It’s Halloween.

We don't usually dress up, but Ms Rights said she had been looking for her tiara that morning.

I thought she wore it every day. 

‘Only mentally, Marion, only mentally,’ she said.  ‘And what about your broomstick?  Is that why you always look so cheerful?’

For the record, I never look cheerful. But I was more concerned with the ‘underneath the venom, there’s a happy person’ implication.

The other day she arrived at work clutching a latte and announced that she needed some advice.

‘My husband came back from the States and gave me a pair of suspenders.  Red suspenders.  What do you think this means?’

‘To much information,’ I thought but tried to appear unperturbed.  ‘I think it probably means he would like you to wear them dear,’ I said, trying to rapidly banish the resulting picture from my head.

‘Yes, but you don’t understand, they’re Gordon Gekko suspenders, you know – the sort you wear to hold up your pants…’

Ah, American suspenders…  Braces.  Trousers not knickers.  Got you.  I should know this stuff since I’ve spent the last month inserting these very words and their siblings into my book to make it more, well, American for the publisher on the other side of the pond.

But now I was even more perturbed.  ‘Why is he buying you braces?’

'I don't know, that's what I'm wondering...'

‘Does he like you to wear men’s clothes?’ asked another, whose meek voice belayed the fact that she won the ‘unfortunate things I did in my youth’ contest in the office the other week, up against a lot of fierce, very fierce competition.

‘Have his mother, sister, female friend, cousin, whatever,  take him aside and tell him what constitutes an appropriate present for a woman,’ I counselled.

Banish from the list: braces, gladioli, carnations, a Magimix, cosmetic sets bought on planes (we generally wear one shade of lipstick and don’t need three others in crap colours) more than two airport perfumes in which we’ve expressed an interest, and a tea-tray with four cups and saucers.  The final item was the gift I received on the last birthday my husband spent at home.

I should have known then something was afoot.

Cold calling

This morning, on the way to work the phone rang...  It was someone who used to commission me and who kept me off the breadline at various points in my life but it has been a while since he has returned any of my calls. Today however, he was on the line.

Chatting.

About his cold.

He didn't mention the book proof which I know my publishing company sent him, and about which I had thought, in my giddy, excited naivety, he would be pleased - in the way a friend would.  I waited for him to say something - anything - until it's the elephant in the room, but apparently only I can see it.  Oh dear Lord, how awful it is when you send someone your book and the response is deafening silence.  I feel it at work when we parcel up our own proof copies and dispatch them to people we hope will say something nice to put on the cover, and it's like they've fallen off the end of the world without even a splash.  However, it's worse when it's your own.  I mean, even 'thanks' would be nice.  I'm not expecting a three ring circus or a plot analysis.

Instead he spoke for a good five minutes about his self-confessed 'man-flu', and about being laid low, and how he was 'zapping' it with Echinacea and Beechams Cold and Flu relief.  Ah yes, the art of sparkling conversation is not yet dead.  This is one of the advantages of not living with a man - that you don't have to sympathise while hearing lurid descriptions of their snot.

Eventually after he'd talked about his steam treatment, I crumbled and asked him if the book arrived.  He muttered an off hand yes.   The way I do when a sales representative asks me if I'm the person who deals with our environmental waste management.

 'You won't read it will you?'  I said in wearily defeatist mode.

'No...' he agreed, before insisting that it was lying around somewhere.

(Sound of indeterminate scrabbling)

I sigh.  I got six copies and have only two left and he has one 'lying around somewhere...'

'Well will you pass it on to someone else for me?'

He mumbled something discouraging about the book pages of his paper, intimating that it wouldn't really be quite their thing being all paperbacky but offered to give it to his 'kid' who is 33 because 'she likes girlie books'.

'It's not that girlie,' I protested, 'it's quite dark.'

I couldn't help myself from exaggerating hugely about how pleased the Waddling Duck Overseas sales' departments were (believe me, to hear me tell it - they know my name in India where, as you can imagine, the Delhi housewife is going to be enthralled by the domestic life of a West London psychopathic housekeeper), but he remained unimpressed by my blatant lying.

I could practically hear him yawning.

'And our author Aravind's White Tiger won The Man Booker,' I added, bringing out the big guns for good measure, refraining to mention it was the only ruddy thing that anyone wanted to talk about at last night's Meet The Press night at Waddling Duck at which I was supposed to be plugging myself.

'Yeah, is it any good?' he drawled.

'Of course it's good.  It's fantastic.  It won.'

But his only response was to reprise his minute by minute pharmaceutical treatment of his bad cold (aka man-flu).

Bless him.

Getting your book published is only the first hurdle in a long, long battle.  Next you have to get bookshops to sell it and then you have to pray someone will read it.  What hope is there when you can't even persuade some of your friends and acquaintances to flick through further than the acknowledgments?    The woman (very, very nice woman) from Radio Four said that she gave each book 50 pages.

Maybe I should have slipped in fivers?

You may remember the self-published book I was sent recently on the slush pile with a quote that the author had added on the back from 'my friend Dave'.  I'm now worried that I may not even be able to muster up that:

'I read a good book today.  Yours.'  My eldest daughter (who lives with me, food, rent-free and with all utilities paid).

'I read a bit and then I put it down.'  My youngest daughter (as above).

'It really stayed with me.'  Fran in Pedantic Press Publicity Department (sits behind me, within easy reach of hot liquids and scissors, recently moved to New York Office).

'It's good.  Everything you do is good.'  Husband.  Before leaving.

'I might not like it.'  My best friend Nel.

'Can you change the ending?'  American publisher.

Feel free to jump in anytime.

Anyone?

Okay then, tenners?

A bottle of champagne for the best one?

First born son?  (Actually he's unemployed, lives at home etc, but has great hair and is very cute...)

Meet the Press at Waddling Duck

The publicity machine trundles along, or in my case creaks, much like my aching joints as I hobble in heels along The Strand to Waddling Duck for a Meet The Press session with my fellow spring authors. 

I’m a little nervous as readers of this blog will have by now ascertained that 'meeting' is not my strong point.  I can sometimes enjoy a party, despite all claims to the contrary, but like marriage, monogamy and motherhood, it’s more the idea that appeals to me.  I like the anticipation, the fantasy, the notion.  By the time it's a reality it's too late - you're there, stuck in a corner, doing it, with only alcohol to dull the pain.  

So what do you wear to meet the press?  Once upon a time I was the press and I don't remember anyone dressing up for me.  The other problem is lighting in as much as, at home, in the 4pm gloom of my bedroom, I don't have any.  Naturally, this means that when I'm getting ready by 40 watt bulb, I look simply wonderful - but not so much when standing on the 10th Floor of Waddling House Corporate Headquarters under spotlights that do the same for the face as holding a torch under it, but in reverse.  My eldest daughter had helpfully rubbed in a bit of unblended concealer before I left the house (breeding does, apparently, have its advantages) but after that I was on my own with a glass of cava in a room the size of Terminal 5 with a lot of people wearing sticky badges, most of which seemed to herald that they were not, in fact, Press, but employees.  

Young employees.

It appears that the press were somewhat under-represented though those who did drag themselves across  London for a free drink were quite senior literary editors lured, no doubt, by names like Alain de Botton - whose Waddling Duck minder stuck to his side like glue in a sweater - rather than that of, say, Marion McUnpronounceable.  I was recently invited to one of his School of Life singles evenings by a friend.  Even the thought made me want to curl up like a cold canape and throw myself into the nearest swing bin.  Not least because I imagine they are full of women.  Clever women.  Everything is full of women.  (Please God, women who read!) There are times, this being yet another in the long conveyor belt of such moments since the husband became unhinged and unhitched, when I realise that not only have I woken up to a brand new world full of women, but that I have also woken up to a brand new world full of young women.  

At work the other day during a heated discussion over whether or not Russell Brandt should resign (American election, what American election?) I mentioned that the Beeb could always hire him back later: 'Remember, like they did with Kenny Everet?'

'Kenny who?'  said one of my co-workers.

'You, know - Kenny..?'  and then my voice trailed off.  That's the problem.  They don't.

'Leonard Cohen?'

'Is he one of the Burn after Reading brothers?' 

