Post-partyum

So our book didn’t win. The seemingly effortlessly intelligent Rose Tremaine had that honour and apparently it was a star-studded event with impressive canapés and rivers of champagne. Gerry Halliwell was there as well the chap from How to Look Good Naked and em… Vanessa Feltz. I mean, hey, we’re talking serious glamour here.

So while the rest of the staff were chatting with the likes of Helena Kennedy, as anticipated, I stumbled flat-footed to The Portobello Gold and had a very large glass of wine which I necked like I was on a Club 18-30 holiday. It was an analgesic, believe me. Why did I think that Sex and the City would be fun? What’s fun about watching people get jilted and seeing their marriages fall apart because of a one night stand? Try a year and a half Miranda, and get off your self-righteous high horse and give the guy a break. No, it wasn’t exactly a cheery evening of escapism. I think we were supposed to gasp over the clothes and coo over the shoes as the four women tottered hither and thither in spikes and skimpy frocks, but, sorry, it just doesn’t resonate. I’m the same age as the Kim Cattrell character and while I can walk in heels like the rest of them, it’s unlikely that I would be able to lie on a table with sushi strategically placed across my body without eating it in the first five minutes. My own close friends idea of a night out is a BYO restaurant, a pair of Birkenstocks, big knickers and an heirloom bra.

Still I could have gone for the whole lying in the bed with the shutters drawn being drip fed vodka looking devastated. As it is, my devastation merely prompts people to tell me I’m looking tired.

So, yes, I needed that glass of wine. I needed another when the red-faced man began leering at us delightedly from the other end of the bar with his tattooed knuckles clutched around a pint of Strongbow. He smiled at me and raised his LOVE fisted glass to me revealing one large white tooth and a gap next to it.

Sadly, there’s a distinct dearth of Mr Bigs in the hostelries of Ladbroke Grove.

O-rage

The excitement, the joy, the thrill when you open up your email and see the magic word Orange in the subject line.

Mr T has sent me an email marked Orange Business.

I am beside myself with anticipation as I click on it.

And then I read:

"You’ll be delighted to know...

(oh gosh, delighted, did you see that! I have butterflies... the fairy godmother is waving a wand - maybe maybe maybe you shall go to the ball!)

...that you are now registered to contact Orange to change details, review tariffs, order handsets, etc.

Oh.

'Thrilled,' I type and then press send.

Well it is a terrific responsibility. I mean, come on, it's a position of trust. I can order handsets for the other people in the office who get company phones and quibble about their tariffs. That doesn't happen every day.

It's an honour really.

I really should have had an acceptance speech prepared.

And I needed to have the dress dry cleaned anyway - it's not like it's wasted.

Home on the Orange

The whole place has been Tangoed as Orange Fever spikes in the office.

‘I can’t believe we’re having a launch meeting at 9:30 the day after the Orange Prize,’ says one of my beleaguered colleagues from behind her partition. ‘We’ll all be hung over!’ she adds.

I cough piteously, or possibly annoyingly to those who find my Little Nell act is wearing a little thin, and point out that my Orange Wednesday is going to be somewhat different from those of the literary party goers. I’ve got a two for one ticket for Sex in the City.

There’s a silence from behind the partition and then she peeps round the side of her partition and asks me if I would like to come to her birthday bash (oh do I know how to turn the screw or what?) at which there will be Red Velvet Cup Cakes from the Hummingbird Café. As consolation prizes go, it isn’t a bad one though I feel I would turn up a bit like the maiden aunt you have to ask to Christmas lunch otherwise she's sitting at home eating baked beans with a sprig of holly stuck in the toast. I smile as would Cinderella on getting an invite to a bacon sandwich by a good-hearted bystander instead of the ball with a big engraved stiffie delivered by footmen. So I won’t be needing the carriage or the fancy dress or the singing mice and the sewing birds.

