Keep your friends close

Yes it does... I've also been in book launch heaven over the last week. First it was Tom Avery's for To the End of the Earth, held in the swanky Dunhill's off Berkeley Square, just around the corner from Morton's where lone men roam at lunch time. The room was full of square jawed, handsome young chaps of the sort who drive huskies across the frozen wastes in their spare time and escort aristocratic blondes in the evenings. Tom, modest and lovely as well as intrepid, certainly knows how to throw a party.

This was followed a few nights later by a Notting Hill Gate soiree for another author who shares my agent, given in one of those incredibly grand houses which open their gardens to the public once a year just to show us plebs how the other 0.01 percent grow roses artfully over the conservatory. It was achingly lovely - the party, the house, the hostess, and possibly the author but I admit I've gone off him since he was sniffy about the fact that my own book launch was held in a pub. Snob.

Mr T was already installed with a glass in one hand and suitably interested guest in the other.

'I didn't know you were coming,' he said, managing not to sound disappointed.

'Ah but I knew you were coming because I RSVP'd for you, and of course, as you know, old Chuckie is a friend of mine and this is my manor.'

Okay, well it's not my manor. It's Lady Somebody Rather Impressive's manor, but although I live somewhat to the north of the area, it is still, with a small, geographical stretch of the post code, my neighbourhood. In fact I saw many people I knew. My husband's cousin was there with his wife. David Macmillan and Arabella Pollen whose son went to school with mine and who was good-natured enough to greet me enthusiastically were also there. It was very, very starry. I saw friends, neighbours, countrymen and a lovely redhead (I have a weakness for redheaded women) whose daughter used to go to nursery school with my anarchist back in theri finger-painting days. I felt like I was in an episode of This is Your Life and that everyone had gathered especially for me. I think I knew more people there than at my own book launch - so thanks for that Chuckie - I got the classy party after all by virtue of association.

As I was just about to leave I found myself speaking to two diminutive men, and yes, I know, I think everyone is short and that I'm an Amazonian Queen just because I'm wearing heels, but I am convinced I could look at the top of their heads from on high. One was sporting brightly coloured Christopher Biggins specs of the sort architects used to wear in the 80s to underline that they are creative people, or which Children's entertainers use to denote that they are fun. He was funny and nice and told me he had noticed me earlier which I took as a compliment and not to mean that I looked like a lighthouse on a particularly rugged coastline in my red dress. We chatted the sort of drivel you chat about at parties - and it seemed to me, though I admit I'm out of practice in these things - that there was a little bit of mutual appreciation going on. I was thoroughly enjoying myself until the glamorous redhead came up to me and put her arm around me and asked me to remind her of the name of my book.

'It's called The Lost Wife's Tale,' I said, preening a little (look two glasses of wine on an empty stomach followed by two crackers with pate do not provide fertile ground for modesty) as Mr Red Specs' face fell a little.

'Do you all know each other,' I asked, getting ready to launch into the story of how we met all those years ago...

'Yes darling,' said beautiful red head, 'Do you know, that Marion's son was at nursery with Doone... (presumably the elder sister of Eyre and Mansfield) and she's just written a novel...' she continued as I realised that far from being strangers, I had in fact been chatting up her husband for the previous ten minutes. That was the end of that beautiful romance. I do think that couples should be made to wear badges at parties, just to save embarrassment. Turned out the other man had a daughter who was in my girl's class at school. I once had to ring him when she disappeared to see if she was holing up there. It's a small ruddy world. Too darn small.

A weathered aristo in a fortified blonde perm joined us and reached into her handbag to reveal a packet of Camels (particularly apt given her complexion - they should put that on the side instead of a health warning), from which she drew one, and lit it up. Just then my literary friend, approached and said she had run out of fags. I resisted the obvious pun and told her to ask the Dowager for a smoke.

Dowager looked us in the eye and without missing a beat said: 'I'm afraid I don't have any cigarettes,' and kept on puffing.

You see that's how the rich stay rich (and married). They hold on to what belongs to them. And they don't share.

Vic Reeves rang up and asked to speak to Sarah, his editor.

I said 'No, she's not in today.'

Does it get any better than this?

