Liz sent me the link to the event for something called Guilty Pleasures which she assured me was absolutely perfect for women like us.
'Are you sure? It sounds like a fetish club,' I said.
'Nooo, it's much cooler than that - lots of retro disco stuff from the seventies and full of people our age.'
'Really?' (Nothing is full of people our age except Weightwatchers, or at a pinch, AA.)
'Yes, really, I'm telling you - look at the website, they've even got Davina McCall as a special Guest Star, and it's Panto night so you can dress up if you like...'
'Erm, I think I might pass on the fancy dress.' (Suddenly the fetish club sounds a better alternative. I mean, panto? Frankly I'm not that keen on Davina McCall either.)
Nevertheless, Saturday night arrives as surely as fat women at a church hall on weigh-in day and there we are - four fortysomethings (artistic license, okay - work with me here) - a gallery owner, a journalist, an academic and me, sitting in a restaurant in Camden on our second bottle of wine, waiting for it to be late enough to turn up at the club. I'm already yawning my head off. Guilty Pleasures? Mine is going to bed with a boxed set of an The West Wing and my laptop at nine thirty.
Liz, the journalist, has brought a friend - a thin blonde who is another soon-to-be-single woman. I ask her what she does for a living.
'Oh I'm a scientist,' she says, 'I work on brain development.' She smiles. 'And you?'
Well top that girl.
A ruddy scientist? Who says that? Well, apart from real-life scientists, I suppose, sensing that the reply 'answering the phone at Pedantic Press' isn't going to trump her and so I play the creative card and bang on about my novel instead.
'You were writing a novel too, weren't you? When you were on maternity leave with your second child...' prompts Liz, intimating that Ms Scientist knocked it off as a little sideline hobby between breast feeds while, when I was having babies, it took all my brain cells to remember if I was on the left one or the right one whenever the baby cried.
'I might go back to it someday,' she says, like it's a bit of knitting she has put down at the side of her chair. We in publishing are holding our breath.
Okay, so no points there for originality, Marion. As I know - everybody is writing a freaking novel.
'And I also work for a publishing company and write the blog,' I add, hoping to impress.
'Mmm,' she looks puzzled, then asks with a pained expression: 'But why do you want to externalise everything?'
I glance at Liz who shrugs in silent solidarity We're hacks. If we didn't externalise everything we'd have nothing to write about. Liz is an amazing generous and talented writer who could tackle any number of weighty subjects in searingly insightful depth, but all her editor ever asks her to talk about is her latest hair cut.
Clever birds, she seems to say, what can you do with them? I drink more wine and look at my watch as the minutes tick slowly away and the evening drags its arse like a dog with worms on through the long night of the cheapest thing on the menu, the mint tea (no caffeine, it might keep us awake) and the pudding we all say we don't want as though the idea of dessert was akin to converting to Islam (this, I know from experience, is actually much less painful than eating a bad taramisu); and in any case, it's an empty gesture because I already know that later I'm going to come home and eat all the marron glace I got for my birthday.
The Scientist, it occurs to me, is my husband in a frock, but much prettier. She's the one with passion for her work, the driven genius, the one with the intellectual brownie points and also the main breadwinner. She certainly seems to be the person with the balls in the partnership. I hear her talk about her break-up, which she's initiating, feeling inadequate, wishing I could be so adamantly decisive about what or who I didn't want instead of choking on nostalgia for a long-dead relationship and generally being that woman you see crying on the bus who makes you glad you picked up a copy of London Lite so you can hide your head in it and pretend not to notice.
She's like a different species. She commutes to London in the morning on a train full of men reading the Financial Times. She claims the journey is ideal as it allows her to get lots of work done. When not weeping on the bus, I hold a manuscript on my lap and tend to sleep.
I am stuffed full of envy, admiration and half-baked bread rolls laden with butter in equal measures, and only slightly mollified when she lights up a cigarette on the way to the club which I convince myself is the reason why she is so thin, and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she is not going to go back to her commuter belt bedroom and eat a box of candied chestnuts.
At the dance, it is indeed Panto Season. It is also, apparently, Club 13-30, and rather than being for geriatrics like us as I had been promised it is, instead, full of gum-chewing teenagers dressed in skimpy corsets from the Anne Summer's Winter Wonderland Prostitute Collection where, whatever it is that you're queuing outside Father Christmas's grotto for, it's not a Polaroid. It's like there's been a competition to see how little you can wear and still look terrible. There are legions of pretty girls descending on the roped off foyer of the old Camden Palais, none of whom seem to own overcoats or, in many cases, hosiery. There is also an alarming number of pirates.
It's like a casting session for the budget production of Peter Pan where you wear your Adidas sweatpants tucksd into your socks, chuck on a frilly shirt, an eyepatch and a hat with a feather and - hey presto - look Jim lad, there be treasure in them there hills.
I suddenly don't just feel Middle Aged, but old enough to qualify for a bus pass.
'Did you fancy a pirate?' asks Liz.
'Not so much,' I answer, as the other alternative, a man in a frock - in this specific instance a large pink tutu, wanders past all loved up and strokes my hair.
'I quite like a chunky chap, myself,' she sighs, looking wistfully at three overweight and over thirty men with bellies like John Prescot's chins hanging over their, mercifully, non Pirate-style trousers. They make me feel small and delicate. Unfortunately the chunky chap doesn't usually like women like me.'
Well, not these ones anyway. They later turn out to be part of the floor show, dressed in tiny lurex swimming shorts doing a very camp pole dance to 'I don't want a lot for Christmas'. The audience cheers at what, to them, is a novelty act, and for us older women has more or less been bedtime, but with boxers, for the last twenty odd years.
God, I'm glad this isn't my life, I think as yet another gang of young buckaneers walk past and shuffle vaguely rhythmically in a circle which, as the room fills up, and the promise of music before 1975 fails to materialise, gets smaller and smaller until the room is a veritable huddle of twitching, stomping pirates, Santa sluts and fairy whores, a wand in one hand and a Bacardi Breezer. Liz is smiling blissfully and repeatedly hailing a cab which seems to be her main dance move. I close my eyes so I can't see myself being fifty as the young, or at least those who can still focus their eyes, look at us with relief, saying to themselves, 'thank Christ you're not my mum'.
'Sorry, it's usually a much older crowd,' yells Liz at airport runway levels, which still comes over as mute mouthing given the volume of the music that, except for the odd festive blast of Wham, none of us have ever heard before. 'But it'll be great to write about in your blog,' she screams.
Indeed.
It can all be externalised in the morning.
But in the meanwhile I've missed the final of both Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor.
This is time I'm never going to get back again.
Much like my youth.
Thank *