While the rest of the office are out with our author Nancy Huston with everything crossed, waiting and hoping for a gong for Fault Lines I’ll be sitting in the cinema with a Cornetto wondering if the man I was once introduced to as the real-life Mr Big who dated Candice Bushnell for years, was indeed the basis for the Chris Noth character.

Sigh.

Then my friend Nel and I will stop at the Portobello Gold for a glass of wine and steak and chips on the way home and I shall then tell her all about the night I was invited back to the purported Mr Big’s Shag Palace in Chelsea, with the knee high white carpeting and the dim-able lights and the soaring songs for swinging lovers and the leaping flames in the gas fire that all appeared at the flick of a switch.

Mind you, that was about as exciting as it got. Sexless in the City, I assure you. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if he lived up to his name.

Alice went to the readings for the Orange Prize last night at the Royal Festival Hall as a spare ticket came up at the last minute. I would have loved to have gone but couldn't bid for the place as I had a previous engagement with literary friend who shall remain nameless who possibly has the most piercing carrying voice in the whole of London. Indeed, I expect penguins in Antarctica heard all about her preference for a ‘cut cock’ as did every male in the pub where she made the announcement.

None brightened at the prospect, I may add - but we were in West London where I fear the feature is not ubiquitous.

I merely coughed and looked deep into my nuts.

Peanuts, I mean.

We then went to the S&M café, which is short for Sausage and Mash for the uninitiated and not a perversion or the name of a terrible column I once found myself writing, but there was one awful moment when the sausages arrived, and her mouth opened, that I wanted to duck under the table, fearful of what she was about to say.

Luckily she only wanted mustard.

Buddhist transport

I’m persevering with the Buddhist guide to Happiness which advises letting go of the ego and self-centredness. Goodness. I’d be stuck for things to talk about. Nevertheless, as instructed, I sit on the No 7 bus and do the exercises. I think of all the people who are worse off than me and send them silvery nectar thoughts of empathy floating on my outward breath, and draw all their pain into the white orb in my chest where, in theory it is released, and in practice merely lodges like indigestion. I soon get a sense of lightness in my head and begin to think I'm experiencing an out of body state of nirvana but then I realise I'm only hyperventilating. The man sitting next to me seems to think I am about to sneeze, and flinches away from me every time I exhale. He may also think I have lost my mind instead of vainly trying to hold on to it by practicing meditation techniques. He eventually scurries to the vacant seat on the other side of the bus and continues eating his Snack-a-jacks which is a result because the crunching was interfering with my Karma, and the vinegary smell was beginning to make me feel rather sick, especially since I was drawing it into my lungs with such concentrated effort. There was less of white orb of light over my heart than a chemical mix of monosodium glutamate and sodium.

If the less fortunate are to gain anything from this, I may have to kill the man first so I can concentrate.

I think perhaps it is time to try staring into space and let my thoughts run over my mind like a waterfall, but five minutes and the waterfall is springing through the eyelids. Self-pity Central. Alight here.

Obviously this is going to take a little more practice, but nevertheless, I feel a bit better.

Breathe. Compassion and empathy. Inhale. White orb of light. Dissolve.

But darn it, the only thing that’s dissolving is me. Bloody hell, I’m a narcissist. How do I chant my way out of this.

The man with the Snack-a-jacks, finishes the bag and crumples it up, shooting me another anxious glance. Then he starts on a pork pie. Huh, and he thinks I’ve got problems. At least I’m not full of additives, matey.

He sees me looking, and edges back against the window. I tell you, if I had a rucksack and a beard he would have called the Bomb Squad.

At work I am urged to find out the name of the Sales Manager of Bentley. I feel like a cold caller, the kind I hang up on, while I'm ringing and saying, excuse me, can you tell me the name of… so instead I trawl the web site. I go to the press office and scroll down the names, and there is a woman called Julia Marozzi who is Head of Lifestyle which sounds jolly good fun. I'd like to be Head of Lifestyle at Bentley - it must be all engraved hip flasks and fur lined lap rugs and men with double barreled names whose other car is a Land Cruiser, you know, for the dogs, darling while the wife has a little BMW sport's car for running up to town.

