When all the politicians had gone home to scrutinise their expense accounts, Mr T suggested we might go to dinner.
'Would you like to come?' he asked me and then turned to debonaire banker and said: 'You don't mind if I bring my crew, do you?'
Ah, I've always wanted to be in an entourage, and so off we went. Myself, an Editor, Junior Editor, Fashionista, Junior Fashionista, Mr T and the lovely Banker. As we tripped off through the police barricades set up in readiness for today's G20 summit, Mr T, in a fit of unaccustomed intimacy, took my arm.
My, I was flattered. Look at me, linking arms with the boss... It soon became clear that this was not the honour I had thought it. For a start Mr T is a very fast walker. His banker friend also has exceedingly long legs that stride out like John Cleese going for Gold. I'm a dreamer. I'm a dawdler. I'm also in three inch heels and we're negotiating cobbles. To be frank, I couldn't keep up.
There they were striding out forcefully and there was I tripping along, my little podgy legs a blur, as I tried in vain to maintain the pace, held firmly in the crook of Mr T's arm. What's more, the two of them were chatting animatedly to each other and I had nothing much to say. Actually there was nothing much I could say except perhaps 'oxygen'... I was out of breath. Every time the road narrowed, because Mr T and I were linked, we huddled closer together, the two men, coming at me from both sides (that sounded different in my head) and making me feel like the meat in the sandwich - a very, very nice sandwich, but one in which the bread is definitely the most interesting part. They were artisan hand milled Poillaine and I was supermarket, water injected ham... As we turned a corner at 40 miles an hour I glanced to the young editor behind me imploring and stared, wide eyed and panicked, like a skittish horse on the starting line for the Grand National behind the other fifty fillies...
My feet were killing me. And then, whack, Mr T dropped something on the ground (it may have been deliberate - a sort of mercy food drop) and when he stooped to collect it, he let go of my arm. But now I was the riderless horse after I'd refused the first jump. They sprinted on ahead, the gap between them closing, and I got squeezed out of the middle until I merely trotted along behind them while they galloped down the field, or the Mall at any rate. I felt like Prince Philip in one of those pathetic little buggies trying to control two large stallions with a handbag instead of a whip. I gave up in defeat and evenutally they left me behind. I slowed to a canter and fell in with the young editor and publicity manager.
'I could see you were struggling,' said the editor.
By the time we reached the restaurant - which incidentally Boris Johnson was just leaving - I couldn't feel my feet at all.
But that could have been alcohol related, I admit.
We had a fabulous meal, most of which passed in a pleasant Sauvignon induced haze though I do remember one sticky moment when Mr T announced that everyone assumed he was the romantic interest publisher in my book.
I was mortified.
'I'm so sorry,' I said (I'm sho shorry, may have been a closer approximation)... The book was written long before I worked at Pedantic and the hero was retrospectively based on a man I met at a dinner party who is, indeed, a publisher and does, indeed, have a wonderful smile, but of whom I have no biblical knowledge and is neither handsome nor Mr T.
'I don't mind,' he said, the way I say that I don't mind being fifty. It hadn't really occured to me that this would ever strike anyone as even faintly plausible. I'm a bit slow. In all things.
Mr T was last seen holding the fashionista's arm, striding very briskly across Westminster Bridge, with Big Ben striking in the foreground, disappearing into the horizon like the fade out scene in a romantic novel.
Who needs Richard Curtis, I ask you?
