Saturday night. A lovely dinner party where, amazingly, there were seven men and only five women. I kept blinking my eyes just to clear my vision as I went round the room counting them. Unwittingly, I was presented with a glass of Prosecco with a shot of vodka in it when I arrived and had not been able to feel my lips since I finished it, so there was every chance I was just seeing double and counting the same ones twice. On my second, astonished, round up I recognised one of the singletons as a man who used to date a friend of mine who is now, he told me, expecting twins. Despite the happy news, I struggled not to look horrified - having survived two decades of child-rearing I can't contemplate the idea of multiple births without wanting to lie down in a darkened room with a cool flannel on my head for about a hundred years and yell: 'You must be out of your mind.'
It was a very glitsy crowd. The hostess - my dauntingly superwoman friend - author, business woman, networker - is more plugged in the Dyno-Rod and seems to know absolutely everyone who is anyone. There was a famous columnist and a BBC person, a journalist and a blonde, glamorous woman who I was later told is a 'publishing legend'. The men sat all together down one side of the table, while the women flanking a few more, sat opposite. Half way through the evening, some of us skipped over to the other side. It was like country dancing in Norway or one of the those places where women are an endangered species and the men all have to dance with each other.
Without realising the blonde, glamorous woman's legendary status in publishing I was seated next to her on the skip-change.
'You work in publishing?' she asked, politely, barely sifling a yawn.
'Well, that might overstating things a little,' I said. 'I work, and it is a publishing company, but I don't really have anything to do with the publishing process.' I explained that I examined the prostate of large electronic printers, made lunch appointments in restaurants I don't visit and booked hotels for conferences that I don't attend. One of the interns once picked up someone else's dinner jacket from Moss Bros for an award ceremony, but so far I haven't been pressed into service as a butler for other people's clothes, though I did go out and buy 24 glasses which other people drank from, for a Board Meeting last week.
In an attempt to make myself sound marginally less dull and druge-like I then mentioned I had written a novel and droned on about it for a few minutes while glamorous blonde woman attempted to look as interested as I was in my friend's twin pregnancy.
'What do you do?' I asked, anxious to steer the subject back onto safer waters where there was no danger of anyone asking me how many copies of the book I'd sold.
'I work at...' and she mentioned the name of an imprint that has lined my shelves since the eighties. I played a few hands of Old Maid - you know the game. Someone says they work at, for instance, The Beeb and you ask if they know your friend Talullah on the switchboard, or sometimes, you drag out Alan Yentob, airily, and pretend to know him quite well because he's your close friend's son's godfather and you met him once at a Christmas Party, or stood outside the school gates with him and often found yourself waiting while the limo idled by the kerb, and sometimes he would leave his son with you and speed off to a meeting and never bother to ask your name... (sorry I'm ranting just a little).
In this instance I dragged out Ursula whose husband I used to know 25 years ago in Oxford (there's a whole category for this in Linkein, followed by men you have slept with) and who wouldn't be able to pick me out of a line up but who did, nevertheless, used to work for the same imprint. She knew her. She was, she told me, very casually, the publisher.
Oh.
I sipped some wine that wasn't even mine, but had been left there by the person whose place I took (the Prosecco and vodka put me instantly over the limit for driving) just to affect a nonchalance that I didn't feel. Poor woman. Putting a publisher next to a debut novelist at a dinner party must be like being a gynecologist slapped next to a woman with fibroids. You just, really really really don't want to go out for the evening and be stuck with yet another author, or womb, as the case may be. It transpired that the famous journalist had also recently published a book though hers had been serialised on Radio 4. A Royal Flush and me with only a pair of twos. They both said a few encouraging words of the sort you offer toddlers when learn to tie their own shoelaces and I struggled to find something more interesting to say. I couldn't. Especially when my hostess decided that we really should have a 'dinner party conversation' and introduced the topic of Primary Academies. I felt like I was in an episode of Gossip Girl (yes, dear, I am that intellectual) and couldn't give a flying fig about Primary Academies. Neither could anyone else, but in a blink of an eye we were on to my specialist subject. Gaza and the Palestinians. I could have danced all night.
The host's husband gave me a conciliatory smile. 'Coals to Newcastle this, for you, isn't it?' he said sympathetically.
'Yep, you can lose the husband, but not the ruddy cause.'
I refrained from running away screaming just as we got on to Myerson where it was 10:1 against with the famous journalist the only supporting voice. Luckily the Publishing Legend had even more burning questions to attend to. She had discovered a plate of amaretti biscotti and was busy rolling the wrappers into tubes and setting them alight where they burned and shrivelled like dwindling erections (okay, not known for bursting into flames, but otherwise, I assure you, the analogy is spot on) and then floated into the air. We all gasped appreciatively and the husband of the famous journalist had to have a go himself. Men just can't let the opportunity or pyromania go past them. The dinner table was a 999 call waiting to happen.
Our hostess did not look in the least perturbed at the prospect of flaming paper flying towards her newly painted ceiling.
North Londoners, they are so laid back.
Vodka and Prosecco are going to do that to you, I suppose.
