A rank outsider

August is the cruellest month in publishing. Everyone is away in exotic places leaving just a core staff to (wo)man the office, but sadly, the cold callers of life don’t get to vacation in Tuscany. Instead they are sitting in a call centre, going through a list until we are randomly selected to have the good fortune to be connected to them:

‘Good Morning, Pedantic Press!’ I say, smiling brightly into the receiver in an effort to sound like a cheery can-do sort of upbeat person.

‘Oh yer, can I speak to the person who's in charge of youse fax machine?’

Now, come on. Let’s be realistic. In Charge? Of the Fax Machine? Like, you mean, a traffic warden standing guard over it?  Is there such a person? Well, sadly, this task seems to have been designated to me (along with 'water cooler engineer' and 'lightbulb purchaser').

Sigh.  Face falls, mouth goes into an inverted saucer of gloom, another sigh: ‘Who’s calling?’

‘Yer, you awrright? This is Tracy from Overpriced Office Solutions in Liverpool and we just wondered if yer would be interested in…?’

‘We’re not.’

‘But we can give you a very competitive rate on a new…’

‘I’m sorry, but we’re perfectly happy with our current machine,’ I say, replacing the receiver as the ancient fax beside me whirrs and creaks and spews out yet another advert for Low Cost Photocopier Toner that still manages to be the same price as every other single supplier.

Ring Ring.

‘Hello is this the lovely Marion? And how are you today?’

(I’m sucked in by the ‘lovely’)

‘I’m fine, what can I do for you?’

'Great, great, so you're having a good day then, Marion?'

Damn it too late, I've been caught...

‘It’s Sanjay here from Paper and Parcel Pleasures, and I’ve been told that you are the lady to talk to about the Office Stationery,’

I glare at Alice who turns to stone in the middle of an apologetic shrug. Fran, meanwhile is hiding under the desk. I hold up a note that says: I hate you, and wave it at her.

“Well, no, I order the stationery (as I may have mentioned - another of my executive duties) but…’

‘Ex-cellento, Marion, you don’t mind if I call you Marion, do you, Marion, but I wonder if you would consider giving us an order and letting us undercut your current provider?’

‘Actually, we’re all set for stationery at the moment.’ I say, an hour later, when he’s finished reciting the contents of his Summer catalogue to me.

Ring Ring.

‘I’m wondering if I can speak to the person in charge of the BT Line?’

I mean, who thinks up these scripts? Who, in what company, and where, has a person who is ‘in charge’ of a BT line? What do they do, shout orders at it, give it detention?

By now I don’t care. I don’t care about the poor person sitting in a barn in Basildon or Bangalore going through a list of numbers, I don’t even care about starving orphans in war torn parts of the world. I just want people to stop ringing me trying to sell me stuff I don't want.

‘There isn’t anyone.’

Beverley from Random Telephone Provider sounds shocked. “What, like, nob’dy. There aint nob'dy dealin’ with yer phones?’

‘Nob’dy.’ I assure her. I’ve even – unwittingly - started to mimic the accent of whosoever is on the line.

I similarly assure the photocopier salesmen that we don’t have one, the recruitment agencies that we don't employ anybody, the people who wonder who is ‘in charge’ of Human Resources (and then try to sell me paper towels and hand sanitizer) that we don’t have either Humans or Resources, and that nobody, absolutely fricking no-body has any responsibility whatsoever for the franking machine. It’s fully responsible for itself, thank you.

‘Can you at least not give them my name?’ I plead with the other members of staff who so confidently assure all sales people that ‘Marion’ being ‘The Office Manager’ is the person they need to talk to.

Trust me. They don’t need to talk to me. They really, really don’t.

I’m not that much of a conversationalist.

While I’m fielding calls, the rest of the office is a-twitter with Booker nerves. We’re all crossing everything (or in my case, just plain cross) hoping that our author Aravind makes it from the short to the long list. Everyone has been to the bookies and placed bets, and now there are other odds being calculated – namely who gets to go to the dinner if he does. We’re top heavy with Chiefs and rather understaffed with Indians – so at least five of the places will go to VIPs, while lower serfs are playing eeny meeny miney mo. Finally, there is also the author who, magnanimously, is allowed to invite his friends and family. We all heartily wish we were related, and I am sure everyone has suddenly been surreptitiously firing off chummy emails to Delhi, hoping he discovers hitherto unknown depths of fondness for us. Aravind. Dear, dear, Aravind. I’ve always liked him. I always felt – well, a certain kinship.

I'm not even in the race, of course since my sole contribution to the success of White Tiger has been sending it out to reviewers in a jiffy bag, and raising a glass when the author came into the office while he was promoting it, but nevertheless, I am a very, very significant glass raiser.

And, really, I’m much too important to be spared. Who then would be ‘In Charge’ of the fax machine? It’s actually a very responsible job. And in these stressful times, some of us just have to step up to the plate and press 'Send'.

So, do we have a fax number for Aravind?

Crash landing

Work.

I’m back.

In body if not in mind.

Manhattan and Hideaway Island are both distant memory. Hell, last night is a distant memory. Everyone tells me I look rested and relaxed which is true. I’m so relaxed, I can hardly remember my own name.

