really excited.
And then the fateful day arrived. I wore mascara - that's how prepared I was. I cancelled my own appointments in the afternoon and then, since I was staying at work all day, the MD invited me to the Alliance Christmas Party that evening at Faber. All this and heaven too, huh? That mascara wasn't going to waste.
I got back to my important job of organising the office Secret Santa. This had, in fact, been done the previous week while I was off doing my version of Extreme Home Makeover - Party Edition (which basically consists of hiding the mousetraps). Unfortunately the envelope with the unpicked names nestled in its depths had been left on the desk of an unsuspecting member of staff who had then filled it with manuscripts and sent it off to a reader. The reader then opened the envelope sprinkling staff names around her study like confetti and since she didn't plan to buy novelty gifts for the rest of us, we had to repeat the draw.
I was just on my third pick to find someone I could palm off the wind-up nun that someone gave me for my birthday (oh don't you just love the jokey present that costs the same as a perfectly nice box of chocolates) when a Chief came shooting out of his office in his customary Tasmanian Devil rush and announced in the kind of booming voice perfectly honed for public speaking: 'Did I ask you to come to this meeting today?'
Me (uncomfortably aware that Indians all around me had fallen silent and were hurriedly whittling arrows out of pencils): 'Yes...'
'Why?' he bellowed.
It was a good question, and one I had also asked myself but, being unwilling to look a gift meeting in the mouth, had left unanswered. 'Erm, I think you were just being nice?' I stammered uncomfortably (well so much for that idea.)
'Well, look don't come, because...' and he gave a perfectly good and plausible reason that I didn't properly hear because by then I was back on the floor, out for the count - crushed.
It occurs to me that office life isn't actually so different from wrestling. There you are standing in the middle of the ring when a man leaps on you from above and flattens you in front of an audience - except that in the office none of the men wear sequins on their pants.
Ouch!
Guess who's getting the wind up nun from their Secret Santa this year.....
Tuesday 9 December 2008
Let your hair down
My mother didn't believe in parties.
She didn't believe in long hair, mess, fuss, waste, hire-purchase, mail-order catalogues, clothing that showed dirt or praise either. However, since her hair-brushing techniques could have been applied as torture methods for the Vietcong, Rapunzel-like tresses were never going to be an option in our house, and all other prohibited activities were mere unattainable dreams - so the only sanction that really had much of an impact on my life was her distaste for anything vaguely celebratory.
I spent my youth being the only person in sensible clothes at birthday parties surrounded with girls dressed in pastel frocks with net skirts (waste and mail-order catalogues) wearing their waist-length ringlets (fuss) tied up in pink satin bows (dirt-attracting). Their kitchens would be transformed into party grottos with the help of a paper tablecloth (waste) draped over a wallpapering table, and festooned with paper plates (even more waste), streamers, paper chains and concertina fans (craven, teeth-sucking waste) and plastic cups (waste that could nevertheless be thriftily washed and used again. And again. We had plastic cups that were almost heirlooms.) The table in turn would be laden with fairy cakes (fuss), caramel cakes (made with condensed milk boiled in the can, mess and fuss) and tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (fuss, waste and mess).
On my own birthday parties were verboten. Parties meant mess. No decorations in casa Calvin - because sellotape might damage the walls and pins left holes in the plaster and gifts would have to be useful. Who can forget the gift of time in the alarm clock year of 1972? Or the duvet of 1975? The excitement of the pile of socks, underwear and books, that I had usually found months earlier hidden under the bed and already read, waiting unwrapped on the sofa (to avoid waste of gift-wrap) was hard to contain, as you can imagine. And later - the birthday tea consisting of a dumpling with a lucky silver sixpence inserted into its depths which was removed and carefully washed to be reused the next year (though I never figured out was supposed to be so bloody lucky about it, except that you didn't choke on it). I didn't even like dumpling, but nevertheless it had to be eaten (waste).
I'll stop now before I get overly sentimental about the hardships of a Scottish Presbyterian childhood and the joys of lukewarm dumpling, flecked with raisings like clammy flesh wtih a skin disease and skip forward several decades to now.