And they are everywhere: sitting at the desks surrounding me in the office, standing in the huddle into which I insinuated myself the other night at the book launch, hanging around my house eating my food claiming to be blood kin, and now here, swarming at Waddling Duck.  My lovely editor looks like she's stepped out of the pages of  Tatler.  My publicist, doe-eyed, winsome and slim as a bread-stick stands next to me and immediately supersizes me to a Happy Meal with extra fries, and then I see a tall, leggy girl with blonde curly hair tumbling down her back talking to Andrew Holgate from The Sunday Times and think she is the journalist from Vogue.  It's not until the Publicity Director at Waddling Duck (also impossibly young) tells me her name that I realise she's actually my Publisher who, on the basis of one short meeting, I seem to have embossed in my memory on a pedestal of glossy, corporate seniority in a Chanel Suit and Anna Wintour shades.  There are even boys, boys, with managerial titles, and less facial hair than some of my women friends...

So where are all the birds my age, I wonder (apart from hurriedly having electrolysis?)  Have I stumbled into the publishing equivalent of Logan's Run?


(Logan's what?)

But no.  They exist.  They're out there writing books judging by the other female authors.  All three of my fellow novelists must be at least in my ball park (okay I'm downscaling, on the grounds of tact).   One of them, another mother of four, can surely remember Kenny.  She has a daughter older than mine.  Not a ruddy line on her face though, and no body fat.  I know.  I checked.  That intent look when I'm talking to you is not me being absolutely riveted by what you say (though that too) - it's me desperately trying to identify a wrinkle so I can feel less like the Cryptkeeper surrounded by nubile nymphs.

None of the authors I wanted to meet appeared.  How to meet a man after 40?  Not a sign of her.  (Get a wedding ring, I would say.  It always seemed to have a magical effect for me, albeit with the wrong sort of sleazy man who touchingly imagines being married makes you 'safe').  Or Split: 'I want a divorce.'  Surely we two would have a great deal in common?  Even The Idle Parent would have been nice to know, since its a philosophy I have long held and practiced.  

'I thought you must be the stalker woman,' said a male author.  

'No' I said, offended.  

'I meant the woman who had been stalked,' he added.

'Still no.  Though I did have a stalker once,'  I replied to his back.

'Yes, me too,' he said airily, lest I think I was special.

I asked Andrew Holgate if he was married.  'Yes, 29 years,' he replied defensively, stepping back just a tad (perhaps worried that I was about to apply my own criteria for sleaziness).

'Good,' I said.  'Please get your wife to read my book.  It's about a woman who runs away,' I add, quickly, wondering if Will Skidelsky is also married and I can lean on him for his wife before he goes.

Target audience, darling, target audience.

White out

...and then I'd just fallen asleep when the sixteen year old clumped into the bedroom and woke me up.

'Can I show you something?' she asked.

'Sure...' I replied blearily trying to give the impression of a mother who has been up all night worrying instead of comatose, couldn't care less, thought she was in bed hours ago.

'Well you could sound a bit more enthusiastic,' she scolded.

(It's the middle of the night, or it could be, and I've been sleeping, and it was lovely and I'm not ruddy enthusiastic.)

I jumped up brightly - or as bright as you can be when you're pissed off and bleary eyed, prepared to be attentive to whatever wondrous thing had happened - Britney in Rehab, Gossip Girl second series out on DVD. etc.

'You need to get up.'

(No, no, no.) I  tripped over my jeans, my shoes, stood on a stiletto heel, kicked over a glass of water and swore

She pulled back the curtains.

'It's snowing.'

Ah - so yes.  Apparently hell does freeze over.

Justin Marozzi’s Book Launch, W11

It’s slightly worrying and just a bit Woody Allen on his Bergman kick in that the house, a grand stucco edifice on one of those curling crescents on the way up the Notting Hill Gate, is slap bang next to my shrink.  I only realized the coincidence, and yes, shut up Freud, such things do exist, when I was standing outside earlier in the day ringing the bell.

As I left at the end of my session I told her that I was invited to a party later that night in the house next door.  ‘And I’m definitely going.’ I added, just incase she had also been invited and was planning on attending.   This is my social life at stake here so if there’s any risk of us running into each other outside the professional space I want it made clear from the outset that I’m not going to be the one staying home watching Coronation Street.

So lines drawn in the psychoanalytical sand,  I’m upstairs in the drawing room, drinking Prosecco, hoovering up peanuts and any canapé that is unwary enough to come within a three foot radius, mingling.  I hate mingling.  I sort of swim through the crowd looking for someone I know well enough to monopolise and then cling on to their social lifebelt like a shipwrecked sailor, and if I happen to hail a familiar face across the room, believe me I’m definitely drowning, not waving.

Luckily, literary friend is already in situ, next to an ashtray and a bowl of chocolate truffles, although no luck is involved in any part of this sentence as all has been carefully arranged including the relocation of the small bowl of confectionery, previously on a low table at the other end of the room.  Literary friend is swathed in smoke and provides a great, if odoriferous, place to hide.  She has colleagues with her, enough to look like there are a bunch of us, all terribly interested in what each other has to say which, given that they work together every day, is highly unlikely.  I have my eldest daughter with me which, given that we live together every day means the same conclusion may be drawn.

I don’t really know the author but have the good fortune to remember who he is as he strides across the room looking older and even more handsome than he did ten years ago when we last met at something FTish.  However, we share an agent, and his wife used to be my editor, and his launch party is being held in the house next door to my shrink and my friend Kate is an editor at his publishing house.  That makes me an utterly legitimate guest who is not attending under false pretences. 

I repeat this between handfuls of peanuts:  ‘Marion, you are a legitimate guest.  You are not freeloading.’ Though in my head of course (all that money spent next door, absolutely not in vain.  And then I notice the hole in the ceiling.

One of the few things that makes it bearable that other people live in houses like these is that they too probably have mice.  You are reassured that you are not the only person to have cracks big enough to push wishes into like the Wailing Wall under your windows or huge, water-stained chasms in your ceilings which small children could drop through.  The daughter who was with me followed my gaze upwards and, knowing the small fissure on our kitchen through which water drips every time someone has a shower, smiled at me in solidarity.  She remembers sitting in the Bodleian in Oxford working on her thesis when there was a scuttling sound overhead and a squirrel fell out of the ceiling and scampered off across the reading room table and disappeared behind the stack.  When she mentioned it to one of the librarians they looked at her disapprovingly and informed her that nobody else had complained.

No squirrels here.  So far.  But it is a ruddy big hole.

And that’s where the Woody Allen kicks in.  1988 Another Woman.  (The power of Google, lest you imagine I'm a film buff.  I can’t remember anything before last Tuesday unless it involves humiliation or emotional trauma when it becomes encyclopedic.)  Mia Farrow sitting spilling her soul in her shrink’s office and Gina Rowlands (coincidentally, again, forget the Freudian stuff) eavesdropping through the air conditioning vent.

Oh God.

I scanned the room for the attractive older woman who seemed to be the hostess and the dark, dapper man who was, possibly, her husband.  Their son, a friend of the author (I believe) was wandering round with a bottle in each hand.  It suddenly occurred to me that while I’m upstairs spilling in the shrink’s front room that any of these poor, unsuspecting people could be resting in their bedroom next door, listening.

Imagine.  It’s like this blog only never, ever funny.  The hairdresser without holidays.  The confession without the sin.  The city without the sex.  Is there anything worse than blabbing about your petty neuroses than the possibility of being overheard?

I looked again, right into the eyes of the young man serving the wine.  He smiled cheerfully – either a waiter, hired for the evening, or totally unperturbed by any leaking angst.  Neither one of the older couple seemed to be catatonic with boredom.  The sound of my voice didn’t send them screaming to the window ready to jump.  Very thick walls then?  Hole in ceiling not directly connected to shrink’s consulting room?  Apparently not.

I moved away from the comfort of familiar faces anyway, just to be on the safe side as an old friend, another author, rent-a-bod at London Literary Parties, and sharer of agent appeared in the doorway.  He was with a poet (it’s West London folks, what else would he be?) all self-effacing, stooped shouldered, floppy haired, Hugh Grant, cashmere jumpered and bohemian (there was probably a hole in it somewhere inconspicuous).

I waved (drowning).

Frantically.

He obliged by approaching and after several heavy hints introduced me to the poet. 

‘You’re adults, you can introduce yourselves,’ he said crossly on the third raised eyebrow and elbow dig. 

I tried to see if the poet was wearing a wedding ring or a big sign saying ‘I am gay,’ but couldn’t verify either and am smiling winningly, or grimacing wildly depending on how many glasses of wine you’ve had when the old friend announced that he had seem my husband earlier that morning at Chatham House.

‘Did he tell you he left me five months ago?’ I asked, sighing, turning to the poet adding an ex to every subsequent sentence with a husband in it.  He backed off a little in a manner suspiciously similar to that of the person (aged approximately 35) I had spoken to earlier when I introduced him to my twenty four year old daughter.