I feel like I’ve taken lots of drugs (which is also true, though Night Nurse, my current sleeping pill of choice, is not yet a Class A narcotic) and I’ve only had 6 hours sleep in three days. Consequently I can’t function. I shift manuscripts from one side of my desk to the other, then float into the kitchen and come out without the cup of tea I went in with. I don’t recall a single thing. Not the messages for Mr T that made it as far as a Post-it note, but no further, or the fact that Friday is a half day in August and so everyone else has gone home and at 2.30 I suddenly find myself sitting at my computer, all alone.

I don’t ever work in the afternoons - so this is indeed a fairly big lapse.

I wondered where everyone else had gone.

I’ve asked someone over for a drink on Sunday when I will be in Yorkshire, Ginger Pigging it, and another for dinner on Friday night when I shall be on a little plane to Guernsey on a food trip.

‘Plot’ and ‘Lost it’, very much in the same sentence.

‘Can you print out a map of where I’m going for lunch,’ asks Mr T at some point in the morning that feels like dawn but is, I realise with horror, a quarter to twelve.

‘Lunch?’ I say.

‘Yes, lunch. Today,’ he adds when I continue to look spacey.

‘Geales in Notting Hill, he prompts?’

‘Today?’ I repeat, weakly, vaguely remembering that there is, indeed, a meal in the middle of the day called lunch and that there is a restaurant in Notting Hill called Geales which, since I chose it, booked it, and arranged it myself, is comforting.

Eventually, after half an hour staring at the screen, I find a map on the internet and press ‘print’.

But there is no paper.

In the entire office.

I usually order the stationery, but I’ve been away, don’t you know? How can I buy paper from Manhattan? I think, when one of the execs struts across the office muttering, and sounding exactly like my kids when they open the fridge and find there's no milk.

At home, I'm no more popular. Despite some of my offspring treating me like I torture puppies instead of going out to do a perfectly normal office job instead of - say - putting milk in the fridge, and despite the usual method of greeting being a flounce followed by the sound of a slamming door, my absence has been noted.

'What do you mean you're going to Yorkshire? And then Guernsey? And yesterday you worked late and then went straight out to dinner with the Frenchman! (Okay, I concede, the last point was worthy of disdain) We never see you any more. We need a mother!'

Now, they 'need a mother?' 'I'm never here?' Does the last 25 years not count? The youngest is sixteen. When I was her age I was running away with a marr... Well, I mean, that's not the point. I've got to work. I've been sitting watching Celebrity Come Dancing every weekend since 1985? Can't I have a week's holiday. Can't I have a night out? It's not like I was enjoying myself - I mean it was the Frenchman for goodness sake...

So I'm derelict in all my duties.

Mr T strides past my desk in that brisk country walk way he has that makes him look like he's gliding on a treadmill, and calls over behind the filing cabinets where I'm hiding: ‘And can you ring our solicitor and see if the lease is ready for signing?’

'Lease?'

'Did we ever get it back?'

'No,' I assure him, though I m looking at a big black hole where my brain used to be: ‘Sure thing,’ I all but salute.

Then five minutes later I go into his office and wheedle, ‘erm, can you remind me who our solicitor is again?’

My own American Contract finally arrived from my agent, a moment I have been anticipating for months. It’s official. Signed, sealed and delivered. I am not going to wake up and discover that it's all been a terrible mistake.

Except I don’t know where I put it.

It’s too much.

I need another holiday to recover.

Luckily I’ve still got Morocco at the end of the month.

(Which I have yet to mention to the kids.)

Something's cooking...

I’m in the bath soaking in Jo Malone having just had a last swim in the pool before dinner. Downstairs in the kitchen, time is measured out by the steady blade of a knife chopping, chopping, chopping, when Ahhhh, Ahhhh, Ahhhh, comes a cry, in exactly the same rhythm, each louder than the last.

'Aye cut myselve,' yells Natasha, the cook, through the floorboards as Zena the butler (I kid you not), both of whom are from Belaruse, rushes calmly to her aid.  They speak to each other in that sneering way that makes you think they have their noses wrinkled because of a bad smell, biting off the end of their sentences, filtering their words through bared teeth.

I wait long enough for a normal sized person to have bled to death and then quashing my fear of blood, I do the decent thing, get out of the suds, wrap myself in a towel and open the door that leads from my bathroom straight down to the kitchen (obviously I'm sleeping in what was originally one of the servant’s rooms) and yell into the stairwell.

'Do you need any help?'

There’s a long silence.


'No,' says Zena curtly, in the same tone of voice I used to use to my mother-in-law when she was fussing and I wished she would get lost.

'Is there anything wrong?'

'Noa, everyzeeng ees fine,' says Zena.

'Yuess, somezeeng ees wrong, I cut my nail een haffe, right in zee meedel of preparing zee dinner,' wails Natasha.

'Do you need to go to hospital?'

'Noa, eet’s okay,' says Zena.

'Eet’s not okaye, I haff only haffe a nail!'

Tonight we’re having tempura with dipping sauce for dinner, I noticed on the menu Natasha keeps on the counter top… All very Sweeny Todd.

I once had a dinner party where I was using a mandolin to slice vegetables, sliced open my thumb, wrapped it in a towel, drove myself to the emergency, had it glued together, came back, rinsed the blood off the mandolin and went on cooking. We had 8 people coming. What was I meant to do. Get take out?

The chopping has resumed.

Let’s hope we don’t move on to whole fingers.