Unlike my mother, I like fuss, can't get enough of it. I positively adore waste. My whole personal economy is built on credit and mail-order catalogues (albeit of the on-line shopping variety) and though I still struggle with the concept of praise and can only tolerate mess when I'm the person who has made it, parties are something I really, really love. Well, at least until thirty minutes before all the guests arrive and I'm standing in my newly cleaned house setting out all the plastic glasses and paper plates, wondering what the * I was thinking of when I decided to invite 50 of my closest never-see-them-from-one-year-to-the-other acquaintances to eat fiddly, fussy food that I have spent the previous two days slaving over.
It's strange how it suddenly seems like an absolutely terrible idea just when it's too late to disinvite everyone.
And that's how you find me last Friday night, hurriedly piling 48 cup cakes with icing that will not set onto a three tiered cake stand that drips white sticky guano all over the floor while the microwave pings, and the barbecue smoulders (my son decided to light it two hours before people were due to arrive and it has now gone out again because - yes - you've guessed it, it is also POURING with rain), just as a friend who was supposed to be helping calls from the car to say she's running late and can I put the oven on and assemble three baking trays for her (this is helping?). Then the lighter burns my fingers as I singe of most of my eyebrows trying to light the candles, and I worry alternately that I don't have enough food and then that I have too much, and can't remember who, if anyone I've invited.
Remind me, why does a deprived childhood mean that you have to massively overcompensate for the rest of your life and waaaay beyond the time that having birthdays is appropriate?
My fellow Indians are the first to arrive, em masse, sodden, bedraggled, tired after the long schlep to the postal district beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, clutching a bottle and many packets of cigarettes. The smokers look around them anxiously wondering how quickly they can excuse themselves to disappear outside under the garden umbrella and light up. Disconcertingly the others all sit down in the kitchen as though expecting an entertainer. After fifteen minutes of spectacular fussing with plates of food and cups and bottle openers I realise that this would be me. What? I have to talk to them? Isn't it enough that I ply them with drinks? Isn't that my husband's job? Why the hell does he have to be having a philandering mid-life crisis now, when he could be much more usefully passing round wine?
I try to enlist one of my sons while the other is in the garden, unsuccesfully, making fire since the charcoal is now damp. 'Offer people drinks!' I hiss, but his response is to look at me as if I had suggested he might like to give me one of his kidneys. Let's just hope I never need a transplant. The youngest daughter whose chore this was supposed to be has brought in a friend for reinforcements but they have decided they need to be in full make up and wearing as little as possible before this task can be properly undertaken, and resultingly, are in their bedroom, in the dark, smoking cigarettes out of the window, deciding what not to wear. Office smokers are standing outside in the rain. I pray none of them offer advice to fire-starter who is liable to walk off in a strop if criticised. Instead I think I hear one of our merry band of Indians incite him, not to the use of dry kindling, but to insurrection, suggesting that - poor thing - he shouldn't need to be there, bent double over a hot stove, when others were swilling beer, having a nice time, and being sympathetic. Smoke is coming out of my ears now. Don't ruddy sympathise with him, he didn't get up until noon. He has been slaying Orks for most of the last year. Let him bring home the bacon sandwiches, please, just for a change.
Another half an hour passes. Graham Rawle arrives and... em, that's about it. It's almost eight o'clock and nobody else has come. I fear the Indians think I have no friends and that they have been invited along as rent a crowd. This is true, but I hoped it would be slightly less obvious.
I'm smiling with a glass in each hand which are both for me and running through the guest list in my head. Who did I invite? Did I, in fact, invite anyone? Are they going to turn up at all? How can friends you don't have and haven't invited pitch up to a party they don't know about. My mind is a blank of humiliating over-catering. How stupid am I going to look when I'm left with fifty hand made spinach fatayer, fifty bacon rolls,sixty falafel, three dips, polenta and a hundred cheesy circles? What shall I do with all the poignantly unused plastic wine glasses sitting waiting for the ghostly guests who don't come? I let the smokers light up inside just to make the place look full and then try to encourage them to go into the other room which looks like the Marie Celeste with candles which flicker eerily in the draught like something out of a Vincent Price movie.
