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.)
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.)