Meet the natives

The cocktail party starts at 6pm. There are no road signs on this private part of the Island to which we have flown for the weekend. Everybody here lives as though in seclusion, hiding out in their gated estates from the IRS, or in the Witness Protection Program. The rich want to hide their wealth from anybody who isn't in the club - privacy from all but 'people like us' is more important that having an address you can find on a map. The directions are that you turn right after the first sharp bend in the road, then left, then right, then left like dancing a reel, swinging round each driveway in turn, going from road to lane to dirt track until you piroutte into a circular driveway with a rose arbour planted in the middle.

We're in the middle of a forest but there’s valet parking, we discover after we’ve tucked the car under a tree.

The house is a square with a lot of white clapboard and glass shooting out of the roof at angles so that the windows look like raised eyebrows in an asymmetrical face, but, as in all Island homes, the main rooms face out to the ocean, or in this case a small lake scribbled with an indeterminate mass of trees and bushes, with the flat sea behind it – two wide expanses of water without even a sailboat to break the monotony of it. It’s the sort of view that's like a plain woman, at whom you look again and again, desperately trying to find something attractive in her uniform features, and failing.

There is food laid out on a table, the sort of Academic waspy appetisers I recognise from parties in Cambridge – sliced hot dog with a mustard or ketchup dip, triangles of pitta bread filled with hummous like it’s a sandwich filling, overweight supermarket shrimp with the ubiquitous spicy tomato salsa which weighs down the poor server’s arms as she totes it around the room, then stands there smiling wanly as she patiently waits for each guest to deposit the tail.

A tall man wearing a dragonfly pin on his lapel and introduced as a Middle East Expert who used to be in the State Dept, takes a hearty bite out of a shrimp, then double dips. Don’t they teach etiquette in the State Department? I wonder, as the hostess gushes over across the deck and greets us. She introduces Audrey as her brother’s most brilliant student, me as ‘this beautiful woman who is visiting from England’ and Mr Audrey as ‘involved in global economic matters’. She is dressed in an embroidered caftan, a long necklace made out of shells, and emeralds the size of broad beans.

So far, I’m the youngest person here.

When they talk about old money on this Island they really do mean old.

Most of the other guests are in Island uniform – for the men this means a brightly coloured jacket and/or pants in a lurid shade (or even green/blue Ralph Lauren plain - where do you think he got his inspiration?), often accompanied by an equally garish tie, a cane, sprouting eyebrows, hearing aids inside bristly ears, sunburn and incipient skin cancer.

The women are in jewellery and either slip dresses in 'summery' colours like pink and yellow if they are thin or, if not, they go down the caftan route. I didn’t get the memo, so I’m in a sort of slip dress that only looks like a caftan because it's big and I’m wearing it.

And no jewellery.

A young couple arrive and are pulled over to meet us, and by young, I don’t mean under 40, I mean really young. Well under 30. The woman is called Kelly and is very, very, enthused by it. Her eyes, startlingly blue in a shock of bleached Malibu Barbie blond hair, are wide open and astonished, as though even her name as she introduces herself has come as a total and wonderful surprise about which she just couldn't be happier. She’s wearing an orange frock (slip dress, of course) with a visible bra and lime green shoes. Her husband, who has initials for a name, is bear-big, or ‘husky’ as he gets to call it since he is male and overweight, with a sweet chubby kid’s face, polished with sun, money and good health. He smiles a lot which accentuates his overbite and makes his chin look strong and square, as tells us all about Obama with whose campaign he is involved. My friend Audrey gets very excited and tells us about her recent photo opportunity, and describes how Obama put his arm around her and kissed her.

'He’s very charismatic,' she says.

'He is,' agrees Husky.

'And what do you do, are you part of this Middle Eastern cabal too?' Asks the hostess.

What Middle Eastern cabal? I don’t ask, because just in time I remember Audrey’s masters in Ottoman History (although she was never a student of the hostess's brother any more than I'm beautiful or English), Husky's 'interests' (whatever that means) in Iraq, the man from the State Department who ‘speaks Arabic’ (but doesn’t know not to double dip which must get him into trouble when he's dining in Middle Eastern homes) and his wife Peggy who has skin like corrugated paper on her upper lip. Both Peggy and State Department have recently come back from Egypt where ‘everyone looks like the President’ according to the double-dip husband. 'He's not like us,' he adds before walking off to the ominous silence that greets this remark.

He’s being ironic, says Audrey. 'Everyone here is a Democrat.'

'No,' I reply. 'I’m a food writer.' ( Well, what do you mean 'you're what?' I am. Sort of. I do write about food. Sometimes.)

'Oh,' she says, smiling uncertainly. She obviously doesn’t have a clue what that really means, and neither do I since - okay - I kinda of just made it up.

'So yes, I have travelled to the Middle East a lot, but I’m an expert on the food, not the politics,' I add, which is taking fantasy to new realms so that I should have my own number in the Dewey Decimal System.

'She’s also a novelist,' says Audrey.

And I agree, wholeheartedly. 'I’m also a novelist.' This leads to a local celebrity being pointed out - the parents of Famous Filmaker who wrote a novel about an ice storm.

I look blank.

You know, 'The Famous Film?'

'Oh yes, The Famous Film... I remember, something about wife swapping in the seventies...'

'It's about his father, and...' - someone points at a man whose comfortably matronly wife I met a few minutes ago... 'that is his father there.'