‘That’s too bad,’ said old friend.  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.  If I had known I wouldn’t have mentioned seeing him.’

Oh shut up about the husband please, I’m thinking.

‘You know I’ve been through all this myself.’  He added.  ‘We could always have a drink?’

At which point my mobile rang with a call from my sixteen year old daughter asking to be picked up. 

Woman with baggage.  See me weep.

What’s worse was that after I’d excused myself another message from my daughter arrived to say that she was getting a taxi home and didn’t want me after all.

By that time I was home.  Had missed Corrie, but still managed to catch House. 

Welcome to the club darling, welcome to the club.

I'm running a little late this morning

PS I may be some time...

Graham Rawle's launch party for The Wizard of Oz

I feel like that woman in Manet's Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, except in a studio in Shoreditch, and with messier hair.

Nevertheless, I am standing behind a bar (aka a kitchen worktop) with several rows of wine glasses in front of me and the choice of white, red or water in a loft the size of a five-a-side football pitch.

Every now and again there's a sort of grandfather clock chime (I may be making this up, but either way it's a noise) which heralds another guest, several storeys down at street level. Some minutes later, a body or two appears in the doorway and, as if genetically programmed, makes its way towards me. I hand them a glass and they go off into the throng which divides unequally into two: friends of the artist Graham Rawle and People from Atlantic (though the categories are not mutually exclusive).

The space is amazing - both cosily and quirkily domestic and the sort of place that makes your teeth ache with envy, especially if you spent any time in an Art School and ever had dreams of having your own studio. It makes my cupboard with a window in it and the garden shed with the table top press that is now buried underneath the lawn mower, pale into insignificance in the way that The Sahara is a desert and a sand box is where kids play with buckets and spades. I'm still in the sandbox, making pies. He's at the far end of the Saharan room with an enormous record collection, a brace of drawing boards, display cases of the sort you used to find in old draper's shops full of dolls and old toys set out in a little shrine to a 1950s childhood, and a jumble of disembodied dummies.

I mean, apart, that is, from the people from Atlantic.

These dummies are blank faced and fixed-eyed.

No, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic. (They're the ones with glasses in their hands.)

I'm referring to the torsos with gaping sockets, separated heads and loose arms and legs that are strung up from the ceiling like laundry hung out to dry. It's a magician's workship. A bizarre magician's workshop. Little Dorothy from Graham's Wizard of Oz illustrations poses in one of the shop cabinets next to the threadbare lion frozen in an open mouthed roar that still manages to look more pained than punitive. When I was a kid we had a doll that went on top of the Christmas Tree every year called John (so, who says angels have to be girls - ever heard of Gabriel?). John had plastic moulded hair onto which someone (me) had once stuck cotton wool, was cross eyed with one eyelid that was forever winking, and his limbs were attached to his body with elastic bands that perished annually and had to be replaced. I always wondered what happened to him. Now I know. Graham's studio is where the old, broken and bald go to live again...

And yes, I'm still not talking about the people from Atlantic.

We're out in force. Everybody wanted to come to this party. A large number of us are wearing silver shoes (in the book Dorothy's slippers were silver not ruby, however in the, then, exciting new world of Technicolor film, silver would have shown up on the screen as grey) although we managed to persuade MD that motorcycle boots were perhaps, in his case, more appropriate.

Beside the dummies (yep, okay, fair enough, this time I do mean two or three of us from Atlantic) twinkles the fantastic Emerald City itself. It's exquisite. Forget having a studio. If you ever wanted a model railway, or a toy farm, or a doll's house, or you ever watched Blue Peter and made a Sindy bedroom out of a cardboard box and a washing-up bottle (I confess, that sad girl was me) you can't help falling in love with the Emerald City. I want to live there. Okay, well as a consolation prize, if you insist, I'll take the studio...

In the meantime, I go back to the bar and keep pouring drinks.

More and more of Graham's friends arrive. I see a cool blonde with whom I think I may once have gone to Dorset for a weekend. She's a friend of a friend, who isn't any longer. I say hello in that awful way you do at parties when you have to first remind the person who you are, and they still look at you blankly. (To me this is called introducing yourself.) So you're stammering, clutching at any topic of conversation you can grab out of the air ('nice space' - 'mmmm very nice') and saying something stupid like: 'and how's Louise?' (the person who organised the Dorset weekend) when I saw her myself two weeks ago and I know she's fine.

I'm fine.

Lost weekend in Dorset woman's fine.

Louise is fine, her husband is fine and her kids are fine.

We're all really, really fine.

Groan.

I hate parties.

Why am I cursed with this memory that never forgets a face and the urge to go and speak to that face, just because I recognise it? It's an affliction. A mental bloody illness. In this way I once bounded up to Anna Chancellor in the actor in Portobello Road and asked her how she was because I thought I knew her. I did. From Four Weddings and a Funeral. In this way I strike up conversations with women on the bus who I am sure I know really, really well. And I do. They work on the tills at Sainsbury's. If I was once introduced to someone at a lecture at St Antony's College in Oxford in 1985 and they turn up in the offices at Atlantic Books, believe me, I will remember them.

Them, me? Not so much.

I seem to be one of those bland people that your memory erases like bleach does a stain.

So back behind the bar.

Red or white?

And, damn it, there's another face I recognise.

Don't do it Marion.

Just say no.

But I'm sure...

No, walk away from the lightbulb moment. Do not introduce yourself. You do not know this person - it is a mere quirk of memory. Walk away...

But I'm off asking Graham: 'Is that your brother?' while referring to a man who looks exactly like Graham but a little older, darker and more fashionably stubbled.

Graham sighs long sufferingly, used to this, and agrees.

'I wondered why you looked so familiar, and now I know, it's because of your brother.' (And your genius and boyish good looks, charm, modesty and talent.) But just to be on the safe side, I investigate further: 'Didn't he used to be on Drop the Dead Donkey?'

Graham nods, thinking, ah yes, another star * er.

And I'm off, across the floor in seconds, not to Graham's brother but to his wife who is wearing her mother's vintage frock - a Biba original. Sigh. If I wore my mother's vintage clothing I'd be in a pre-war wrap around pinnie with a turban and a fag in the corner of my mouth.

'Didn't you used to live in Highlever Road?' I gush.

'Yes,' she agrees, smiling (smiling - take note lost weekend in Dorset person) and within seconds we have established that we were neighbours, and that my best friend just bought their house, and, two more handshakes later, I meet Robin and her husband (okay faces I get but names? Don't even know my own after two glasses of wine) who live round the corner from me and whose kids and mine have shared a primary school.

Mwa, mwa. I'm connected.

and I love parties.

The Book Group

I am an end user.

But you know this from previous blogs. I buy books. I do 3 for 2, the occasional Richard and Judy, shortlists, longlists and selected reviews. In other words, as well as reading slush, borderline manuscripts and great books that we are publishing (on the subject of which - why hasn't everyone read Fieldwork, which is just bloody wonderful on every level?) I'm also in a reading group - a core group of six women who meet in each other's kitchens and eat rocket salad and/or aubergines twenty-three different ways, while dissecting other people's masterpieces (or not).

The subject last night was Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father and to spare sending you into a diabetic coma I shall skip over our comprehensive five-minute analysis and go straight to the post-lit crit when we've exhaustively discussed the book (lovely man, that Barack), the food (where did you say you got this recipe from? Nigel Slater, really? He is a lovely man...) and got on to life (husbands, ex husbands, gay husbands, no husbands, not so lovely man, etc).

One of our number (with husband) announced that she was surrounded by people all day but had never felt more isolated. She works in the arts but since most of the other women in her organisation are significantly younger, she felt she had nothing in common with them. 'I just can't have another conversation about a wedding,' she wailed.

I (senza husband) commented that I also worked in an office where most people can't remember when Ballroom Dancing was naff. Most of my colleagues have mothers younger than me. Does it prevent me from talking to them, liking them and enjoying their company? Well of course it does

n't.

(sorry) but I love office banter.

We don't talk about weddings. We talk about literature. We read book reviews.

Aloud.

We swap opera and concert tickets. We weigh up the merits of various restaurants and rate new films. Okay, yes, occasionally there is some discourse about Strictly Come Dancing and sometimes we do share the Kit-Kat of our personal lives around the office (or maybe I alone take the biscuit in this category). However, I find other people's gossip fascinating, even if it is just what they did on the weekend. One of the best parts of my job is the other women in the company.

