Oh the glamour, the glitz, the excitement, the joy, the sycophancy that is working in publishing.
Tonight it's a book launch for Luke Jennings' elegant and brilliant book Blood Knots which we're holding at the Antiquarian Society in Burlington House, where people walk past the window in an almost constant trail carrying large canvases into The Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition.
'Wouldn't you like to go and mingle?' asks one of my fellow indians, jammed with me into the corner where I'm providing the absolutely vital function of selling books, with a glass of red in one hand and a sack of pot pourri aka vegetable chips in the other. It makes giving change slightly difficult but luckily I can multi-task.
'I'm fine - I haven't really finessed the art of mingling.' I say. Book-selling means that people come to you, can be engaged in conversation while they hand over their fivers, and can stay if they're so inclined, or suddenly see someone they simply have to speak to at the other side of the room if they aren't. In this way I have a chat with one of Luke's seven (yes 7) brothers (in a fairy story they'd all be turned into swans or something) and a jolly woman who has put her hand into a blender (and yes, jolly, really!). Later an agent comes in who I have previously only known from emails, though the acquaintance is not mutual. She's escorted by a tall, craggily handsome chap in a grey jumper that either has a spot of white paint splashed where lesser creatures sport the logo of designer knitwear, or a moth hole through which his white t-shirt is visible. I feel immediate empathy since I have my own large moth hole in the cardi which I threw on this morning and intended to change before the party, but am still wearing since I didn't have time to go home first,. My attempts at disguise consisted of pulling up my black tights to camouflage the hole and tying a knot at the offending spot on the cardi. But it's like toothache - I can't stop poking at it.
'Are you an author?' I ask - Ms Originality or what!
'Well I've written a book but I wouldn't call myself an author.'
'Oh I would. It helps me not to staple my hands to my desk and scream when I'm talking to people called Tracy from call centres trying to sell me office supplies.'
He asks about my book, but that's where the theory goes a bit awry as it's one thing saying you're an author (novelist is my usual self-description, though not even I believe it) but it's another thing trying to talk about your own one startlingly ordinary work of no genius whatsoever without sounding like a conceited self-regarding ass. I mumble what I hope is something non-committal and try to turn the subject back to most men's favourite subjects. Themselves. But, darn it, this chap is a rare find. He asks questions. It's like playing tennis with things you don't want to talk about instead of little yellow balls.
Eventually, he takes pity on me and tells me he's really an artist.
'Lovely,' I say, none the wiser. I live in Notting Hill Gate where painter, artist, scriptwriter and writer are all euphemisms for unemployed and on the dole.
'But you don't write any more?' I prod.
'Well, I'm writing the screenplay for my book at the moment.'
As I said, painter, artist, writer, screenwriter...
'...but I'm really an artist.'
I was talking to a self-proclaimed (and unemployed) artist at my friend's memorial service the other day in Portobello Road - this one did video installations which more or less shut me up for the rest of the conversation as, even after myself spending several years in art school myself, I had no idea, and less inclination, to find out what that actually entailed. But you're not in Kansas now, toto, you're in the Land of the Literati with Lynn Barber standing behind you and as it later turns out, a very successful contemporary artist watching you eat pot pourri with a red wine smile curling up the side of your face.
He did tell me his name, but, being the sort of pleb who hangs out with slum landlords in Willesden who support their artistic habits letting out rooms in houses they bought in 1973 for fourpence, it sailed over my head like a miss-hit ping pong ball. He also told me what he had painted - but thank goodness, it wasn't until I googled him this morning that the penny dropped into the slot as I recognised the images. It's just an awful lot easier to talk about Roxy Music to someone you imagine is as ordinary as you are, than it is to find something meaningful to say to a person whose reputation is supposed to precede them. (I mean you should have heard me babbling to Lynn Barber - though I did manage to stop short of telling her that my first boyfriend was married too. Just.) Unfortunately, we got cut off before he began to expound on women's underwear which his wife designs - a subject very dear and near to my underwired heart.
'Guess what. I met Harland Miller last night,' I told a bleary-eyed former art-dealing, editorial who sits opposite me.
'WHAT. You met Harland Miller - he's amazing, he's my favourite artist. I own a Harland Miller. I got it from White Cube... and you met him at a launch.' I'm not liking the way he is emphasising the 'you'.
'Not only did I meet him, but I spoke to him for ages. He even told me that I look a bit like Jerry Hall. We were talking about Roxy Music and he said "Remember they had her dressed as a mermaid on the cover of Siren..."'
Editorial looks really crushed. Ha - I've got him back for that bloody Japanese film...
I add that I hoped he meant I looked like her then and not now, but either way, I chose to take it as a compliment.
Even though I think she looks a bit like a horse.