Poor guy. Imagine being introduced as the villain in your son's Hollywood Movie at every party. It suddenly made sense that his wife shook Audrey's hand and called herself, wryly, 'the wicked stepmother'.

I can't imagine her dropping her car keys into the goldfish bowl. Except due to senile dementia.

The conversation then moved another film - this one of a John Irving book - which was shot on a house on the Island, which seems even more unlikely than me as an expert on Middle East Cuisine but is nevertheless true. A film crew was actually allowed on to the Island to film. The summer residents guard their exclusivity so much that they have been arguing for two years about putting in a bike path lest it attract rif-raf from the mainland who might come and sully the place with their proletarian bicycle tires.

We meet someone that Audrey knows on the way out. She is wearing a Caftan but is thin enough to slide out the crack they’ve left in the car window for the dog who is panting inside the vehicle. I can see her nipples like ticktacks poking through the material.

So correction, both the fat and the anorectic wear Caftans.

Both have things to cover up. But nipples, apparently, aren’t one of them.

Just as well. As when we left the dinner party I got caught in the full hosepipe crossfire of two freaking sprinklers and if there was an island Matron Wet T Shirt contest, that’s one prize, I would definitely have walked away with.

Two restaurants and a check

Cafe Boulud.

It's a restaurant - a few high heeled, excruciating, my feet are bloody (literally) little mermaid swords, blocks from my friend's house and so we walked, a rapier in the groin a step, first to the Carlyle Hotel where we sat in Bemelmen's Bar.

I love this bar. I met my old (as in 30 years ago) boyfriend who used to work at the UN here, waiting in another kind of agony for him to turn up, which he eventually did after 30 minutes. This time time round it's just me and my friend, both nursing warmish vodka martinis (don't they know they have to be ice cold and steaming like liquid nitrogen?) and chewed the fat of our marriages.  Or rather I chewed the fat, the gristle and sucked the marrow out of the bones of my marriage, not to mention the salt off all the chips, the cheese straws and the macadamia nuts, while she listened and nodded, and didn't eat any of the snacks.

By the time we left I could hardly feel my lips, or my feet, so the drink had a medicinal affect and allowed me to walk into the restaurant upright with a smile on my face, but even so, New York is a city where nobody ever catches your eye if you look like me - the gaze doesn't rest but glides over you unseeingly like a swipe with a cloth from a disinterested maid - well it does on the Upper East Side anyway. Fat and fifty merge into a cloak of invisibility but there are more people wearing it than I remembered. I sat between my two dinner dates, dazzled by diamonds on fingers and ears and swapped caustic comments about men and life, like the three wise monkeys – Eat-no carbs, See-no carbs, and Fear-no carbs. I was ‘fear-no’ having eaten all the bread...  There was something chocolatey for dessert but I can't remember more than that it tasted nice as I was so exhausted that it was all I could do not to let my face fall into the plate. The walk back, still painful, but mercifully short, was fuelled the thought of bed so that managed to arrive back at the house without carrying my shoes which I immediately threw back into the suitcase. I will never ever wear the dratted things again.

Manolo you can kiss my ankle.

The next day I met an old friend whose face was the first I saw when I arrived in New York, and his apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn the first place that I heard Sarah Vaughn and Betty Carter and Charlie Parker, sitting in the window of his place on Eighth Avenue, watching the street walk by. He had a black and white apartment and a black and white marriage, and a decidedly gray life, and it was he who took me around Manhattan and showed me China Town and Little Italy, Greenwich Village and The Empire State Building. It was he who ate shrimp sandwiches with me on 7th Avenue, he who took me to see a rerun of Woody Allen's Manhattan in the cinema there, and who sat with me until 2am drinking Grand Marnier in the bar on the corner. We walked up Fifth Avenue and down Madison, we took the D train into Manhattan to go dancing and when it broke down, we got stuck on the bridge until 4am so that we arrived in midtown in time to have breakfast with hookers in a brasserie that is now a fancy, shmancy restaurant. So this man is, and always will be, New York to me. When he was busy, I pretended I went sightseeing but in fact Manhattan intimidated me without his hand to hold, and after one trip to the twin towers and Wall Street, I stayed in Brooklyn and walked in the park, or went to the Museum, or hid in the pagoda in the Botanical Gardens where I wrote my diary in the rain, then went back to the apartment when everybody had left and spent the day reading.

So he's sitting opposite me now. He still looks the same though he has a dusting of icing sugar on his shaved head, and instead of an oiled Abercrombie and Fitch physique, a tiny stomach that he points out to me before I've even sat down. To me, he's still New York. He's limping from serious back surgery and I'm just limping.  If we're playing body poker, I can see his stomach and double it and raise him an ass and two boobs but I don't think he really sees me at all, so it doesn't matter. I see the past, and he just sees someone that comes to the city now and again, and he keeps away from nostalgia the way you do a rabid dog, walking quickly away from it so it doesn't have a chance to bite you.

We eat. We play a sort of conversational game of draughts, each of us simply mirroring the other's moves. I tell him about my kids. He tells me about his kid. I ask about his relationship. He asks about mine. I tell him what I have been doing and he tells me what has been doing. I talk about my book and I need Windolene to buff up his expression. I get the check. It's $63, $75 with the tip.