'But do you go out together,' she asked?

'Sometimes - we have author events and book launches and parties. It's part of being in the publishing business. It's a very convivial place.'

'But do you go clubbing with them?'

'No. (Duh, I mean come on, I still think a Club is a chocolate biscuit). But I didn't go clubbing when I was twenty. It doesn't stop me chatting. I like hearing what they get up to.'

She seemed doubtful. 'I just don't have anything to say.'

'Ah perhaps it's because she's part of the management... ' ventured another member (con husband) of the reading group. 'You know, it sets her apart and means that she can't really mix in the same way as you do.'

I looked at her across the table.

Because, let me see, I'm so far down the company ladder that I'm carrying it under one hand with a pail and a sponge in the other, I didn't say, but thought.

Ah we, the common people.

It's good to talk, in't it?

Pass the rocket salad, will you. If I don't stuff my mouth full of food I may kill her.

What goes up...

must come down. In this way they must have built the pyramids: All fifteen of us carrying ninety six boxes, from the conference room on one side of the building on the second floor to the MD's office on the first floor on the other side of the building, led by a Chief with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. That's the A Team spirit. Well, that and tequila.

An eyewitness account from the Guildhall:

Booker Prize 2008

The Ceremony

Impressions from the Guildhall

These things are immediately apparent: A great expanse of red carpet. The judges have emerged from their huddle, and are At Large. The lighting is not as flattering as one might have hoped. And we’re definitely unfashionably early.

Uncomfortably exposed, we nervously hang around in the foyer, awaiting a sign (the pop of a cork, for example). Flashback to the difficult first hour of every school disco you ever went to, but more posh, with better clothes and fewer pimples. And instead of your chemistry teacher and the school secretary, there they are: Judges. It’s literally impossible not to stare: what might the body betray? I can’t help but feel sorry for them. How much time has been spent perfecting the poker face? Michael Portillo boldly strolls over, with hand outstretched to Aravind. I can’t look. [Note to self: never, under any circumstances, enter into a game of Texas Hold’em with Alex Clark or Hardeep Singh Kohli. These guys are pros.]

The makings of a throng arrive, fizz upon fizz is distributed, music is provided by a delightful jazz ensemble. Sadly they don’t cover Bananarama’s ‘Nathan Jones’, my school’s disco staple… No matter, they lighten the mood, and at least for now it’s just another publishing party.

The shortlisted authors have all met in advance of the ceremony this year – a reading at the South Bank the previous evening; a photo call and signing at Hatchards that very morning – and by all accounts (and certainly to all appearance) there is between them a tangible and pleasing sense of good will. It’s very gemütlich.

The voice of God booms from the rafters (perhaps, on this 40^th Booker year, the voice of Salman Rushdie, the Booker of Bookers?) and summons us to the Great Hall for dinner. Le tout publishing pays no attention. God waits 5 minutes and then speaks a second time. Will we make Him speak thrice? Oh dear, it looks like it.

Dinner? Nobody is interested in dinner. Nerves, anxiety, and the dresses and dinner suits we’ve all squeezed ourselves into put paid to any idea of engaging much with three anomalous courses plus coffee and little chocolate/marzipan thingies. Buns could, one supposes, have been put to fighting use: but with the authors all behaving so well, we publishers really don’t have an excuse.

(Actually, sorry, excuse me, could you just… I’ll just hang on to the marzipan whatnots…thanks.)

The Great Hall is a scene from Gatsby, all starlit and sparkling, like living inside a martini glass.

Not to complain, but the toilet is a about a mile away, in some kind of crypt. A good ten minutes totter from the tables (bearing in mind the stairs) if your heels are a tad too silly. More, if you stop to speak to any smokers/jitterers/bathroom-visitors you encounter on the way. I have a ‘you-know-and-i-know-you-know-and-you-know-i-know-you-know’ moment with Hardeep in the doorway. Saved, not for the first time in my life, by Alan Hollinghurst. What a lovely man.

Noses powdered, perfume spritzed, my companion and I head back to join our parties. We’re not, I’m afraid to admit, discussing our respective authors. It’s too late for that. No, we’ve moved on to Strictly Come Dancing. (Does a tall chick stand a chance on the dance floor, I’m wondering? Jodie Kidd frankly isn’t cutting the mustard. Take heart, I’m told. Zoë Ball was all elegance and spun sugar. Hope springs!) With all this talk of the American Smooth, it’s a while before we clock... Oh heck! Not the voice of God, exactly, but for the purposes of this evening it’s as good as: Portillo speaks! The Spanish Smooth! We scamper awkwardly (and noticeably) back to the front row. Withering Look from Übereditor.

After what has been an extraordinarily long drawn out evening, what happens next happens very suddenly. Physically my reactions are instantaneous – I’m on my feet; I swear, forcefully and out loud; my hand clamps itself to my mouth. I’m shaking in my shoes. Übereditor’s face – a picture of shock and disbelief – speaks a thousand words. I wish I had a photo to show you. Aravind, alone amongst us, reacts with supreme eloquence and composure. He is a star. He is up at the lecturn, and he is a star, and he has won the Booker Prize.

Holy crap.

The White Tiger has won the Man Booker Prize 2008.

My phone dissolves. There are many interviews. There is Kirsty Wark. There are many, many more drinks. There are some tears. There is an unholy long and confusing taxi drive. A party.

There is also a flight to Frankfurt at 9am, Jesus wept... There will be no sleep.

I remember the morning, a year ago now, that Übereditor came whirling into the office, eyes ablaze, excitable like a child, ‘I read something really really good last night…’, already quoting
lines at me. I remember reading the manuscript he handed me that evening, and my eyes too taking on that same tyger-brightness. And then gradually the whole office – emails exchanging, conversations effervescent, calculations calculated, plans afoot.

We at Atlantic Books loved Balram – servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer, White Tiger – from the get-go. Aravind wrote The White Tiger passionately; and we published The White Tiger passionately. Winning the Booker matters for many reasons, not least because a whole lot more people will burn bright from reading a knockout novel.

Congratulations, Aravind. Onward. Write your guts out.

Written by Senior Editor, Sarah Castleton. This post also appears on the Cannongate Blog, but ours is much better.

Not in Kansas anymore

Friday morning

I arrive to find a truck parked at the side of the building unloading 125 boxes of The White Tiger that have to be transported up two flights of stairs, carried into the boardroom and unpacked, ready for signing.  We had the lift door jammed open but rapid calculations meant that we could only take about 20 boxes at a time without exceeding the weight limit (and even then there was a sharp intake of breath by whoever was travelling with them as it shuddered slowly upwards like a nonagenarian climbing the Empire State Building.  So, by the time I had taken off my coat I was one of a small conveyor belt of women (oh yes, women - most of whom, though not me, probably weigh less that a box of books) because the men, who of course are those with doors that close, were all in Frankfurt swanning around receiving (admittedly well deserved) laurels and congratulations while we gals and Tom, the Contracts Manager, toted the bale, carried the hod, passed boxes from hand to hand then ran up two flights of stairs and did it all again, yomping through the office carrying cartons two at a time.

I don’t mind a bit of physical activity but that morning I had been involved in a little altercation with my eldest daughter meaning that I could not get into my wardrobe which is in her bedroom (small house, not enough closets) and which resulted, mid argument, in my snatching a skirt from her bed and wearing that to work instead of – say – one that actually fitted me.  As an expression of spite it was somewhat ineffective as it turned round and bit me in the bum.  I hadn’t realised quite the brevity of the hemline or the dearth of material around the hips.  Not the ideal outfit for bending and stretching.

The next stage was opening the boxes, unpacking the books, turning them to the title page (all the better for signing) and then returning the empty boxes to a wall at the side of the room to be repacked and sent off again.

Aravind was coming in mid-way through the afternoon to begin the mammoth task of signing them, but in the meantime, most of my morning, along with two willing helpers, was spent unpacking.  Glamorous? My my, indeed it was. 44 empty boxes later,  I skipped home the other side of lunchtime leaving the others to see to the actual signing which went on into the early evening.  By that time I was snugly tucked up at home with a daughter who, not only was still angry with me after our disagreement in the morning, but livid that I had stretched her skirt.  Yet another thing to add to my shortcomings:

'How could you go out looking like that?  On the bus?'  She yelled.  'I had my coat on,' I protested.  But not only have I failed on the mother front but I’ve also fallen down badly on the ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ question.

