Actually, the colour is auburn if you don't mind.

The latest excitement in my life is that I'm going to work on a book with the owner of a frightfully smart shop in Marylebone High Street for which we've just signed a contract at Pedantic Press. I'm very enthusiastic about the whole venture, my only slight reservation is the name. It's called The Ginger Pig, and you can just see the jokes flying thick and fast. Certainly I've started veering towards the Mid-Brown shades on the Clairol shelf just in case anyone thinks it's an autobiography. And no my hair isn't ginger, not remotely, it's just the way the sun shines on it sometimes. It's what happens when you do it yourself rather than spending 80 quid to talk about your holidays with a disinterested man holding scissors.

So for the next eight months, as well as hopefully getting my heroine Maggie out of the front garden of the house in Chelsea (she must be getting a bit cold by now - just sleep with him already, girl) I will be immersing myself in all things bovine, porcine and things that go quack in the night. I shall be simply obsessed by pigs, none of which will be sleeping beside me since my domestic porker has gone.

As a consolation I've ordered a new bed on e-Bay, a Louis XIV reproduction with scrolls and gilding and pink, oooooh yes, you heard right, pink plush upholstery. In preparation for the mythical, golden time when fifty really is the new forty and there are men under the age of seventy-seven who are interested in women my age for more than their housekeeping skills, the bedroom shall be resurrected.

But it may be some time.

No wonder poor Maggie is stranded in the front garden unable to consummate her great love affair with the limpid eyed Rent-an-Italian (nope, sorry, I just can't get excited about him at all - what chance do I have if even the writer doesn't fancy the hero - I keep seeing him as balding and tanned and Brian Eno-ish and then get slightly more enthusiastic but that doesn't fit the character...) She's as out of practice as I am. Maybe I should take this tack and advertise myself thus in a lonely hearts ad:

Novelist needs inspiration for male character - should own a house in Chelsea and a Famous Blue Raincoat. Italian an advantage.

Actually, flicking back to Brian, his daughters used to go to school with my youngest and occasionally they used to play together. Once Brian actually came to my house and sat on my sofa and admired my orange curtains (are you sensing a theme here vis a vis the colour scheme of casa mia. Vibrant must be springing to mind. Or garish, perhaps). I had always been a fan since I read his diary which Faber published probably a decade ago in which he was slightly pissy about the other parents at Sports' Day at the children's school - a sentiment I shared - horrible competitive dads turning up with their trainers in a bag so they could win the fathers' race, and all that people-like-us social climbing. It's a wonder they didn't arrive with crampons and ropes. He also confessed that he liked spending his time tinkering with Photoshop making women's bottoms larger.

Ah, bless, I thought, having once caught him looking at mine when, many years ago, it was thin enough to be clad in a leather skirt in which I had just bent to kiss my little girl goodbye one morning when I was only a Range Rover short of being a yummy mummy before the term was even coined. 

I had high hopes, then, that his then wife would be bottom-heavy curvy baby-got-back of voluptuous charms, only to be disappointed that she was a perfectly slim, pretty woman with absolutely no bloody bum.

Illusions.

Shattered.

Still I would much rather he was on the steps of the mews house in Chelsea preparing to seduce my poor, overlooked and unappreciated Maggie than the current drip who's waiting for her, but Maggie is a 36 year old woman. She's not ready to settle for a bald man yet.

Me on the other hand.

Bring it on.

Just don't make the mistake of calling me Ginger.