We walk out of the restaurant, or at least I walk and he hobbles a little until he shakes the stiffness out of his leg, he takes my hand like he used to do almost thirty years ago and, unlike the rest of me, that's one part that still stays the same size, and feels tiny in his big bear mit as the fingers interlace with mine and curl up like a clam shell.

But we don't go far. Instead of walking through Manhattan in the early hours of the morning, we make it to the end of the block in the middle of the day. On Sixth Avenue he flags a cab and hugs me. then kisses me goodbye. I wave at him out the window but he's met someone on the street that he knows and he's smiling at him. But I wave anyway.

The cab down town cost $18 and $15 to ride back to the house. I write it in my little account book - but you can't put a price on memories, which are priceless, according to the Mastercard advert.

Well yes you can - and this one was $108.

But still sort of priceless.

Spa heaven, body hell

New York, Upper East Side.

I wake up at two am and am swamped with panic that I will never get back to sleep again as long as I live and will, instead, become psychotic and have to be hospitalised and tanked full of lithium. In other words, I have perfectly normal jet lag. I’ve only been in bed for three hours, but eventually I drop off until it’s five thirty, and a reasonable time to put the light on, and flip open the laptop.

At seven o’clock the occupants of the house are upstairs exercising and I’m sitting in the kitchen with a bowl of figs and a cappuccino made for me by Antonio who is already at work.

I didn’t expect that there would be anybody downstairs and so I walk in wearing a scanty dressing gown like Botticelli’s Venus, a hand on either extremity. The sound of an early morning garbage truck chewing its way up the street is the only noise apart from Antonio tapping on the computer. It’s comfortingly familiar and I realise that it’s been a while since I saw the back of a man’s head at a keyboard.

Unless you count Martin in accounts.

At 11.00 am I’m having my nails done by Lula from Azbekistan who informs me I have an intelligent face – you can tell, apparently by my long nose and wide forehead. I start to feel even worse than I did before I left the house, doughy faced and wan from jet lag and free airplane alcohol. She tells me I’m lucky. I have a lucky face – I don’t ask why in case she makes a merit out of my age spots. She used to tell fortunes, she adds, so she knows, but ‘no more I tell them’ she says. ‘Since we come here my husband gets more religious and the Torah says no fortune telling,’

Sylvia is doing my toes. I feel like Cleopatra, albeit Scottish Cleopatra (you speak like Breetesh, says Lula) being ministered to, having my feet rubbed and my fingers massaged. I long to fall into the grasping fingers of the massage chair and go to sleep as my feet bob up and down like apples in the foot spa and little bits of me are pinched and preened and buffed and polished.

An hour later and I have fingernails like sea shells and red toenails that glisten in the sunlight.

‘You need to do your eyebrows’, says Lula sternly and I cannot but agree as I lie down and have hot wax poured over my forehead. “You want I should do your top lip?’ she asks.

What top lip? So I have long nose, wide brow and a bloody moustache.

I decline, but can’t help but squint into the mirror when she’s finished and my ‘wide brow’that now looks like a case study for skin disease, all red and swollen, checking for the invisible ‘tash.

And they call this beauty treatment?

The next stop is the hair salon where a nice stodgy French woman with a double chin colours me golden, degingering me with a sweep of her magic brush, and then highlights me blonde.

I’m feeling wonderfully confident until I go to the bathroom and discover that I can’t get the toilet seat lid to go up. There’s a reason for this. It’s electrical. There’s a control panel beside the pedestal with more buttons than the NASA space program and I don’t have my glasses so I don’t know what to do. I press them randomly and nothing happens, then suddenly rapid jets of water start hitting the underside of the, mercifully still closed, seat, otherwise I would have had a facial of the sort I hadn’t anticipated. Then the toilet flushes several times in succession. In desperation I press a yellow button, and for a horrible moment as it seems to have no effect I worry that I’ve pressed an alarm bell like they have in disabled loos and that suddenly someone will burst in and find me bent over the toilet, peering at the cistern.

Eventually I manage to hit the spot, and open sesame.

Who goes to the hairdresser and has jets of water fired up their various entrances and exits for god’s sake?

Next I am passed to Herge who chews gum and smiles with his mouth open so that it looks like his teeth have been glued shut with blue tac. He loves curly hair so much that by the end of the blow dry I look like I’m in Boogie Nights and only need some white lipstick to complete the bouffant look. Luckily he tongs me into ringlets and I leave ready to give a rendition of The Good Ship Lollypop, following Audrey into Hermes where the manager greets her with: 'Is this your daughter?'

Audrey is ten years older than me and about 200 years thinner.

I can only assume it was due to the youthful hairstyle which is lacking only a big red bow. Or that he thought I was retarded and out of the care facility for the weekend.

I still feel like a goddess.

Tonight we’re going for drinks and dinner. I only have a black dress but Audrey’s friend the style consultant who dresses many of New York’s rich and famous told me that the only people in a restaurant who should be wearing black are the ones handing you the menus.

Oops.

I guess I’m not going to be feeling like a goddess for very long then. What with me having the maitre d' moustache and all.

But who cares?, There’s a vodka martini with my name on it and a bowl of chips waiting to be eaten. I can only oblige.

Life's a pill

One of the popular misconceptions about publishing is that it’s a boozy profession, consisting of a succession of long, three martini lunches, and late nights at The Groucho Club with a credit card behind the bar.