For the past two months I've been attempting to set up a meeting between one of our authors who I last saw in a fashionable restaurant with his retinue after my book launch - and Mr T. Since then we've since become firm pen pals as we exchange weekly emails in which I try to match up his schedule with our esteemed leader to find them a mutually convenient date to meet.

Our author cancelled the last one.  He was in Los Angeles working on his film.

We had to make another date, but that was going to be difficult.  He would be in Ireland.

I went back to the diary but he said he would be in Cannes on the day I suggested.

Only joking he added.

I'm not sure he was, however, eventually we found a space.

Lovely, he said, we can go to the Ivy Club, if that's okay.

Wonderful, I said, as if I would actually be going myself.

I pencilled it in.

This is what Cinderella would feel like if she worked as a PA

Thrown to the lions...

To the land where electricity pylons go to mate for another reading in a library.  The little town I chug into on the commuter train on the misery line looks just like the one where I grew up, but English, with docks instead of coal mines, and the library similarly shuttered and stained with graffiti.  They are charging people to come and listen to me so I'm not expecting a big turn out.  The organiser reassures me however: tickets have been sold and people as far away as the next station along have struggled through the torrential rain that is jumping off the tarmac in the car park like it's a power shower on high.  I begged Louisa to come and support me but she's photographing a one armed man who can't get a disabled parking place in Billericay for a local paper, so I'm huddled in the staff room with a plate of Jaffa Cakes and four members of staff.

'So have any of you read the book?' I ask bravely.

There's a long silence while the librarians look at each other.  I'm reminded of Louisa in the Clap clinic.

'Yes, I have,' said one, eventually when none of the others would own up.

I waited.

'...and?' I said when nothing more was forthcoming.  Somehow, I knew it wasn't going to be a front page of the LRB sort of accolade, however her...

'It was alright.' still managed to humble me almost as much as my supposed friend Frances who drove up from the country to see me and announced, hand on my knee, that I was 'sort of' attractive.  (He later followed up with a text message  saying that what he had meant to say was 'really, really' but too late, that ship has sailed and docked in a far distant port where it has sprung a leak and sunk to the bottom of the harbour, and so you can get your ruddy hand off my leg, mate.)

'Oh well,' I said - thinking that this wasn't going to be much of a pull quote on the jacket, nodding like one of those dogs you used to put in the back window of Ford Escorts, trying to look as if this was something I could take in my stride, while I mentally scooped my guts off the floor and shoved them back into the gaping ego shaped hole in my stomach.  I mean, you would hope that if someone asks you to trek out to the provinces to talk to their book club that they might have actually checked that they, themselves, enjoyed the book first.

I turned to another librarian who was dressed as a bus driver:

'What about you?' I asked with the same sort of hope that kids from Brent display when asking Santa for a pony.

'Well, the humour got me through it,' she said, valiantly, as though it was a struggle she had to overcome.  Try Cold Mountain if you want a ruddy reading ordeal, I thought.  She told me she was a fantasy fan, or speculative fiction as I have learned to call it and would probably have been much more impressed by my colleague Tom Stormcaller Lloyd, but no, they were stuck with me.  And we still hadn't left the staff room.

'Though one woman did ring up and ask if we would be selling copies because she had enjoyed it so much she wanted to get another to give to her daughter,' said a third librarian (who either hated the book or simply hadn't read it - neither was confirmed or denied) tapping my arm consolingly.  I jammed a Jaffa cake into my mouth and sucked all the orange jelly out of it to stop myself sobbing. just as the plate was whipped away and transported into the main library where people who had paid money to eat them had begun to gather.

'What about the book group, how did they take it?'  Say what you like about me, but I've got guts when it comes to criticism...  Glutton for punishment comes to mind, as well as for chocolate biscuits.

'Mixed,' said Ms 'Alright'.  Another quotation for Amazon.

I daren't ask more and dragged myself into the main library where people had assembled around the biscuits like wildebeest round a watering hole.

'Now Marion's going to talk to us about herself and her book,' said Ms 'Alright'.

Bloody, bloody - this was news to me.  I thought I was going to read.  But then again, what was the point of reading if few of them had liked the book?  I hadn't prepared a speech.  I'm not that interesting.  A person who promotes her book by talking about her recent marriage break up in the Guardian under the heading Sad, Single and something shudderingly worse that I cannot repeat, is obviously hard pressed for something to say.