And then the doorbell rings.
Relief.
People.
Real live breathing eating drinking smiling kissing people who remember my name and have indeed been invited. Loads of them. Lovely, lovely, friends from as far away as Finsbury Park. A couple of publishers, an agent, a few spare men, many, many women under thirty, a banker, an academic, a museum curator, a smattering of artists and a lot of Pedants.
Only two people failed to turn up and you know who you are...
The last couple left at two am. I rewashed all the plastic glasses in the dishwasher (frugality and waste), threw away all the paper plates (pure waste) and ate what little food remained so as to avoid waste (finally my mother is smiling at me from heaven), cleaned up the empty bottles (see ma, no mess - ah, she's straightening the antimaccasers up there in the great OCD mansion in the sky, brimming with approval though, naturally, stopping short of actually praise...) and went to bed.
I woke the next morning, ever so slightly fatigued, staggered to the bathroom for a glass of water, regarded myself in the mirror, another year older and deeper in debt, and recoiled like I had been hit from behind by a speeding reality check car... Despite the many tenners and hours I had spent at the hairdressers the day before having my tresses straightened out whilst listening to a S'th 'frican girl tell me about the healing power of crystals and the pyramid she has erected in her flat to protect her from microwave rays, it occurs to me that though my mother was absolutely wrong about fuss, dirt, credit, waste and parties...
I'll give her the long-hair.
She didn't believe in long hair, mess, fuss, waste, hire-purchase, mail-order catalogues, clothing that showed dirt or praise either. However, since her hair-brushing techniques could have been applied as torture methods for the Vietcong, Rapunzel-like tresses were never going to be an option in our house, and all other prohibited activities were mere unattainable dreams - so the only sanction that really had much of an impact on my life was her distaste for anything vaguely celebratory.
I spent my youth being the only person in sensible clothes at birthday parties surrounded with girls dressed in pastel frocks with net skirts (waste and mail-order catalogues) wearing their waist-length ringlets (fuss) tied up in pink satin bows (dirt-attracting). Their kitchens would be transformed into party grottos with the help of a paper tablecloth (waste) draped over a wallpapering table, and festooned with paper plates (even more waste), streamers, paper chains and concertina fans (craven, teeth-sucking waste) and plastic cups (waste that could nevertheless be thriftily washed and used again. And again. We had plastic cups that were almost heirlooms.) The table in turn would be laden with fairy cakes (fuss), caramel cakes (made with condensed milk boiled in the can, mess and fuss) and tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (fuss, waste and mess).
On my own birthday parties were verboten. Parties meant mess. No decorations in casa Calvin - because sellotape might damage the walls and pins left holes in the plaster and gifts would have to be useful. Who can forget the gift of time in the alarm clock year of 1972? Or the duvet of 1975? The excitement of the pile of socks, underwear and books, that I had usually found months earlier hidden under the bed and already read, waiting unwrapped on the sofa (to avoid waste of gift-wrap) was hard to contain, as you can imagine. And later - the birthday tea consisting of a dumpling with a lucky silver sixpence inserted into its depths which was removed and carefully washed to be reused the next year (though I never figured out was supposed to be so bloody lucky about it, except that you didn't choke on it). I didn't even like dumpling, but nevertheless it had to be eaten (waste).
I'll stop now before I get overly sentimental about the hardships of a Scottish Presbyterian childhood and the joys of lukewarm dumpling, flecked with raisings like clammy flesh wtih a skin disease and skip forward several decades to now.
Unlike my mother, I like fuss, can't get enough of it. I positively adore waste. My whole personal economy is built on credit and mail-order catalogues (albeit of the on-line shopping variety) and though I still struggle with the concept of praise and can only tolerate mess when I'm the person who has made it, parties are something I really, really love. Well, at least until thirty minutes before all the guests arrive and I'm standing in my newly cleaned house setting out all the plastic glasses and paper plates, wondering what the * I was thinking of when I decided to invite 50 of my closest never-see-them-from-one-year-to-the-other acquaintances to eat fiddly, fussy food that I have spent the previous two days slaving over.