Well I hate to disillusion you, but it’s not a misconception - it's all true.

Not so much the Private Members’ Clubs – except for the higher echelons when entertaining authors - and not so much vodka at lunchtime, unless, like me, you go home and absent-mindedly take your multivitamin with a glass you find by the sink and then discover it doesn’t contain water. (I live with my kids. My kids have parties that end when I’m getting up. Accidents happen.)

However, certainly hangovers after work nights out are worn next morning as bonding badges of honour (who can forget the great Louisa Karaoke Evening?) And when we decide to push the party boat out after a book launch or a leaving do, what often begins as a sedate bottle of white in the Boardroom to celebrate say - the launch of Graham Rawle’s magnificently dark and wonderful The Wizard of Oz - becomes a mass office exodus to The Perseverence in Lamb’s Conduit Street, from which I teeter unsteadily at around 8.30 having dined on two bags of Cheese and Onion Crisps, purchased for me by none other than the esteemed author himself. Ah yes, rubbing shoulders with the literati - it's a classy life.

I then make my way home, with a slight detour about which we will not talk about here, and arrive at the house at about 2am when I go directly upstairs, without passing go, and without either collecting a glass of water or saying hello to the assembled rabble offspring who have been up since around three pm raiding the fridge and are now busy, variously assembling teams to win the Championship League in FIFA 2009, or slaughtering orks or whatever in Warcraft, or watching My Super Sweet 16 Marathons while I’ve been at that novelty activity called:

Work.

Networking.

Etc.

I fall straight into bed and wait for the room to stop spinning.

It doesn’t.

However my head begins to beat like the bass in a souped up Ford Capri idling at the traffic lights on Ladbroke Grove.

I sit up, brace myself for the bed’s massive lilt to the side, then wince as I turn on the lights, scrabble for my glasses and survey the bowl at the side of my bed which is like the display in a hypochondriac's sweet shop.

Darling, it's The Valley of The Dolls.

The bowl contains all sorts of pills for all sorts of ailments from which I, or people known to me, may once have suffered back in 1982 but which I keep, just in case of a medical crisis. I know there are beta-blockers (too much coffee one day last summer), a bottle of emergency Valium (my ex-husband’s back problems 18 months ago, very handy for jet lag), some Sleepy Time Herbal Remedy the size of horse pills (divorce - I lost him, but at least I got the Valium as well as the insomnia) , and some indigestion pills (The Ivy's bad martinis). I sift though them. I ‘m sure there is a foil packet of painkillers. But what's what? Everything has brand names. I remember giving my daughter Zantac for a week thinking it was Zirtac for her hay fever and then wondering why it wasn't helping and she was still sneezing (though had a remarkably settled stomach), so I lifted up one bubble pack after another, picking through them - I found Colofac, Propanalol and Cuprafen - but what are they all for?

This is how I come to be sitting on my laptop at 2.15 in the morning typing Colofac – into a search engine. Apparently it's an antispasmodic and I didn't even know anyone suffered from spasms. Then Cuprafen - the foil that's been peeled back in several places and my still drunk eyesight means it takes me ages to get the spelling right - but bingo - I type it in and Lo - dulcet angels burst into songs of praise and relief - pain relief. It's an analgesic.

I take one with Colgate flavoured water from the toothpaste mug (I should have stopped for that glass of water) and try to sleep. A quarter of an hour later I take another. Luckily, the liquid in the glass is indeed only water and I manage not to brush my teeth with Triflora Arthritis gel.

What did we do before Google I wonder.

Clashing colours

At work, where I arrived in a state of almost gleeful intoxication to be back in the world of nice reassuring emails and filing and letters written by other people that require me only to put them into an envelope, there was great excitement.

The Clash arrived.

Okay, not the real Clash, who even if they turned up, ( I mean, just the living ones - the dead I'm sure I might sort of be startled by), wearing Clash tour t-shirts and playing their greatest hits, I probably wouldn't recognise them from Graham Rawle who is coming in tomorrow. I think I was asleep in the late seventies, or at least, if not asleep then doing the' euphemistic' sleeping with a long series of unsuitable men who didn't listen to the Clash, meaning therefore, that neither did I - while I was comatose, pregnant, or both at the same time for all of the eighties. So instead of their autographs, I'd probably just ask them if they wanted tea or coffee and tell them to sit down in the lobby.

Luckily it was the Clash book that arrived then. Lovely, lovely, lovely - big, glossy, fully illustrated and in a cover that shall henceforth be known as 'Clash pink' throughout the Pedantic Press universe. I'm taking a swatch of the cover straight to Homebase and getting it made into a paint sample immediately. I can see a new colour scheme at home developing like a Polaroid in front of my eyes.

Poetry in predictive text

...and then Sarah at work gave me this book.

She said: Oh Marion, this looks like one for you, and left the volume on my desk, as slim as hope, with its buff paper cover peppered with little hearts for all the world like a schoolgirl's textbook. And the title?

The Love Letters of Famous Men

Inside, in case you're a bit dense and haven't managed to keep up, these are short excerpts from the love letters of Pliny the Younger and Henry VIII (to Anne Boleyn who must have sort of wished she had just slept with the ugly old devil instead of hanging out for the white dress, though hanging may not be quite the best verb, chop-chop) - all full of longing and devotion.

And if I scroll back through my mobile phone, what do I have? Yep - a text message that says: I like your *.