My mind went blank.

Snowstorm.

Whiteboard.

New novel not written, blank.

'Erm, would anyone like to ask a question?' I murmured eventually, coughing the words up like nails from a rusty coffin.

A big girl with the air of an off duty policewoman in the front row said:  'I liked the first fifty pages but then I couldn't get on with it,' she said.

I'm still waiting for the question.  It isn't coming.

'Yer, and then it got going and I liked it, but then it went off and I didn't like it again.'

The image of the man in the wheelchair in Little Britain popped into my head.

I nodded, as if this had been exactly what I planned when I poured a couple of years of my life into writing it.

'I didn't like it,' will go great with the 'Alright' when trying to impress my American publisher.  I started to hyperventilate just as a nice woman on the left asked me how difficult it had been to get it published.

A monologue ensued.  Those men I've been going out with - they stepped up and inspired me.  Drone, drone, drone, publishing, drone, drone, agent, drone, drone, drone, drone, dropped computer, drone, drone, and then husband left me... (yep it got that bad - another five minutes and we would have been on to tales from childbirth).

I paused for breath and glanced around the room looking for another hand.  A woman in an ugly jumper spoke up:  'I didn't like the language.'

Me nodding again.  Of course.  Terrible syntax, awful sentence construction, too many metaphors...  I looked at her and raised my eyebrows waiting for her to elaborate.

'I don't buy books with bad language.  I don't like it.'  she elaborated.  Profusely. Itemising the specific chapters..  They're nothing if not consistent these gals.

'Oh, you mean the swearing?' I said, relieved that at least it wasn't literary criticism she was offering but merely the Mary Whitehouse viewpoint.  ' Well, you're quite right.  If you don't like swearing in a book, you shouldn't buy it.  I don't like your ****ing ****y jumper, and I certainly wouldn't buy that.'   I didn't say.

No, I was cowed.  Smiling ingratiatingly like a geisha in a tea house.

'I don't like books that have abuse in them.  I don't know why there just can't be nice stories, that don't have any attacks in them,' said another who left, I noticed, clutching a Maeve Binchy book of short stories.  Tough audience, setting me up against Saint Maeve. 

I apologised for my 'attack' storyline.  Next time I'll have Agnes go on a holiday to a Greek Island instead of being kidnapped.

Luckily there were a couple of retired teachers and a magistrate who may or may not have been a plant as she came from Leigh on Sea and knew my friend Louisa (hopefully not from a court appearance - or the Clap clinic, now I think of it) who were enthusiastic in their support, rolling their eyes and shrugging their cashmere twin sets in disgust at the hostile audience.

'I thought they were very rude,' said the magistrate as we travelled back up to London together.

'They just didn't like my book,' I said with stoic resignation.

'Well it's a cultural wasteland, dear,' she said, 'They don't know what they're talking about.  Pay no attention.  I'm surprised that your publisher let you go there.'

I don't think I'll be back somehow.  However, I did get a letter from the bus driver who is training to be a Methodist Priest (yep good luck with that) telling me that the feedback had been good and that most of the women had never met a real live author before and had really enjoyed the event.

Good for them.

I'm surprised they didn't eat me instead of the biscuits.

Mother's Day

I'm telling Eva the whole story in the same cafe after Louisa leaves to drive back to Essex.  This is my life.  I sit around in coffee shops pretending I write in the afternoon, dispensing advice that I don't take myself.  Eva also has a Scandinavian boyfriend with whom she has recently been reunited and is annoyingly smug and happy.  No sharing lemon tarts for her.  She's lost her appetite.

Damn her.

I can't eat if she isn't - it's the tyranny of the sisterhood.  We're talking about our kids who have all recently returned from university.  Mine is planning to spent the week protesting the G20 Summit, while hers is about to have a house party that she, as yet, doesn't know about.  Mine spent the weekend playing me Palestinian freedom songs.  I'm getting old.  I actually said: 'That sounds just like shouting,' when he played me Protest Rap.

'Listen to the words,' he said.