By Monday, Aravind has left the building, no doubt with his signing arm in a sling, and the conquering heroes have returned from Frankfurt.  MD brought us some German biscuits, Ubereditor a warmly bestowed wide smile, and Mr T three thousand business cards to add to his contacts.  Though that gift was for me and me alone.

Into every high life a little low must fall.

Roll on Thursday and Graham Rawle’s The Wizard of Oz launch at his Studio.  I’m clicking my heels just thinking about it. 

‘There’s no place like Home.  There’s no place like Home.  There’s no place like…’

Actually, wait a cotton pickin’ minute, there is a bloody place like home – it’s called Broadmoor Maximum Security Prison where you are not allowed to go out in the evening and cheer alcoholically when your Company’s author wins the Man Booker, you're pants at parenting, your ex-husband gets to leave but you don't, and furthermore you can’t even get into your own wardrobe so are forced to wear doll's clothes just from the privilege of going to work.

Who the heck wants to go home?

What's so great about Kansas anyway.

Move over Jamie

8.30 am

'I need money and the car keys,' says my youngest daughter.

'I don't have any cash but the car keys are on the table,' I croak.

'What do you mean you have no money?'

'I mean I have no money. It's an economic freaking crisis, don't you know?'

She flounces, slams the door then BOOM BOOM BOOM SLAM down the stairs as I grope for my glasses and the world slowly comes into focus. I'm just wondering why she wants the car keys when she's only 16, struggling to sit up as the horrible thought occurs that she might actually intend to drive it when SLAM BOOM BOOM BOOM, she's back.

'The car isn't there!'

'Of course it's there.'

'It's not there! I've looked everywhere! It's been stolen!' All these exclamations are slamming into the side of my head like ice picks. An irate girl is seething at the end of my bed, demanding that I produce a car which seems to have vanished. That's all I need.

I drag myself slowly out of my bedroom and as I'm holding a coat around me, scanning the street which is empty but for drifts of leaves in the resident parking bay, it dawns on me... just about the time that I remember Lyns with Lauren in a head lock grappling her from behind while holding her nose (apparently trying to stop her hiccups) that I took my car with me last night.

I drove to Notting Hill Gate and parked it.

Somewhere.

8.21 am

oh God...

1.10 am

The rest of Pedantic are no doubt boogying on down somewhere.  I assume there will be dancing.  Singing even.  Speeches of mutual back pattery.  But I'm home in bed, wined out, dined out and....

3.10 am

... where's the sodding Paracetamol?

Man Booker Prize

And YES, Michael Portillo says: 'The winner is a debut novelist: Aravind Adiga.'

the announcement

the interview 

We're sharing the space upstairs at the Union with another publishing house, but when we all start screaming like crazed Take That fans, there are only about 15 of us hugging each other and shrieking with joy while the rest of the room looks on. There may be a polite smattering of applause but if there is we are too overjoyed to hear it. Though the comment overheard on the stairs that 'those Atlantic girls (girls! * off) need to calm down, it's only a book prize,' did make its way to our ears.  Oh, bite me! We're a small company.  We actually like each other.  There are only around 20 of us, some of whom only work part-time and it's not 'only a book prize' so tonight we're pretty full-time darn ecstatic.

It didn't start out quite like that. Though never anything less than totally enthusiastic, as if by common consent, we all emerged from various offices, bathrooms and cupboards dressed in black. 'We look like we're going to a very sexy funeral,' said Sarah, with Fran doing the whole mistress with the single rose thing, the only exception in red. Alan is wearing his kilt and a smile of total, unconditional delight as he lifts me right off the floor which is something that is as rare as winning the Man Booker in my world, and I wonder whether he's amenable to being rent-a-guy for reassuring back patting in a crisis, arm candy at parties when all the other women are matched up, and general Macho stuff. But before I can ask (though just as a matter of interest, are you?) within seconds, he's outside texting furiously, as is our printer, no doubt telling the presses to roll with Winner of instead of Shortlisted for on the brand new editions.

White wine - from a town near Condom, our Company Secretary tells me, swirling some around in his glass (a very safe place, no doubt) - is replaced by champagne and 2 paracetamol from Lynsey's party pharmacopia, and we wait for what seems like hours until Mr T and Ubereditor arrive. Toby is low key, stunned into unaccustomed silence, looking like a man whose birthdays and Christmases have all come at once and buried him under the gifts. As he kisses his way into the room and someone I don't know mutters behind me: 'How anticlimactic.' I don't quite know what she means. What does she want, a ticker tape parade of self-congratulation? We can do quiet, stupified pleasure too. And then it's Ravi's turn, eliciting more screaming and cheering. Somebody else says ruefully: 'yeah, but what about the person who wrote the book?' But he's still being interviewed on Newsnight, on the television in the corner which is whispering modestly, talking to Kirsty Wark who either must have prepared a speech for all six books or had some notice about what she had to mug up on.

And then thirty minutes later Aravind arrives at the Union with his retinue.

I would love to stay - if for no other reason because of Hardeep Singh Kohli wearing an elaborate turban and yet another kilt (what are the chances of being swept off my feet in delight twice in one night?), but I'm too flushed with success and too fifty, and I have only an Oyster card between me and a long walk home in heels. However, our Financial Director who lives close to me, is sober and padded with petty cash and offers to pay for the taxi home. Downstairs, Faber's room is fairly empty compared to the crush when they were handing out canapes earlier, and I hardly recognise a soul except for our own staff who are in meetings outside on the pavement where Irina and I hail a black cab.

Ah success, hard won and long awaited, is very very sweet...

B Day

...has dawned. Pedants are flying in from all corners of the globe - well Frankfurt anyway - even the one who apparently slipped out for a meeting and missed a train at Düsseldorf (though this hasn't been confirmed and may be an idle rumour designed to discredit our high standards of professionalism). Dinner Jackets are being hastily pulled out of garment bags and little black dresses unfrocked, there is even a sari being wound round and round the Publishing Manager in the boardroom. As the countdown commences, corks itch in bottles, Hobnobs have been unwrapped (to give us a little rush of energy to help with the preparations), Marcin is wearing a tie, a tie, I repeat, and I came in on the No 7 bus in a satin frock, the main feature of which is that strategic parts of it are missing. These missing parts have already been noted. That's all I've got - lipstick and underwire.

I make myself some calming chamomile tea and add a sachet of sweetener to the cup to save the calories of a spoonful of sugar, quite missing the point that I'm going to be tipping three thousand calories down my throat between now and bedtime.

'Ah but they're liquid, they don't count,' says Lyns, thereby echoing my hairdresser to whom I always go for nutritional advice who claims that after 8pm all your calories should come from fluids.

Slowly the office transforms. Previously wan faces are emerging flawlessly made up, hair is glossed and spritzed and curled. And that's just the men. MD is changing in his office in the mistaken belief that those Venetian blinds actually work. Lyns who outdoes me on the missing parts of a dress front has gone for the modesty option and filled them in again with a t-shirt.

The auditors seem somewhat bemused not quite understanding what's going on though the DHL man gets it in one: 'You all goin' awt tonight then?'

Ah, party time...not only do we publish bloody great books, but by God, we look good too...

Directionless

I'm driving through North London and I'm lost.  I could be in Azerbaijan as nothing looks familiar.  I printed out instructions from the AA website on how to get from A to B but when I was half-way between the two points I realised that I didn't have my reading glasses so the three sheets of instructions were pretty useless. Nevertheless I know I'm going to Archway and that it's up there somewhere between Camden Town and Crouch End, how hard can it be?  I look at the signs on the A40 which you'll be reassured to know I can just about decipher even if the windscreen wipers aren't working and there's a smear right in my line of vision meaning that I'm croached over the wheel like Mr Bean. I readL Tufnell Park, Holloway, Islington...  but, darn it, no ruddy Archway.  I keep driving and panic into turning left at King's Cross thinking that if I just go North I'm bound to find something, and I do - eventually. 

After some time I find I'm on Caledonian Road.  I've never been here in my life before and I have no idea whether I'm even driving North or South.  It's at times like these that I really miss my ex-husband who was equally clueless, couldn't read a map while the car was moving, but nevertheless was handy for yelling at. We used to leave dinner parties early just so as to factor in the half hour for the fight on the way home when we invariably got lost.  I could stop and look at the A-Z but if I can't read the instructions from the AA there's no chance I'll be able to read the ants crawling across the pages of the 8 point, 25 year old A-Z that is, in any case missing most of pages 65 through 80.