Ah, the silver tongued modern man.

You can't live without them, and you can't shoot them in the head.

That Friday feeling

Friday. It used to be the high spot of my week and now I greet it with the dread of a debt collector. I come back to the house with my heart in my heels. There is three days worth of junk mail lying on the doormat, shoes laid out like dance steps on the tiles of the hall, hoodies and jumpers hanging with one arm hooked around the stair-rail and the smell of burnt toast hanging bitterly in the air.

In the kitchen carbon films the counter tops as though we’ve been dusted for fingerprints, and indeed there has been a crime. The crime is filth. Dishes seem to be gathering for some sort of grime convention. It’s making me feel like I’m 19 again, but not in a good way. It reminds me wearily of kitchens gone by - you probably remember the sort of place I mean - melamine counters peeling at the edges, spotted grainy, stainless steel sinks with other people's pots containing the memories of other people's meals, all piled on top of each other like the leaning tower of pizza, food scattered like confetti all over the stove, clogging up the drain, and crumbs crunching underfoot.

There's a lid that once closed an ice cream container and when I pick it up melted ice cream curdles and slides off the plastic all over my feet and on to the floor.

It suddenly strikes me that I’m in flat share hell with my own kids, but instead of it being some faceless landlord that owns the furniture and pays for the home maintenance, it’s me (with magnanimous help from the ex).

So it’s my lovely black lacquer dining table that I bought fondly imagining it surrounded by friends (that I don’t seem to have) set with all my beautiful candle sticks and Designer Guild plates (the former have been burnt down during last weeks house party and are covered in wax, and the latter are wearing their name tags for the convention in the sink) and instead find it covered in CDs a computer, two screens, laundry, papers and three glasses.

There is unfolded laundry all over the kitchen table, pots crusty and cold on the oven, dirty laundry in two bags vomiting clothes all over the upstairs hall, the bathroom should be condemned and there is a trail of cocoa puffs all over the floor just so the mice can find them before the ants do.

This is why people used to send their kids down the mines. Just to get them out of the bloody house.

But at least you’re not alone, friends say. And yes, it’s true, I’m not alone, except in any way that’s enjoyable.

I am tripping over people, I find them sleeping on my floor, lying in my bathtub, wearing my bras, pointedly not eating my food, borrowing my concealer (I’m fifty for goodness sake – who do you think needs more concealer – me or a sixteen year old with peaches instead of skin?)

On the way back from the daily walk round Wormwood Scrubs, Nel and I ran into her neighbour.

'Oh hi,' she greeted me enthusiastically. 'I am so glad I saw you, I just wanted to tell you that I’m off on holiday with two books written by people who live around here.'

'Oh yeah', I try to sound enthusiastic, but it would be a stretch under normal circumstances, in today’s climate I don’t really want to even admit that there exist other writers.

'That Sadie woman who is on Richard and Judy and was shortlisted for the Orange, she lives down there' (she points) 'and the whatsername something about Moths, lives down there – she was handing out copies of the book when she was picking up her kid from school. She said to me, is this naff?'

(Yep, it’s naff)

'…and I said, no, I bake cakes and hand them out, you write books and hand them out.'

(okay it’s not that naff, because a cake takes like thirty minutes and a book takes that many months, so it’s just faintly desperate – I like her already.)

'…so next year I’ll take your book on holiday.'

Hahaha, I laugh weakly. As though I want to know that there are two other really fantastic writers who live within two streets of me. Does that help. Have their husbands also left them? Are they also living with the mistletoe of with adult kids who still think they are five?

I already know the poet who used to live up the road until he left his wife, and that Margaret Drabble has a house a few streets across, and I know that Will Self used to live round the corner in my friend Rosie's house. I know. I know. I’m a citizen of literary, shagging, dinner party London. But I don’t have a work permit.

I’m in the kitchen doing their bloody washing up.

The haves and the have nots

At work and the phone rings with a friend doing her Katherine Hepburn impersonation, except that this is actually what she sounds like, but breathy and appealing and sort of adorable - if it isn’t kind of wrong for a 47 year old woman to be cute.

Which it isn’t. She's lovely, so shut up.

Marion, she drawls, I wanted to call you after lunch last week because I needed to tell you that about one day a month my husband is totally in love with me and the rest of the time he hardly notices I’m there and you just happened to catch him on a loved up day.

I know what she means. When she took me out last week he was being effusively affectionate in the way that even under normal happily married circumstance makes me want to garrotte myself with a dinner napkin, but these days just impels me to walk in front of a bus. It’s not that you don’t want your friends to be happy, but you wish they would be a little less conspicuous about it and though I really can only celebrate the fact that she and her husband are mutually besotted, it makes me envious.

Yep, envious.

I used to be the one with the doting, if distracted, husband, and now I’m the cast off, no-body loves me, I think I'll go and eat worms.

Oh it’s fine, I said, but I must admit it did make me realise what I was missing, I admitted. Believe me, winsome didn't come in to it.

No, but we have just as unhappy a marriage as anyone I know, she insisted, being a dear and rubbishing her perfectly functioning, relationship just so that I didn’t feel slighted. She goes on:

I know that before I sold my book a friend of mine got hers published and though I was happy for her, it made me less happy with myself.

Yes, precisely. Other people’s success is a dish best served when you are totally satiated by your own cooking.