'I don't want to.  I like melodies - give me a protest song that sounds like Michael Buble and I'll sing along.  Mums like Michael Buble...'

He turned his attention to his laptop, clicked a few buttons and sure enough, a ballad ensued from his tinny speakers at maybe a decibel short of Wembley Station volume.

'and the tanks came... and my mother cried... la la la la la...'  sang (ahem) the (ahem ahem) singer.  I nodded appreciatively.  'lovely darling - I do like a nice tune...'  and hastily excused myself before he asked me to give him a lift to the tube station so he can go and picket the Bank of England...

You can see why I would rather sit in a bourgeois cafe and sip overpriced, but delicious, coffee with a succession of women.

We're just finishing our decaf skinny double shot frappalatte soya frothy nonsenses when an impossibly tall, slim, glamorous redhead comes into the cafe pushing a baby stroller and pulling a toddler who appears to be on springs.

'So sweet,' says Eva.  'Do you remember when our kids were small.'  Her eyes grow all misty.  The toddler bounces across the floor like an unsteady ball.

'I know.  Everything seemed so much simpler then.' I agree as the mother unzips and decants the chubby, edible baby into a high chair and squeezes the springy toddler out of an anorak and slots him into a corner banquette where he slides and ricochets across the slippery pleather.

'I often worry that I worked too much and wish I had spent a bit more time at home,' she sighs. 'Now they're all grown up and just want me to go out so they can have their friends round.  They used to love coming to Wales, now I have to go alone...'

'I often worry that I didn't work enough and that maybe I should have spent less time at home, I sigh.  'Now they've all left (well that's the fiction, anyway) and I'm a bit lost.'

We look at each other sadly.

The mother has coils and coils of French Lieutenant's Woman hair pinned up in that artless, dishevelled way that I have spent hours of my life trying to perfect and never managing more than a bird's nest.  She unpacks the child kit-bag with the efficiency of a soldier on a forced march.  The baby's bottle is placed on the table.  A muslin cloth is set down next to it.  A selection of small, chewable toys is unearthed from the bottom of the bag.  It occurs to me that this is exactly what I need - something to gnaw on that contains no calories. Quilted coats balloon on a nearby chair and eventually the mother sits down and looks at the menu.

Eva and I are watching her enviously.

I was never that calm.

Another group of young mothers are seated around a communal table, barricaded in by strollers the size of small jeeps, each nursing a baby with a bottle stuck in its mouth.  Definitely no breast feeding in Notting Hill Gate ladies. God forbid you display your chest in public unless it's in a low cut slip dress from Joseph.  The contented sound of money  throbs from the glossy mothers as one chats about her upcoming Easter ski-ing holiday when nanny, currently offstage, will be staying home taking care of the infant, thus the need for a bottle fed babe.

I was never that rich.

Eva and I are watching them like puppies in a pet shop window, when ...

SMASH

...three wine glasses hit the floor, falling off the edge of the table like lemmings and splintering dramatically into a thousand jagged pieces, while behind them the springy toddler looks alarmed despite having pushed them.

Pretty mother jumps.  'That's why I tell you not to play with things!' she screeches, her voice threatening to shatter the one remaining glass on the table.

A waitress bends to survey the damage giving us a lovely view of her thong.  A waiter rushes off to get a dustpan and brush as the toddler goes for a full house and starts fingering the last wine glass, seconds before the mother sweeps it out of reach along with all the cutlery on to another, table.  He does, however, continue to bounce.  This time along the banquette where he reaches to the floor for a particularly tempting spike of broken glass that nestles invitingly inches from his bobbing foot.

'NO!' three voices yell in unison - mine, Eva's and his mother's.  We all lock eyes as Eva and I smile apologetically.  Old habits die hard.

Springy toddler is dispatched to yet another table that has hastily been cleared of all glassware where he sits with a deer-in-the-headlights, blank expression on his face and proceeds to knock over the salt dispenser, spreading an avalanche of crystals all over the surface. He's just about to begin opening sugar packets when the mother snaps.

'I don't know why I thought this was a good idea,' she wails operatically, yanking the toddler out of the chair and into his anorak in one movement as he begins to whine. 

'I'm hungry,' he moans.

'Stand there, don't move,' she says, jamming toys and bottles back into her bag.