It's strange how it suddenly seems like an absolutely terrible idea just when it's too late to disinvite everyone.
And that's how you find me last Friday night, hurriedly piling 48 cup cakes with icing that will not set onto a three tiered cake stand that drips white sticky guano all over the floor while the microwave pings, and the barbecue smoulders (my son decided to light it two hours before people were due to arrive and it has now gone out again because - yes - you've guessed it, it is also POURING with rain), just as a friend who was supposed to be helping calls from the car to say she's running late and can I put the oven on and assemble three baking trays for her (this is helping?). Then the lighter burns my fingers as I singe of most of my eyebrows trying to light the candles, and I worry alternately that I don't have enough food and then that I have too much, and can't remember who, if anyone I've invited.
Remind me, why does a deprived childhood mean that you have to massively overcompensate for the rest of your life and waaaay beyond the time that having birthdays is appropriate?
My fellow Indians are the first to arrive, em masse, sodden, bedraggled, tired after the long schlep to the postal district beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, clutching a bottle and many packets of cigarettes. The smokers look around them anxiously wondering how quickly they can excuse themselves to disappear outside under the garden umbrella and light up. Disconcertingly the others all sit down in the kitchen as though expecting an entertainer. After fifteen minutes of spectacular fussing with plates of food and cups and bottle openers I realise that this would be me. What? I have to talk to them? Isn't it enough that I ply them with drinks? Isn't that my husband's job? Why the hell does he have to be having a philandering mid-life crisis now, when he could be much more usefully passing round wine?
I try to enlist one of my sons while the other is in the garden, unsuccesfully, making fire since the charcoal is now damp. 'Offer people drinks!' I hiss, but his response is to look at me as if I had suggested he might like to give me one of his kidneys. Let's just hope I never need a transplant. The youngest daughter whose chore this was supposed to be has brought in a friend for reinforcements but they have decided they need to be in full make up and wearing as little as possible before this task can be properly undertaken, and resultingly, are in their bedroom, in the dark, smoking cigarettes out of the window, deciding what not to wear. Office smokers are standing outside in the rain. I pray none of them offer advice to fire-starter who is liable to walk off in a strop if criticised. Instead I think I hear one of our merry band of Indians incite him, not to the use of dry kindling, but to insurrection, suggesting that - poor thing - he shouldn't need to be there, bent double over a hot stove, when others were swilling beer, having a nice time, and being sympathetic. Smoke is coming out of my ears now. Don't ruddy sympathise with him, he didn't get up until noon. He has been slaying Orks for most of the last year. Let him bring home the bacon sandwiches, please, just for a change.
Another half an hour passes. Graham Rawle arrives and... em, that's about it. It's almost eight o'clock and nobody else has come. I fear the Indians think I have no friends and that they have been invited along as rent a crowd. This is true, but I hoped it would be slightly less obvious.
I'm smiling with a glass in each hand which are both for me and running through the guest list in my head. Who did I invite? Did I, in fact, invite anyone? Are they going to turn up at all? How can friends you don't have and haven't invited pitch up to a party they don't know about. My mind is a blank of humiliating over-catering. How stupid am I going to look when I'm left with fifty hand made spinach fatayer, fifty bacon rolls,sixty falafel, three dips, polenta and a hundred cheesy circles? What shall I do with all the poignantly unused plastic wine glasses sitting waiting for the ghostly guests who don't come? I let the smokers light up inside just to make the place look full and then try to encourage them to go into the other room which looks like the Marie Celeste with candles which flicker eerily in the draught like something out of a Vincent Price movie.
And then the doorbell rings.
Relief.
People.
Real live breathing eating drinking smiling kissing people who remember my name and have indeed been invited. Loads of them. Lovely, lovely, friends from as far away as Finsbury Park. A couple of publishers, an agent, a few spare men, many, many women under thirty, a banker, an academic, a museum curator, a smattering of artists and a lot of Pedants.
Only two people failed to turn up and you know who you are...