Anyway, we had a big argument last night and we’re not speaking, she said. I just wanted you to know that.

Quite. I’m the first port of call for the SS Schadenfreud.

I’m not that shallow, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t, because maybe I am.

She had hardly hung up when another of our authors came into the office – she of the Clever Girls Book Club who has just written the book of her career according to Mr T. And yes, I'm impressed and glad for her and muttering under my breath: success is a dish best served when you’re totally satiated by your own cooking, so I start bulking up on my own modest literary achievements to stop myself feeling peckish when I see her plate piled high with plaudits.

I’m reciting to myself; Look Marion you got American rights (yeah - yeah, I know it was at a mere fraction of what she sold hers for but don't go there - step away from the six figure sum and concentrate), Dutch rights, Italian rights, Portuguese rights, a lovely letter from the Italians telling me how honoured they were to be publishing my 'beautiful book'. Did you see that Marion? ‘Beautiful’. Hah! And then there was the lovely, lovely specially shot cover... how lovely is that?

I’ve run out and have to start chewing back at the beginning again as she tells me how her American publishers don’t seem to be planning much of a publicity tour.

Publicity tour?

Yikes, I hadn’t even thought to be upset that I wasn’t having one, but now I have another thing to feel inadequate about. My 'beautiful book, my 'beautiful' book,’ I recite to myself.

I tell her my husband has just left me.

She reminds me that her ex-fiance, coincidentally a fellow countryman (almost) of my ex-husband, and she broke up a year ago.

'*ing *s,' she fumes.

'Yeah, *ing *s.' I agree.

'Prozac,' she announces, definitively. 'It's a great help.'

'I’m self medication with alcohol, bad dates and chocolate,' I reply.

'Well, whatever gets you through it,' she says.

And suddenly we're sisters, forget the publishing rivalry.  We're in the same band.  Founding members of the Bad Bloody Relationship Tribute Band.  Both wearing the T shirt.

Money laundering and other office skills

From the truly sublime to the ridiculous.

On Monday I was up at five in the morning and instead of riding the bus to work, I was on my way to Belgium to interview the owner of a real live chocolate factory. Not, I hasted to add, that the chocolate factory was in Belgium - no, in fact it's in Shepherd's Bush, about five minutes from my house. But the owner got his inspiration for the business he started while he was working in Belgium. So, off we went to follow him on his sentimental journey by Eurostar rather than the tube to White City, a little retinue, a harem of women - a PR, a photographer, a photographer's assistant, me and his Marketing Manager, all trailing him, as we went from chocolate shop to patisserie to cafe, collecting samples of chocolate and cakes as we went. It was like being with the Pied Piper of Hamlyn after the people defaulted on their payment, but instead of leading away the children, he was doing a bit of a mopping up operation on the chocolate.

There he was in a crumpled linen shirt, jeans and Italian shoes, wandering through the centre of Brussels - a confection itself with its gilded buildings and gothic decoration, like icing on a particularly elaborate wedding cake - while the photographer followed him, snapping away, and the rest of us walked behind, carrying the chocolates, like ladies in waiting and Prince Philip in drag.

To be honest, we hadn't even got the first cafe with Chocolate Man when I had already tired of the notion of ever having to eat chocolate again. I was dreaming of bacon, and strong coffee, neither of which I could have. But I did have moules frites and waffles, and was home, laden with patisserie, by seven in the evening.

But stop the week was an afternoon listening to tales of shagging pigs, shagging sheep and shagging bulls with Mr Ginger Pig and learning such gems of Farming Lore as 'nothing with nuts on makes good meat' and 'you don't want to put anything with nuts on into your mouth'. I totally agree. 'It makes them tough', apparently. There you go. That's why men are never very tender. But before this, I had dinner with the literary friend where the main conversation topic was not, as you might have expected, this being literary London, darling, the Booker longlist on which one of our authors is prominently featured, but topics of a different sort for which the younger (much younger) women at the table definitely had a scoring system.

I just ate my chicken and learned a lot that, sadly, has come too late in life to be much use to me.

Dinner wasn't ready until about nine (coincidentally the... no, I'm not going there) and so by the time we ate I had drunk rather a lot and this morning was still suffering a little.

I finally arrived at work at 8.15 almost crying with the desire for an Alka Seltzer, switched on my computer, and found a list of executive tasks left for me by Mr T who was off on a mammoth tour of South West England Rail visiting various authors.

Executive task no 1: book another train ticket for next week going to Crewe.

So far, so fairly easy. I'm getting good at Internet Fraud with the company credit card and can type his name and mastercard number faster than my own these days.

Executive task no 2. Log on to William Hill and put 100 pounds on our author Aravind's White Tiger to win the Booker.

Mr T had been, the previous morning at a Courvoisier reception (it's a tough life being at the top) and had a couple of miniatures sitting on his desk, one of which, he gave over to me after I'd stared at it wistfully, and which I still had in my handbag as though I was going to sprint into action as some sort of Bloomsbury St Bernard, ready to offer mountain rescue and sustenance to those in need outside Faber & Faber when they find the Queen's Larder hasn't yet opened.

So this is how I came to be sitting, hung over, doing on-line gambling at 9.30 on a Friday morning with a miniature of brandy in my handbag.

It's all very Raymond Chandler.

All I needed was a cigar and a gun in my pocket.

A nine incher naturally.