The name’s familiar and unusual both at the same time. The writer Justin Marozzi shares an agent with me, and he married my ex boss at the FT called Julia. Who would now be, , okay not exactly a clearing of clouds and the voice of God moment, but nevertheless it was rather amazing – duh! - Julia Marozzi.

And LO, this is she.

The woman who gave me my big break, now ruling the roost at Bentley. I ring her immediately and the years roll back, along with the kilos, until I was a mere slip of a forty-year old, less padded woman, walking along the Embankment to the FT to meet with her with my cuttings under my arm, repeating to myself over and over again another mantra, hoping that I might be in with a chance as her new restaurant columnist.

She wore rather alarmingly severe specs and examined me over the top of them, much as I do now, since I'm too mean to buy bifocals.

She’s taking me to lunch next week. I wonder if she has any nice, spare, Bentley owners knocking about who might be interested in self-centred egotistical lady novelist, one careless owner, but still very, very good runner in the right hands, who can type, reject manuscripts, cold call and cook dinner for 16 at thirty minutes notice.

I have a clean driving license and a dirty mind.

Okay, I suffer self-pity on buses, but in a Bentley, that could easily be a thing of the past.

I bet you Bentley owners don't eat Snack-a-jacks for a start

Things gone past

Mr T urged me to send out a copy of Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness: A guide to developing life’s most important skill to someone he had lunch with the other day. As I stuffed it into the envelope it occurred to me that maybe I should take a look at it myself since I could use some pointers.

I got to the first Exercise which counsels one to ‘examine the causes of happiness’ and to remember when you were last happy. Suddenly – wallop - the speeding train straight from Misery Central mows me down then reverses back up the line just to make sure I'm well and truly flattened.

Okay, so that won't work.

Somewhat opposed to Mr Ricard’s views of cultivating inner harmony, my agent tells me to wallow in the grief, to grab it with both hands and write my way out of it. ‘We need a second book, darling, get going on it.’

The idea appeals. I could be a tortured muse, banging away on the battered Olivetti of life, churning out a masterpiece. I could be Elizabeth Barrett without the Browning and write Hallmark Greeting Card rhymes for Rejected Wives and the Recently Bereaved. But instead I just whine to my friends looking like a Basset Hound with a hangover. I want to sink into the armchair of gloom or take to my bed with one of those Victorian illnesses that requires invalid food and a couple of housemaids to serve it, fresh linen, smoothed brows, drawn curtains, and maybe even a little fire burning in the grate to keep off the chill. I want to take my meals on a tray and waste away. I want to swoon and brush my forehead with the back of my hand like a pre-Raphaelite heroine, and generally look tragic.

Sadly, or should I say even more sadly, there’s little chance of that. The only thing that looks a bit tragic about me are my decades old jeans that since I began to live on cup-a-soup, I can miraculously fit into, though they are flares and come up to my navel so I look like Simon Cowell doing ladies’ leisure wear. All I need to do is get a chest rug and have my teeth bleached. The hair’s a bit tragic too. I used to have a side parting but I haven’t looked in a mirror for a week and so I fear the coiffeur has suffered somewhat and now looks like I’ve been raising fledglings in it, or keeping mice, a la Russell Brant. What with the too tight trousers and the big hair, if I could squeeze into PVC shirt (another 7 pounds to go) and I could almost do stand up impressions of him. Well, except for the accent.

My publisher at Waddling Duck wants a picture for their publicity department. Who of? The old me or the new me? A month ago I was blonde. A week ago I was a stone heavier. Yesterday I came in wearing my dress inside out. I told her to wait another week – who knows, by then I could be Sienna Millar in the big pants.