The last couple left at two am. I rewashed all the plastic glasses in the dishwasher (frugality and waste), threw away all the paper plates (pure waste) and ate what little food remained so as to avoid waste (finally my mother is smiling at me from heaven), cleaned up the empty bottles (see ma, no mess - ah, she's straightening the antimaccasers up there in the great OCD mansion in the sky, brimming with approval though, naturally, stopping short of actually praise...) and went to bed.
I woke the next morning, ever so slightly fatigued, staggered to the bathroom for a glass of water, regarded myself in the mirror, another year older and deeper in debt, and recoiled like I had been hit from behind by a speeding reality check car... Despite the many tenners and hours I had spent at the hairdressers the day before having my tresses straightened out whilst listening to a S'th 'frican girl tell me about the healing power of crystals and the pyramid she has erected in her flat to protect her from microwave rays, it occurs to me that though my mother was absolutely wrong about fuss, dirt, credit, waste and parties...
I'll give her the long-hair.
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Cake walk
As I mentioned in a previous post, the last time the West London Ladies who Lurch met we read Obama's Dreams of my Father.
Well, round about then Eva was working in her smart gallery one day when the Big Canon who publishes it came in and somehow or another the subject of books came up.
I imagine it went something like this:
'He's seems like a very nice man, that Obama.' (Eva)
'Yup, we're really cleaning up with his books...' (the Big Canon)
He bought jewelery, apparently. I hope that wasn't supposed to be a surprise...
Anyway, as the conversation turned from politerature to reading groups, the Big Canon promised to send her some books which we could read. Oh did he now, I thought doing my inner, head waving, finger snapping, girlfriend thing when she announced this over the designer grass at the last meting. What's so great about their books - I've been offering them Nancy Huston's Fault Lines for months and there have been no takers, just the usual suggestion that we all reread Jane Sodding Austin. You can't have another publisher wading into your own book club bearing rival best-sellers, Independent Alliance or no ruddy Alliance... Luckily the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
So in the absence of free Canon fodder, I jumped in with a suggestion. I wanted something toast-ish, but very literary toast, the sort of reliable plot-driven, alternative existence kind of book that swallows up two days of your life and makes you feel like you've lost a friend when you turn the last page.
Some of us had raved about Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (which I read when I had flu during a family holiday in the Athen's Hilton - never even looked out the window at the Acropolis, just curled up in bed with New York for a day longer than was absolutely necessary), so I chose The Sorrows of an American. Fran was not convinced: 'Has anyone read the reviews? Let's have a back up in case it's no good.'
I was mightily offended. No good and Siri do not belong in the same sentence. However, once I had the book I carried it around with me for weeks with all the other things I should have been reading, feeling tired and dispirited every time I looked at it nestling amongst the manuscripts. The book bag is the equivalent of the gym membership - you think that simply having it is sufficient effort - goodness knows you shouldn't have to actually use it. And then I was on my way home from work and the bus broke down, so out came Sorrows and by the time I turned the first page I was gone, living in Brooklyn, with a psychoanalytic practice and a lodger - ah the lodger/landlord plot - what would we do without it? How else would opposites collide? Of course, a few pages further on I was slightly disconcerted to discover I was a man, and then, on the heels of that realisation, just as I was happily settled in to my new life, much perturbed to find myself lusting after another woman. On one page you're looking round your apartment at the furniture feeling comfortably tweedy and bookish and then, hey wait a minute, hold on there, no, no, NO, I don't do breasts...
Too late to go back though, I was already hooked on the dead Norwegian father who conveniently never threw anything away and has left behind a secret and a room full of papers and letters behind so that it can be unearthed, unlike my own father whose only paper trail was a tiny diary in which he recorded the weather and had said, on his last visit to my house for lunch, that 'Marion looked very nice today.' There's a story in that too, but no hidden skeletons. No our skeletons are all out on stands for everyone to label.
