...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...