I know, duh, I'll stop and ask someone, I think as the roads get darker and darker and less and less populated by anything other than youths in hoodies.  I see one standing outside an Asian shop just after I've passed Caledonian Road tube station and I slow the engine only to speed it up when I see he has a can of Special Brew in his hand.  Somehow the idea of stopping in my party frock and high heels, putting a piece of paper under his nose and saying:  Can you just tell me what this says?  or, even better: Where am I? suddenly doesn't seem terribly well advised.  And then I see another sign for Holloway.

Okay, I'll go to Holloway then.  There's bound to be a sign for Archway from Holloway. 

Yep, you'd think, but as I eventually, thank the lord, find myself on a road I recognise as the way to Crouch End (why on earth did you move from there Julia?) there's only a sign for Camden Town.  Nothing for it.  I look at my watch and discover that I've been driving for 40 minutes and in five minutes I'm going to be late, but tough times call for tough measures, I'll just go to Camden, up to Kentish Town and find my way from there.

Good Idea.  So why did I take a left turn - why oh bloody why did I take a left turn then right turn and then get lost all over again in the back streets of a rat run that another fifteen minutes of backtracking and reversing down roads did come out on another recognisable street with Archway glowing in neon on a lovely sign.  Ten minutes, one illegal U turn, three minutes trying to cross a stream of traffic and I arrived outside Julia's house, late but intact.

And then I couldn't remember which house she lived in.

She does have, however, very nice neighbours.

I rang several bells till I got the right one and was soon sitting down with my one permitted glass of wine when the doorbell rang again heralding the arrival of another friend, a fellow author, and in one of those lovely triangular relationships that make people outside London think that publishing is just one big club, about to be discovered y Pedantic Press, as is our hostess whose book is out at the same time as mine.  The author, bow askew and hair slightly awry, though I think this was fashion and not dazed exasperation, walked into the room piping in her helium voice that she had got hopelessly lost and had been driving around Holloway for half an hour.  Better than me, she had at least found Holloway.

'Sat Nav,' offered another guest, one half of a female couple.  'We used to have terrible arguments about navigation until we bought it, it was the best hundred odd quid we ever spent.'

I think she's right, though I still kind of hanker after a real life human being to shout at when I get lost.  The last time I had Sat Nav was on a hire car in Italy which, mystifyingly, had German Sat Nav which issued all the instructions as orders:  Achtung, Achtung (or maybe that was just because, as with my ex-husband, I tended to ignore it).

Thirteen of us crowded around the table for dinner.  Only three of them men.  Welcome to the future, Marion, this is your life.  Julia said she had called round earlier in the day to try and beef up the blokes ('What do you mean you're in Stockholm, jump on a plane, darling') but to no avail.  I could have brought any number of hooded males from Caledonian Road but as it was the men sat at one end of the table like they were at an Australian barbecue according to lovely blonde woman (Australian) though I would have said an Arab wedding (formerly married to gentleman of Middle East persuasion), wrongly though, because at an Arab wedding they are not even in the same ruddy room. 

I sat next to the woman driver who had invested in Sat Nav who turned out to once have worked for Waddling Duck and had helped launch Pedantic Press,  while her partner, who I spoke to later had also done some financial planning for the company.  Another Waddling Duck sat on the other side of the table next to both our authors.  Meanwhile I did actually get to have a real live conversation with one of the men who ran a whole raft of business magazines.

And people say that publishing is an incestuous business.

Shame on them.

And though I took the correct route home south directly to the Westway, I still managed to find myself driving round the one way system on Camden High Street, on the way home.

Food for Thought

On Friday I had another taste of my old life, but from the other side of the table; one in which I was the companion to another person who was writing about the meal.  We went to a small Chinese restaurant in Soho, one of those places that you pass without giving it a second look, dark and a little murky, tucked into a side street with nothing to distinguish it from all the others.   And it was so delicious.

 Soho is one of those things that long-term Londoners take for granted, or at least I do.  Until I'm walking through it on my way to my agent's or going to the Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue - especially at this time of year when it gets dark early.  Suddenly there's a whisper of foreign otherness in the air as the night fills with the smell of food drifting out of open doors.  Bright lights and lanterns and neon and billboards blinkfrom all directions infecting me with the country girl in the big city excitement, reminding me just how great it is to be living in London and I wonder why it is that I come to Soho so rarely when it's all just there waiting for me.

We had dim sum, glistening prawn dumplings, and noodles, and squid, and chilli prawns, and aubergines: dish after dish, steamed basket after steamed basket, plate after plate, all arriving in the quantities that only a restaurant critic with a healthy expense account can order.  The sheer scale dismayed me as an unfortunate side-effect of a Scottish mother is the inability to leave anything uneaten.

'Oh dear, I'm going to have to eat everything,' I said, giving him due warning.

'Well we were all told to clean our plate,' says my host gallantly, a former colleague who remarks on meeting me that I look well and have lost weight. It's true.  When I ate for a living, I did it well, and wore my success on my hips.  Another unfortunate side effect of that internal mother who will not let you waste food is that this philosophy, combined with a job as a restaurant critic, means you quickly start to look like you should yourself be served on a plate with an apple stuck in your mouth.  He seems to be able to buck the trend and still looks as slim and untouched by the years as he did when we graced the same FT masthead (he towering about me in the kind of headlines that are currently reserved for the economic headlines, with me in the News in Brief section in italics).

I don't know how he does it.

I know how I do it - I just don't go out to eat in restaurants anymore that don't have a BYO policy; and take-aways of the sort we used to enjoy on a Friday night where we competively overate as a family, are lost in the mist of my ex husband's disappearing credit card.  I don't much want to give a dinner party on my own, but even if I did I'd have to be a lot more creative than I could when I could throw money at Lyndon's for meat, S.Peck for Sardinian flatbread, and cheese from Jeroboam's.  I need the wartime cook book that will remind me how to feed 50 on a pig's trotter and an allotment full of parsnips.  It's not stress that has caused me to lose weight as much as lack of access to funds.  Left to my own devices as I was on Friday with a free fullsome lunch and then dinner in the evening from Ottolenghi at my friend's Sarah's house which I picked up on the way on the basis that I wouldn't be eating anything (and then matched her fork for fork) I'd be the size of a house - a large detatched mock Tudor instead of a modest semi detached (with attic extension in heels).

However the beauty of never eating out is that when you do, you enjoy it so much more.  I can hardly restrain myself from running straight back to the restaurant and ordering exactly the same meal all over again.  I just want dumplings, plain and simple, even if it means I end up being one.

I do love Ottolenghi but their prices are geared at the people who must be most frightened off by the apocalyptic economic headlines given that their trust funds are failing (if there is a god), or those with tiny appetites for whom £2.95 for 100 grams of beetroot, figs and feta cheese (roughly a large tablespoon) constitutes lunch.  Walking into their shop in Westbourne Grove is like being mugged, first by the senses because you just want to scoop up armfuls of their mutlicoloured healthy salads and fall face first into the cakes and brownies displayed in the window, and then when you get the till and they start adding up the little boxes and you discover that without even trying you've ripped up a £50 note for something that you could easily do at home for a fraction of the price.  I think they should have catchers ready to stand behind you when you faint.  Or a sign on the door saying: For people with normal incomes, Sainsbury's is down the road.   I mean - one cup cake £2.30 - what the * is in it?  Gold dust?  So, just because I don't have enough to do, I put the cup cakes back, bought six eggs from the local Asian store and a bag of sugar and made merangues instead - cost under £2 for 24 - time taken including sweeping up crumbs after dropping them on the floor, looking for the baloon whisk, shouting at people about misplacing the balloon whisk, washing up, shouting at peole not to touch them, sweeping up crumbs when they ignore you, etc - 1 1/2 hours.

And then we forgot to eat them.

Oh and the bag from Ottolenghi broke just as I was about to get into the car and everything fell out meaning that our salads did not look as though they had been airbrushed at food porn central casting.

Dogs and dinner come to mind.

Ups and downs

One of the chiefs is leaving the office for a meeting. He and his second in command are both standing in reception, wearing their his and hers black leather jackets, and I swear SiC is turning up her collar (perhaps just to untangle her scarf - but still).

It’s just like an episode of Happy Days.

‘So what are you two both in the same biker gang?’ I quip.

‘Ooooh that’s so amusing, Marion,’ drawls the Chief, shrugging his shoulders, shooting his cuffs and smoothing back his hair as he breezes out, unamused, trailed by the SiC, who follows like his minder. MD has had a haircut and looks pretty darn Young Elvis fine with his short, back and quiff. I haven't seen a leather jacket yet, but surely it's only a matter of time before he's got the comb and the Brylcreem out and joins the rest of the gang. I remark that he looks a lot like Mark Kermode, the film critic.