I was late for the reading group discussion as I had been to an networking event at a woman's magazine in South London (several freelancers with a case of wine and several bowls of chips with mayonaisse, each of us saying 'I never usually come to these sort of things but I need the work..: I never usually eat chips but these are delicious.... I 'm not really drinking at the moment but yes, why not...) I had done the sensible thing and printed out a map, and then done the stupid thing and forgotten my glasses, so I had been wandering around the Tate Modern looking for the restaurant holding a piece of paper in my hands, thrusting it under the nose of strangers asking them if they could read. Surprisingly nobody punched me.
So, much delayed as a result of my little game of blind woman's bluff, by the time I arrived at the house of the host, the women had already dissed and dismissed the novel and were eating cupcakes, rapturously.
None of them liked my choice.
'Who recommended that awful book anyway,' asked Eva as Fran looked smug.
'Erm it was me,' I said with a mouth full of cake as Siri and I went home with our tales between our legs.
I have them reading Fieldwork next time which they had better like or my credibility is blown. If this book doesn't save me, I fear the Canons might be in a with a chance. Maybe all booksellers should forget the belly bands and the metallic lettering and just cover their books with cream cheese icing.
Some people have no ruddy taste.
Well, round about then Eva was working in her smart gallery one day when the Big Canon who publishes it came in and somehow or another the subject of books came up.
I imagine it went something like this:
'He's seems like a very nice man, that Obama.' (Eva)
'Yup, we're really cleaning up with his books...' (the Big Canon)
He bought jewelery, apparently. I hope that wasn't supposed to be a surprise...
Anyway, as the conversation turned from politerature to reading groups, the Big Canon promised to send her some books which we could read. Oh did he now, I thought doing my inner, head waving, finger snapping, girlfriend thing when she announced this over the designer grass at the last meting. What's so great about their books - I've been offering them Nancy Huston's Fault Lines for months and there have been no takers, just the usual suggestion that we all reread Jane Sodding Austin. You can't have another publisher wading into your own book club bearing rival best-sellers, Independent Alliance or no ruddy Alliance... Luckily the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
So in the absence of free Canon fodder, I jumped in with a suggestion. I wanted something toast-ish, but very literary toast, the sort of reliable plot-driven, alternative existence kind of book that swallows up two days of your life and makes you feel like you've lost a friend when you turn the last page.
Some of us had raved about Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (which I read when I had flu during a family holiday in the Athen's Hilton - never even looked out the window at the Acropolis, just curled up in bed with New York for a day longer than was absolutely necessary), so I chose The Sorrows of an American. Fran was not convinced: 'Has anyone read the reviews? Let's have a back up in case it's no good.'
I was mightily offended. No good and Siri do not belong in the same sentence. However, once I had the book I carried it around with me for weeks with all the other things I should have been reading, feeling tired and dispirited every time I looked at it nestling amongst the manuscripts. The book bag is the equivalent of the gym membership - you think that simply having it is sufficient effort - goodness knows you shouldn't have to actually use it. And then I was on my way home from work and the bus broke down, so out came Sorrows and by the time I turned the first page I was gone, living in Brooklyn, with a psychoanalytic practice and a lodger - ah the lodger/landlord plot - what would we do without it? How else would opposites collide? Of course, a few pages further on I was slightly disconcerted to discover I was a man, and then, on the heels of that realisation, just as I was happily settled in to my new life, much perturbed to find myself lusting after another woman. On one page you're looking round your apartment at the furniture feeling comfortably tweedy and bookish and then, hey wait a minute, hold on there, no, no, NO, I don't do breasts...
Too late to go back though, I was already hooked on the dead Norwegian father who conveniently never threw anything away and has left behind a secret and a room full of papers and letters behind so that it can be unearthed, unlike my own father whose only paper trail was a tiny diary in which he recorded the weather and had said, on his last visit to my house for lunch, that 'Marion looked very nice today.' There's a story in that too, but no hidden skeletons. No our skeletons are all out on stands for everyone to label.
I was late for the reading group discussion as I had been to an networking event at a woman's magazine in South London (several freelancers with a case of wine and several bowls of chips with mayonaisse, each of us saying 'I never usually come to these sort of things but I need the work..: I never usually eat chips but these are delicious.... I 'm not really drinking at the moment but yes, why not...) I had done the sensible thing and printed out a map, and then done the stupid thing and forgotten my glasses, so I had been wandering around the Tate Modern looking for the restaurant holding a piece of paper in my hands, thrusting it under the nose of strangers asking them if they could read. Surprisingly nobody punched me.