Exercise two is ‘developing attention’. Well, I suppose I could start by checking that I’ve got my shirt on the right way round.

Does that count?

Gormley-less

Okay, don’t get too excited, Steven Spielberg isn’t calling me on speed-dial begging for the film option, in fact, strictly speaking the American publisher has not offered to buy the book, but rather the idea of the book, on the basis that I will set it in America. And, em, elaborate on the ending.

In other words. Rewrite it (for the third time).

‘But what if you win the Booker?’ says Val in the A Team Office. ‘If people try to read your back list they will find that you have two different versions of the same book.’

This, of course, is true. But then if I win the Booker, then it will have to have a brand new category, just for me and hell will probably have frozen over and so we'll have bigger problems. I don’t think I’m going to lose very much sleep over the fact that there’s a New England Agnes and a Scottish Agnes living parallel lives on either side of the Atlantic. I think it’s pretty safe to say that winning the Booker is about as likely as me going home and finding a bottle of champagne cooling in the fridge for what should have been my wedding anniversary.

So I’ll do the rewrite, and try and perform a one woman show of enthusiasm, tell myself well done, and try not to dwell on the things that are not happening in my life.

In any case it’s all too premature to book the marching band but as part of the pre-jubilation cheer-me-up scheme undertaken by one of my long suffering friends, I was transported last night to the ballet at Sadler’s Wells.

Mmm

A Moroccan-Belgian choreographer with a group of Shaolin Buddhists and a lot of coffin-sized crates – sort of Jenga with Monks doing marshal arts.

The coffins were variously bookshelves, temples, graves, beds, boats, dominos. You name it, really. But instead of what I had imagined – namely small athletic men leaping up and down in synch making Ayeeah noises, it was small athletic men leaping up and down occasionally making Ayeeah noises while doing an awful lot of dragging big bleeding boxes around, which squeaked and groaned when moved, and then fussily reassembling them in various shapes then hiding inside them, writhing inside them, hanging upside down in them, moving gracefully around inside them, then leaping up and down occasionally making Ayeeah noises before dragging big bleeding boxes around, etc, etc.

The audience loved it. The girl next to me was rapt, hanging over the seat in front of her entranced, or possibly catatonic with boredom. I just got rather irritated when, once again, the boxes were shuffled about. I wanted to shout: STOP BLOODY FIDDLING WITH THEM AND JUST DANCE.

I was, I admit, in a minority.

At the end when there was about ten minutes of absolutely sublime movement I finally began to enjoy it.

And then came the talk.

My friend is a serious artist. She always stays for the talk. The stage designer was Anthony Gormley, so she was definitely staying for the talk. (Apparently he too got irritated with the boxes not staying where he had put them.)

Seven people sat on the stage, one signing for the deaf, one translating for the two Chinese monks, with an empty seat for Antony who was, lucky bugger, in Japan so did not attend.

Sigh, too late, we were hemmed in Gormley-less and the microphone was circulating.

Audience member: This is a question for the monks. How much cooperation was there between the Monks and the Choreographer?

Silence while interpreter stares into space.

Embarrassed pause. Question repeated by the chairperson to the interpreter.

Interpreter: short stream of chah chah chah chah chah, Chinese dialogue.

Monks: Stunned silence, followed by hesitant but very, very long stream of chah chah chah chah Chinese dialogue.

Interpreter: They say there was a lot of co-operation.

Signer: Rapid hand movements

Choreographer: Oh yes, we co-operated all the time, followed by long stream of explanation and lots of jazz hands while looking all the time at the Chinese monks for confirmation, who continued to look blankly into the audience.

Signer: Very rapid hand movements


Audience member: I’m interested very much in your love of Kung Fu because I do discovered Kung Fu when I was a child and very much enjoyed Bruce Lee’s autobiography when I was younger. When I was at art school, in fact (little laugh), yeah it was when I was at art school that I discovered Bruce Lee, and he had a tremendous influence on me, like…..

