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.