So, much delayed as a result of my little game of blind woman's bluff, by the time I arrived at the house of the host, the women had already dissed and dismissed the novel and were eating cupcakes, rapturously.
None of them liked my choice.
'Who recommended that awful book anyway,' asked Eva as Fran looked smug.
'Erm it was me,' I said with a mouth full of cake as Siri and I went home with our tales between our legs.
I have them reading Fieldwork next time which they had better like or my credibility is blown. If this book doesn't save me, I fear the Canons might be in a with a chance. Maybe all booksellers should forget the belly bands and the metallic lettering and just cover their books with cream cheese icing.
Some people have no ruddy taste.
Monday 1 December 2008
Better than sliced bread
When I used to eat for a living my favourite food was toast.
I would come home from one of those bastions of Michelin-starred all-male dining like Orrery or Lindsay house, having eaten everything from the canapes to the petit fours, and at 1:00am find myself sitting alone in the kitchen while the rest of the house slept, eating Mother's Pride.
Of course, it had nothing to do with hunger and a lot to do with alcohol. But though the meal I had was often, though not always, delicious (I reviewed an awful lot of stinkers who have since gone in to the great waste disposal of life), the food was all so rarefied and pretty - not to mention pretty small portioned. It was all little tastes of this and morsels of that; the teeny, tiny amuse bouche, invariably in a shot glass filled with a foam or cappuccino, or sometimes even spume (never have people paid so much money for so much whipped air), followed by the main course with vegetables as a garnish, pre-dessert and proper dessert and then the extra courses that the chef would sometimes send out in between. It was an embarrassment of rich food but still, at the end of the evening, all I really wanted was a reassuringly un-complex carbohydrate - sliced bread with Lurpak, salty and sweet, the butter melting into puddles and dripping on to the plate - familiar and honest and real.
Sometimes I think that quality publishing isn't so different from dining out in fine restaurants. It's easy to get spoiled by a diet fat on words and heavy on plot where every day is another long, long Tasting Menu with a matched wine for each course until you're drunk on books and can't tell any more what you're reading. It's hardly surprising that publishers and agents say they give up if a manuscript doesn't interest them after only a few pages. Everybody wants something that wakes them out of the drunken stupor.
And I guess we all have our own version of toast..
One of the Indians in the office was saying that she didn't think that there were many women who didn't secretly enjoy a Marian Keyes on the beach, but that doesn't tick the toast box for me. Nor does Jane genius but dreary Austin (I know, I know, but I'm not made like other women), For comfort reading I want crime - somebody on a slab after a grizzly murder, a mystery, some tension, or a stalker with a telephoto lens. When I was younger I admit, albeit reluctantly, that before being married to an academic shamed me out of them, I was a fan of the 80s bonkbuster. A long-ago sad weekend in Paris was only bearable because of a tattered paperback I found in the hotel by Jilly Cooper, whose books I had previously disdained - but sometimes you cling to stereotypes and girls called Fanella like a lifeline, or a pair of reigns and a riding crop in this case.
When not gorging on airport murders, what I usually want from a book is a parallel life that sucks me in and lets me be someone else for a while; not the woman stuck in a traffic jam on Ladbroke Grove but a teenage hooker in Vegas, an anthropologist in Thailand, a Ukrainian immigrant in Canada in the 1950s, or a murderous taxi driver. It's a chance to act without learning lines. A way to travel without leaving your head. A vicarious experience in a room where all the doors may be locked.
White Tiger was the first book I read when I started working here and that's certainly not toast. There's nothing cosy about Aravind's story. It grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last page. We've recently bought another two, very different, but equally arresting books: the first, Cooking Dirty about the restaurant business, is gritty, laconic and Raymond-Carving knife-sharp, while the second , a novel called Thief has completely split our mostly female office - Indians and Chiefs alike. It's a very explicit and coolly self-possessed story of a woman which touches on some pretty taboo subjects and who some of us identified with, fairly uncomfortably, while others recoiled and wouldn't as much as sit down on her vacated bar stool. I was firmly in the first category and loved it. It's not unctuous sauces and creamy mash with truffle oil - it's wasabi and a vodka martini at Duke's Hotel Bar followed by the Heimlich Manoeuvre - something that stops you getting jaded and longing for a slice of toast....