'Oh, I get that a lot,' he says with a weary sigh, patently underwhelmed. 'So, how much longer is this joke going to run?' He asks. I let it go, I'm too busy singing Leader of the Pack which is as widely appreciate at my wit.

‘Vroom, vroom...’

In truth there’s little to be happy about. Office life is frenetic and time has come to be classified as AF - After Frankfurt - which kicks off next week when all the Chiefs migrate to Germany and we Indians keep the home fires burning and Aravind, our Booker shortlisted person, interviewed, tuxed-up and televised.

Well I say we, but I really just mean publicity. My only contribution will be sitting anonymously on the phones.

Speaking of which, an agent rings for one of the Chiefs and snippily asks me who I am.

Good question, darling. Who am I? I've introduced myself to you once before, we one had a close mutual friend, we've had dinner together, you told me a disgusting story about the place you used to live and I snaffled it and put it in my novel (only to have it removed by the editor) but who the hell am I? I give her my name. It doesn't register.

As I may have intimated - we're stressed.

The bitching hour becomes a whole bitching morning. I've been entrusted to source a new phone for one that went AWOL in New York, and so I spend an hour talking to various people on the Orange website.

Mr T tells me it should be 3G. I repeat this to the sales person who sucks her teeth. 'Well you can't have a Blackberry, they're not 3G. You can have a Nokia....' and she names a model, then corrects herself: 'Oh no, you can't that's out of stock.' She then runs through another three out of stock models. I mention another specification - I've been told I need the SPV series. More teeth sucking. 'No, these are being upgraded and phased out, and they're moving over to HTC'. I write all this down in an email and send it off to the phone-jacked Chief.

'What does all this Spiv stuff mean?' he asks, emerging from his office, hair awry, and a confused, oncoming articulated lorry look in his eyes, somewhat like the ex-husband when I used to ask him to change the channel on the television.

'No *ing idea,' I respond and get out my own phone to show him. It cost £10 and has big letters on the front. I don't even know how to take it off silent which, in any case since it never rings, would make no bloody difference.

'I want something like this,' he says and picks up a Demi-Chief's SPV.

'But they're not making them anymore' I parrot (Orange will be ringing any day to offer me a job) 'It's an HTC now'.

'What's that?'

This could go on for some time and, indeed, the story continues - Orange sodding Wednesdays.

I spend another half an hour on the website and find a model somewhat similar to his last phone, negotiate a £50 discount and call him over to look at it.

'I don't like it,' he says.

Frankly, I've lost the will to live.

I'm on Pay as You Go, which given the dire economic crisis is probably no bad thing. The newspaper headlines swim up, more depressing every day. Everyone in the office is in global financial meltdown gloom. I don’t know what to be more depressed about: that I have no savings, or that the bank in which I don’t have savings is plummeting towards ruin.

‘Does it count as savings if you have money in a current account,’ I ask?

‘Who has money in their current account?’

Good point.

‘Who has money?’

Really good point.

Talk turns instead to next week’s Booker and the sun comes out, together with dresses with necklines that plunge like RBOS shares. The announcement is hanging there in the middle of next week like the star at the top of the Christmas tree. While Fonz and the gang are flying back from Frankfurt for the official dinner, the rest of us will be watching it on telly upstairs at the Union Club, where, according to someone over at Faber who are having their Booker party downstairs at the same venue, you are not allowed to dance.

No dancing? What, not even if/when we win? And in any case, really - dancing? Is that even a possibility? What kind of party are Faber & Faber having? It’s all starting to sound a bit Colin Firth in Mamma Mia, or drunk dads at a wedding. I can see the leather jackets being oiled up as we speak.

I can't wait.

Hazards: occupational and personal

I arrived at work to find the office empty but for the MD already half way through a pot of coffee. By 9am when the phones began to ring I was still alone. Mr T had a breakfast meeting, The Ubereditor was in Holland and the Fashionista claimed to be in a locked cupboard with a cake at a school in Sheen.  Don't ask.  It sounds too unlikely to be anything but true.

At 9.30, publicity was unusually deserted, editorial abandoned like a ghost town with tumbleweed rolling through the fluttering papers and then, finally, at 9.45 there was a phone call from one staff member who was running late.

‘Don’t worry, nobody else is here,’ I said, ‘but where a…?’ but that was as far as I got before the dialling tone. And then, finally, just before 10.00 they began to trickle in. The first, like a drover back from the plains, saddlesore, with a determined look on her face and a slow, concentrated gait. The second, a suspiciously rosy-faced ghost with very very carefully applied make-up slipping out of her coat and quietly settling herself behind her desk but without her customary bowl of cornflakes. Then the third, a little flushed, and detached, dawdling a while in the kitchen with a far away look in her eyes that wouldn’t meet mine.

‘What’s happening?’ I whispered to Marcin in accounts. He leant on the door frame and raised his eyebrows in puzzlement, and then I smelt it… Someone at the back of the office, tucking her hair carefully behind her ears and unwrapping the paper bag, and another rustling a napkin behind her so called vanity screen.

Vanity my arse.

They were eating bacon sandwiches.

This meant only one thing.  They' were having a collective hangover.

‘Did you all go out last night?’ I asked accusingly as the penny dropped like an Alka Setlzer in a glass of water.

‘Yeah it was that drinks thing, remember?’ muttered a hoarse voice through the crunching of crispy rashers, wincing at the noise that obviously sounded to the muncher like a building being demolished. She began to chew slower.

‘What drink thing?’

‘You know the drinks thing?’

Ah yes, patently it was the drinks ‘thing’ that I hadn’t heard about until now. Marcin and I exchanged pathetic glances that being smugly hangover free did little to mitigate.

I looked around the office as another person lurched in like a double amputee just learning to walk on prosthetic limbs and gingerly sat down at her desk, then put her head in her hands. Someone offered Diarolyte.

‘Did everyone go except me?’ I wondered, somewhat waspishly, without good cause as I don't even know the person who was having the party.

‘Nah, I went to the cinema instead, I’m saving myself for the Booker night out,’ said Lyns, ‘and I’m glad I didn’t bother. Just look at them.’ She shook her head in dismay. One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor… - four hunched bodies cowered over four cups of coffee. We were just a tube station away from The Big Issue and a mangy dog on a blanket.

Just then the door swung open and another shape appeared in a flapping raincoat, face frostbitten, eyes glazed, one hand outstretched bearing a cup of Café Nero coffee like the Statue of Liberty – that is at liberty to drink too much.

Yep, Publishing - bring me your tired, your pissed, your huddled masses…

‘Do you want a bacon sandwich,’ whispered one of the sufferers, weakly.

‘I just had one,’ the shape in the raincoat croaked. 

Back on the reservation the phones were mercifully silent allowing the sleeping-it-off dogs to lie, while  the only sound was a weak whimpering and mewling, accompanied by a request for paracetamol and the fizzing of Andrew’s Liver Salts.

Liver? Huh, chance would be a fine thing.

Actually I couldn't have gone, even if I had been asked. While the Indians were all out partying, I was at the Electric with two former members of the posh book club. Two of us have books coming out next year and the third is in a position to give these books publicity. 'I'll try,' she said, 'but it feels like almost everybody I know has a book coming out at the moment. Someone was telling me it's easier than ever now to get published.'

It hasn't been my experience, or those of the hundreds of agented manuscripts we reject every month, so I tried to see the attainment of my long-held dream as a successful achievement rather than just another rite of passage for the middle-aged woman, you know like training to be a therapist and getting a tattoo. But my little bubble was sufficiently deflated that it took four slices of bread with butter to buoy me through the rest of the meal.

While carbing up I began telling them that some chap had written to me after my article appeared in The Times and asked me to have a drink with him.

‘I Googled him. He’s a mountaineer, apparently, so maybe I’ll meet him. Why not?’ I said, though there was no question mark, it was a purely rhetorical question. I mean, it's winter, and you can now watch Celebrity Come Dancing on BBCi, which means you don't have to sit in on a Saturday and there are an awful lot of evenings to fill up if you're not out on the lash after work.

‘Um, because he might be an axe murderer?’ said one of the women.

‘Oh come-on, what’s he going to do, hammer me with a crampon over a glass of Sauvignon Blanc at Truckles?’

She looked at me sceptically.

I think that:
a) when dating strangers the biggest danger is being bored, not axed to death
b) surely there are not that many axe murderers in circulation - come on, how many, seriously, how many have you met?
and
c) a man who climbs mountains for a hobby is surely sufficiently thrilled out clambering up rock faces with his own life in his hands to worry about snuffing out mine.