And thankfully the swinging door of the auditorium closed behind him as finally, FINALLY, we left.

Leaving definitely cheered me up.

It was that easy.

Note to ex-husband. This does not apply to you.

Across the pond life

Executive decisions taken so far this morning:


Whether or not to go down to Mr Patel for milk for Mr T’s morning coffee or hope someone else will do it.

It was a tough one. Took me a good ten minutes to ponder, but I decided, after judicious consideration, and weighing up all the different variables, including the fact that I had only 20p in my pocket, just to wait.

Em… that’s it.

Later, I made two rounds of coffee with milk fetched by AN Other (was thanked by an affectionate touch on the arm by one of the recipients – lovely man, is he looking for a wife – really I’m that easy…), poured several glasses of water, and sent out some books to very grand authors. Then I fielded a couple of phone calls from very important agents, one who spit into my ear like a shot from a close range rifle when I told him Mr T was ‘in a meeting’ – and the other who sounded like Brian Sewell pretending to be a female impersonator with a pug under each arm who said he would ring him on his direct line before I could tell him this was pointless, and the call diverted back to my extension.

'As I said, he's in a meeting,' I repeated, dryly.

Otherwise I waited outside Mr T’s office ready to spring on him between appointments, with little success – it’s just as well I’m not a lioness waiting to bring down an impala at a watering hole, because slapping post-it notes on desks and waving paper in front of fleeting eyes does not attest to my stalking skills.

I also walked round to One Alfred Place where Mr T had breakfast and picked up the credit card that he had left there after his breakfast meeting. I mean, when I say I work in publishing, you get an idea of the range of expertise this demands. So don’t bother asking me if I can get your little Pandora of Crispin work experience when they’ve finished their degree in Sanscrit and Psycho-geography at Bristol because they will need a first and/or a couple of living languages before they would even be considered.

You don’t get to run this caliber of errand on six GCSEs and a certificate in life-saving unless you’re me.

And then the phone rings:

Imagine mincing Kenneth Williams type drawl: Yes, good morning, I would like to speak to someone about a book I’ve written.

Imagine bored Scottish sigh: Yes…. (oh bugger off implied but not voiced)

Which is all I get out before he launches into long monologue: Blah blah blah, my book, similar to Robert Kagan’s Return of History blah blah blah manuscript 300 pages (I’m waiting for the word count) I don’t have an agent blah blah… (although in fact it was more of a mya mya mya sound.


Me leaping in with icy diction straight from Miss Jean Brodie: Let me stop you there because I’m afraid we don’t accept any unsolicited manuscripts…

Kenneth Keegan crosses the field and tackles: But as I explained it’s in the same spirit as Robert Kagan’s

Marion, sweeps in, grabs the ball: Yes, but as I’m explaining we don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts and the fact that we’ve already published the Kagan would probably mean that we wouldn’t publish anything too similar.

Foul, I’m over clutching my ankle as he continues to insist: I didn’t say it was exactly the same, it’s about mya mya mya.

Still, you’ll need to get an agent first, I say, absently clicking on my email where I see an email from my own agent. I know it can’t be anything good or she would have called me. I’m guessing it’s more or less what I’ve been expecting – bad news or no news from the American publisher.

But I don’t have an agent, persists Mr Train Spotter, look – is there anyone else I can speak to?

OH MY GOD! I screamed.

This silenced him for oooooooooh all of one second.

I beg your pardon? he coughs, all affronted.

But I couldn’t answer him, my eyes were fixated on the email:

Then my mouth starts moving, saying ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ and ‘list of agents’ and ‘all unsolicited manuscripts come to me and are returned’ as I read the words on the screen over and over again.

That lovey, wonderful, amazingly precient woman from Harpy in New York has typed with her very own fingers: ‘...and so believe it or not I would like to offer…’

Bloody hell – I’ve got an American publisher.