The whole place has been Tangoed as Orange Fever spikes in the office.
‘I can’t believe we’re having a launch meeting at 9:30 the day after the Orange Prize,’ says one of my beleaguered colleagues from behind her partition. ‘We’ll all be hung over!’ she adds.
I cough piteously, or possibly annoyingly to those who find my Little Nell act is wearing a little thin, and point out that my Orange Wednesday is going to be somewhat different from those of the literary party goers. I’ve got a two for one ticket for Sex in the City.
There’s a silence from behind the partition and then she peeps round the side of her partition and asks me if I would like to come to her birthday bash (oh do I know how to turn the screw or what?) at which there will be Red Velvet Cup Cakes from the Hummingbird Café. As consolation prizes go, it isn’t a bad one though I feel I would turn up a bit like the maiden aunt you have to ask to Christmas lunch otherwise she's sitting at home eating baked beans with a sprig of holly stuck in the toast. I smile as would Cinderella on getting an invite to a bacon sandwich by a good-hearted bystander instead of the ball with a big engraved stiffie delivered by footmen. So I won’t be needing the carriage or the fancy dress or the singing mice and the sewing birds.
While the rest of the office are out with our author Nancy Huston with everything crossed, waiting and hoping for a gong for Fault Lines I’ll be sitting in the cinema with a Cornetto wondering if the man I was once introduced to as the real-life Mr Big who dated Candice Bushnell for years, was indeed the basis for the Chris Noth character.
Sigh.
Then my friend Nel and I will stop at the Portobello Gold for a glass of wine and steak and chips on the way home and I shall then tell her all about the night I was invited back to the purported Mr Big’s Shag Palace in Chelsea, with the knee high white carpeting and the dim-able lights and the soaring songs for swinging lovers and the leaping flames in the gas fire that all appeared at the flick of a switch.
Mind you, that was about as exciting as it got. Sexless in the City, I assure you. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if he lived up to his name.
Alice went to the readings for the Orange Prize last night at the Royal Festival Hall as a spare ticket came up at the last minute. I would have loved to have gone but couldn't bid for the place as I had a previous engagement with literary friend who shall remain nameless who possibly has the most piercing carrying voice in the whole of London. Indeed, I expect penguins in Antarctica heard all about her preference for a ‘cut cock’ as did every male in the pub where she made the announcement.
None brightened at the prospect, I may add - but we were in West London where I fear the feature is not ubiquitous.
I merely coughed and looked deep into my nuts.
Peanuts, I mean.
We then went to the S&M café, which is short for Sausage and Mash for the uninitiated and not a perversion or the name of a terrible column I once found myself writing, but there was one awful moment when the sausages arrived, and her mouth opened, that I wanted to duck under the table, fearful of what she was about to say.
Luckily she only wanted mustard.