Though have two of those martinis and all bets are off, and after three you can't focus your eyes anyway.
I would come home from one of those bastions of Michelin-starred all-male dining like Orrery or Lindsay house, having eaten everything from the canapes to the petit fours, and at 1:00am find myself sitting alone in the kitchen while the rest of the house slept, eating Mother's Pride.
Of course, it had nothing to do with hunger and a lot to do with alcohol. But though the meal I had was often, though not always, delicious (I reviewed an awful lot of stinkers who have since gone in to the great waste disposal of life), the food was all so rarefied and pretty - not to mention pretty small portioned. It was all little tastes of this and morsels of that; the teeny, tiny amuse bouche, invariably in a shot glass filled with a foam or cappuccino, or sometimes even spume (never have people paid so much money for so much whipped air), followed by the main course with vegetables as a garnish, pre-dessert and proper dessert and then the extra courses that the chef would sometimes send out in between. It was an embarrassment of rich food but still, at the end of the evening, all I really wanted was a reassuringly un-complex carbohydrate - sliced bread with Lurpak, salty and sweet, the butter melting into puddles and dripping on to the plate - familiar and honest and real.
Sometimes I think that quality publishing isn't so different from dining out in fine restaurants. It's easy to get spoiled by a diet fat on words and heavy on plot where every day is another long, long Tasting Menu with a matched wine for each course until you're drunk on books and can't tell any more what you're reading. It's hardly surprising that publishers and agents say they give up if a manuscript doesn't interest them after only a few pages. Everybody wants something that wakes them out of the drunken stupor.
And I guess we all have our own version of toast..
One of the Indians in the office was saying that she didn't think that there were many women who didn't secretly enjoy a Marian Keyes on the beach, but that doesn't tick the toast box for me. Nor does Jane genius but dreary Austin (I know, I know, but I'm not made like other women), For comfort reading I want crime - somebody on a slab after a grizzly murder, a mystery, some tension, or a stalker with a telephoto lens. When I was younger I admit, albeit reluctantly, that before being married to an academic shamed me out of them, I was a fan of the 80s bonkbuster. A long-ago sad weekend in Paris was only bearable because of a tattered paperback I found in the hotel by Jilly Cooper, whose books I had previously disdained - but sometimes you cling to stereotypes and girls called Fanella like a lifeline, or a pair of reigns and a riding crop in this case.
When not gorging on airport murders, what I usually want from a book is a parallel life that sucks me in and lets me be someone else for a while; not the woman stuck in a traffic jam on Ladbroke Grove but a teenage hooker in Vegas, an anthropologist in Thailand, a Ukrainian immigrant in Canada in the 1950s, or a murderous taxi driver. It's a chance to act without learning lines. A way to travel without leaving your head. A vicarious experience in a room where all the doors may be locked.
White Tiger was the first book I read when I started working here and that's certainly not toast. There's nothing cosy about Aravind's story. It grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last page. We've recently bought another two, very different, but equally arresting books: the first, Cooking Dirty about the restaurant business, is gritty, laconic and Raymond-Carving knife-sharp, while the second , a novel called Thief has completely split our mostly female office - Indians and Chiefs alike. It's a very explicit and coolly self-possessed story of a woman which touches on some pretty taboo subjects and who some of us identified with, fairly uncomfortably, while others recoiled and wouldn't as much as sit down on her vacated bar stool. I was firmly in the first category and loved it. It's not unctuous sauces and creamy mash with truffle oil - it's wasabi and a vodka martini at Duke's Hotel Bar followed by the Heimlich Manoeuvre - something that stops you getting jaded and longing for a slice of toast....
Though have two of those martinis and all bets are off, and after three you can't focus your eyes anyway.
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