The baby, meantime, smiles beatifically and gurgles then tips her head to one side and waves at us.

We wave back as pretty mother jams her into her pushchair and carries the toddler out the door, dangling by one arm like he's been hung carelessly on a hook, his feet in their cute little red boots, barely skimming the floor.

'Poor woman,' says Eva. 'My boys were a lot worse than that.'

'My kids were always fighting.  I wouldn't dared to have brought them in here, they would have been on the floor, rolling around like dogs, gibbering.'

'Mine were awful.  I couldn't take them anywhere.  It was so stressful.'

'I know just how she feels.  I was overwrought the whole time.'

'I was glad to get to work to get a rest, to be honest.'

'I couldn't get out of the house because nobody would look after mine.'

Nostalgia banished momentarily, we paid our bill and left the cafe.  The pretty redhead was standing at the bus stop staring into space, her face a picture of gaunt tragedy - exactly like Meryl Streep at the end of Lyme Regis harbour, but in a green wool coat instead of a hooded cape.

On an impulse I walked up to her and smiled.  'I hope you don't feel that you shouldn't sit down and have a cup of coffee - nobody minds about a bit of broken glass. That sort of thing happens all the time. We've all been there and it passes and it does get easier,' I said.

Her face crumpled, tears instantly running down her cheeks.  'I just never get any sleep,' she sobbed.  'If only I could just get one night's sleep.  I'm so tired.'

'I know, I know,,' I murmured soothingly, 'It's hell but it's over in the blink of an eye.  My friend and I were sitting in there almost crying because our kids are all grown up and we feel redundant, and I had four kids - so I know just how hard it is.'

'I don't know how you coped.' she said, drying her tears on a Carluccio's napkin that I found in the bottom of my handbag.

'It gets easier.  I promise,'  and after another ten minutes of my best attempt at kindly chat during which I valiantly did not cry myself, I patted her arm and walked off.

It does get easier.  They don't break glasses in restaurants and throw tantrums on the floor.  No, they go backpacking across Asia, or take a dodgy minicab home from a party at 2am on a Saturday night, or drive back from university in their friend's car who just passed his test the week before.  They have parties when you go away for the weekend and let people sleep, or worse, in your bed.  They sit down outside the Bank of England with the other anarchists (from Notting Hill Gate) and call you on the phone and ask you to check on the Guardian website and see why everyone's throwing broken bottles.  And on mother's day, instead of a school craft assignment card with cardboard daffodils stuck wonkily on the front, though you've hinted that what you would really like is a cup of tea and a chat at the end of your bed, you wait until 11.30 before you realise it isn't coming and go downstairs, trip over the trainers, and do the washing up in an empty house.

It does get easier.  And so very much harder.

Clinical trials...

Louisa has another job in London - this time taking pictures for a diabetes charity in Haringey and we're regarding a gleaming empty plate with two forks poised on the rim, as yet another lemon tart becomes merely a memory of cream and sugar, washed down with guilt-infused tales of the link between diabetes and obesity. She's telling me that she had heard from the Norwegian.

'What Norwegian?'

'You know, the Norwegian I met at the clinic.'

'The clinic?' She has been threatening to go to a health farm - though as an impoverished photographer who I met when I was at art school in Camberwell (me matron, she graduate) I can't think how she can afford it. I wonder if she's slipped in a weekend away having water fired at her from a high pressure hose while I was at home watching dust motes drift through the air - a remarkably time-consuming activity.

'Yes, the clinic,' she repeats, dropping her voice lower than our waitresses jeans.

'Ah, the clinic.' This is starting to sound like Pinter, (the clinic, mmm, the ...pause.... clinic. Um, yes - the clinic.) but I shall spare her blushes by not explaining further...(not that she really is called Louisa, so this is not a traceable story... but move it to Brighton and make her 35 and French and you're getting warm.)

You met a Norwegian at the clinic and you spoke to him? For goodness sake Louisa, what are you - starring in a Daily Mail expose or something?'

'I didn't want to, but he struck up a conversation and I was embarrassed, I couldn't ignore 'im.'