But as it turns out, issues of my personal safety are purely academic

On further investigation through the graces of the Good God of Google I discovered that my intrepid mountaineer is only 33. I have sheets older than him. I probably have spices older than him. I nearly have children older than him (okay slight exaggeration but I am, theoretically, old enough to be his mother given that I come from a village in Scotland where teenage pregnancy was kind of what you did after you left the Brownies.

I mean, it was nice of him to ask, and who dares wins and all that, but I’m not any kind of prize and definitely am not in the raffle for a toy boy. I fear he might have been watching too many of those American TV shows (Channel 4 on Demand) with the hot cougar moms.

That’s definitely not me.

I’m more of an old tabby.

Cupboard Love

'My mouse is constipated,' said Mr T as he strode out of his office, all long-legged and purposefully, like John Cleese playing it straight.

Our latest intern Rachael looked alarmed, as well she might, as he seemed to be suggesting that she do something about it.  There's a Royal Society for the Prevention of at least two of the things that were running though my mind as he spoke.

'It's all bunged up and stuck, so I need a new one,' he announced.

Rachael shrank back in her chair, as did I.  Well to be honest, I was actually under the chair by this point.  Hey - that's why we have an intern.  She was about to be deputised as next-in-line for a task that I wasn't keen on.

'Can you go to Tottenham Court Road and get me a new one?' he asked.  I was now under the desk, taking absolutely no chances, but feeling a degree of relief that it was indeed a computer accessory he was talking about and not a small rodent that he had been keeping in his office.

Frankly, nothing would surprise me.  We do tend to hoard odd things.  Ilona has the world's largest ball of twine which had we been in Missouri would have its own scenic viewpoint and accompanying gift shop while I have a bale of bubble wrap stuffed under reception that is big enough to pad out the entire office.  It is only of tiny significance that I have ordered both these items from an on-line catalogue where I had a little trouble with the scale of the photographs.  As I may have mentioned - I do have a small spacial awareness problem.  It's the same one that men on internet dating sights suffer from when they tell you they are of 'average build' and turn up looking like Demis Roussos but with an Izod shirt instead of a caftan.

A kleptomaniac mouse with pica is surely the only thing that would account for the surprising things that have been disappearing from the kitchen.  Bunmi's croissante the other morning, two dozen mysteriously vanishing teaspoons, a box of light bulbs, several water glasses and my pungent box of Tesco's Thai  sip-a-soup that I suspect have been thrown out as a precautionary measure because everyone complains when I eat it.

'It's like living in a student house,' bemoaned Jo, as Lyns walked into the middle of the room and wailed that someone had eaten her pear.

A loud sigh of disapproval went round the office.   Nine women who've had their food tampered with are not to be messed with. Whatever next if you can't leave your own fruit to rot in the bowl without it being eaten?

And then a small voice whispered from behind a partition.  'It was me,' confessed Ilona.  'I was hungry,' she almost wept, putting a winsome Oliver twist on to it, 'and it had been there for a very long time.  It was very soft.'

Her husband later told her she was mad to have 'fessed up.  I agree.  I didn't tell anyone that I had the last of the milk this morning.  

'Now I'm going to get blamed for everything that goes missing,' she said.

It's true.  And oh I do like a scapegoat.

I also like an intern who pays attention, listens, does all the rubbish jobs, laughs at my blog, and brings chocolates on her last day.  Lindt too, none of your rubbish.

Farewell Rachael - you will be missed.  And in the meantime, I will be under my desk in case the mouse's bowels seize up once again.

Fish and guests

Yesterday it was my ex husband’s birthday and the kids went off to see him with their carefully chosen and hand-made presents, the birthday cake that my eldest, as tradition demands, had baked and decorated, and the mail that has been accumulating over the last week since they last saw him.

Much of it bills.

Meanwhile I had a fun hour in an MRI scanner having the fillings shaken out of my teeth and then, with my finger on the dial button ready to cancel, went – as the lesser of two evils (the other being a one way ticket to lonely street)  - to meet the Frenchman for a ‘glass of wine’ which for once wasn’t a euphemism. He had people staying with him he informed me up front, so his flat was occupied. And after telling me that I looked tired (this is euphemism for looking like shit as we all know) he took me to Julie’s, the spiritual home of all West London mistresses. I was sorely under-prepared for the role. No make up, no high heels, no décolletage, no hairbrush, definitely no perfume and no bloody interest either.

‘Bad day?’ he asks when we meet, then without pausing to hear about it tells me all about his.

At length.

After an hour or so he asked about my trip to Morocco. Bad conversation choice. ‘I didn’t want to come back,’ I said. In response, he told me that he also had a great time in New York where he had been the previous week.

‘It’s just a shame that I missed one day because I was ill. Haddock,’ He said by way of explanation.

‘Oh dear, what a pity… did you have food poisoning?’ I asked, immediately wishing I hadn’t as you really don’t want those kind of details while you’re eating.

He looked at me as though I was deaf and or stupid and we’ve already established that the first would be an advantage when dealing with the Frenchman and the second goes unchallenged.

‘No, I just maybe slipped a bit too much, I always get it when I travel far: haddock.’

'You always eat haddock?’

‘Yes, I always get haddock. I slipped for ten hours straight, so maybe this is why…’ and in explanation he dropped my hand to hold the side of his temples.

The mists cleared. Headache. He had a headache.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

Now that is a first.

Spreading Joy

I just don’t appreciate the email from Expedia welcoming me back from Casablanca.

First of all, I don’t want to be back from Casablanca. I want still to be rocking in a hammock licking honey from the desert off my fingers, while my host feeds me “tea and oranges” like Suzanne, even if the oranges are green and come only from the tree at the end of the garden instead of China. I want to be walking through Chellah at dusk as the storks float through the sky in their hundreds back to their nests that are perched on the tree tops like open hands. I’d want to be driving idly through Rabat having the embassies pointed out to me as though they were the homes of the Rich and Famous in Beverly Hills, and my attention drawn to the back of the Duty Free shop which is, ‘not the white one, but the yellow building next to it’ (should you be in any doubt). I wouldn’t even mind being lost for one and a half hours in the brutally anonymous suburbs of Casablanca, blind in the torrential rain while thunder rolls over the bonnet of the car and lightening cracks the sky open and you can’t hear yourself think for the water bouncing off the roof like angry anti-aircraft fire. So believe me, I really, really don’t need reminding that I’m back home in the dark on the No 7 bus, with winter the next destination.

If there’s anything worse than Spam, it's Spam masquerading as friendship. How sad do you think I am that I need a cheery welcome from a self-generating email programme?

Okay, pretty sad.

The first night back I met with Sarah’s lovely friend where I made the fatal mistake of deciding I would put on a bit of slap before leaving for the hotel.  It's not as though I had a lot to live up to - I mean, hair brushed would be a start, but I thought I should try to make an impression.

‘Hotel? That’s handy,’ said someone in a far corner of the room who I couldn’t quite reach with my haughty stare.

‘Hotel bar,’ I added.

‘As I said, handy…’ she said.

‘It’s a drink, not a date,’ I said. 'I need a mirror,' I added, as Ilona offered hers, 'but only if you don't crack it with that face. Give me a smile, it's only a drink you're going out for, not a hanging.'

This, she assures me, is just her loving Russian sense of humour, and yes, I felt loved, so loved in fact that the perfume I was applying spilled in a shape roughly the size of Bulgaria across my jeans (so what’s wrong with that, you wear perfume for drinks don’t you?) and…

‘Phwoaaaaaaaaar,’ came a collective moan across the office.

‘Bloody hell, what’s that?’ asked one.

‘Joy.’

‘Well you certainly do smell of it.’

‘It’s better than desperation, middle age and disappointment, isn’t it?’

‘The top notes, maybe,’ said Jo doubtfully.

‘Erm yes, it is a little strong,’ said lovely friend when I apologized for my somewhat overwhelming fragrant self, later in the bar.

I kept my coat across my knees all night trying to stifle the scent but to no avail. I can only think that he’s not a big fan of women who come up smelling of roses as he was pressed into the back of his chair like a man going round Brands Hatch, but with a great deal more white-knuckled terror.

There seems to be no end to the ways in which one can fail to impress.

Where's a slavishly fond chihuahua when you need it?

I mean, it kisses you, doesn't mind spending the night, cries when you leave it behind and is madly in love with your ankles? What's not to like?