I shook my head. This woman needs lessons in appropriate places to pick up men. 'Louisa, clinic waiting rooms are not the place to hook up. Clinic waiting rooms are places where you pretend that other people don't exist. You don't make eye contact, you do not, repeat not, chat. You keep your head down, you read a Hello magazine from 1978 and you keep dark glasses on at all times. A hijab would be even better.'

'I know, but 'e sat right next to me and started talking. And then he called me.'

'He called you?'

'Yes, on the phone at the office, and left a message...'

My head is now spinning around like a fishing reel with a Marlin on the end of the line. 'How in the name of Gonorr... I mean God, did he get your telephone number? At the office?'

'He asked for my card..'

'Louisa, dear, if a homeless crack addict stopped you on the street and asked to move into your lovely Leigh on Sea semi-detached (okay so it's not Brighton but closer to Southend) sea view bungalow, would you just nod your head and say "of course, and 'ere's my wallet?" Why on earth would you give him your card?' I'm beginning to see how she found herself sitting in this particular waiting room. She can't say no. Or even non.

'He's Norwegian. I've never been to Norway, it sounds lovely. 'e was interested in my work - I told him to pass by my studio.'

'Louisa, you met him at the Cla.. .' I couldn't speak. These continental women, they do it differently from we Presbyterians. We shake hands wearing oven gloves and don't speak to people after we've been living next door to them for a decade.

'Anyway, 'e rang.' She said, lighting an invisible cigarette and flicking invisible hair - hers is shorn above her ears like early Mia Farrow and she has ten studs up her ear. Her son learned to count by pointing to them one by one.

'And...'

'He wondered if I wanted to visit 'im in Norway.'

'But you're not going, are you..?'

'No, don't be silly. I met 'im at the clinic. Who knows what he 'ad.' She shuddered. 'I didn't even want to shake 'ands with him.'

There's something flawed in the logic here, but I'm darned if I can see what it is.

'Erm, pot calling...perhaps,'

'Don't be disgusting - I was there for work.'

I said nothing. If that's her excuse, then I'm not going to contradict her...

'Any anyway,' she said. 'it's cold in Norway now. Better to wait for the summer...'

Eating your heart out.

Louisa, who is reluctantly single at the moment, is sitting with me in the corner of Carluccio's listening to Mina sing Se Telefonando, which, given our conversation is particularly apt. Some divot she's been seeing has the habit of making arrangements with her then cancelling them at the last minute with a supermarket own range of ridiculous excuses that make 'the dog ate my homework' look credible.  The man has more migraines than a Victorian hysteric - and his latest coincided with a plan to come to her house for a meal that she had spent all day preparing.

'Why do you put up with it?' I ask, completely ignoring my own very poor form in the area of cancellitis.

'Well I like him when he does turn up,' she says, cutting the lemon tart that has been placed in front of her like a huge, friendly, yellow sun into four gooey quarters.

'He's using you to keep his options open,' I say ruthlessly. 'You should bin him.'

'I know. I just don't know why we let these losers toy with us,' she answers, spooning a sliver of golden custard into her mouth.

'Because nobody else wants to play with us, that's why?' I sigh, digging my own fork into my half.  We're sharing.  It's faintly pathetic that two grown, very grown, women can't even have a whole ruddy lemon tart to themselves.

I tell her that I've developed a new strategy that invokes an altar ego who is a cross between Marjorie Scardino and Mariella Frostrup - a sort of  SUPERMARION.  

SUPERMARION does not hide under the desk at Pedantic Press, but instead is a highly efficient executive who has been eagerly headhunted by a top city bank that still has some funds in the vault. (As opposed to real Marion who shops as Morrisons.)

SUPERMARION also drives a very expensive silver German car and always finds a parking place which beeps like a microwave when the M&S 'Count-on-us' cook chill is ready as she reverses seamlessly into the parking space that always appears miraculously just where she wants it, rather than driving to another postal district and simply waiting till she hears the clunk of the neighbouring car's fender before she brakes.  She has toned upper arms and can wear sleeveless shift dresses without the need for a cardie. Her feet are moulded like Barbie's into high-heel shapes. She can probably ride horses (in stiletto riding boots).  SUPERMARION is a natural sun-bleached blonde and always looks like she has just left the hairdressers and she never, ever has lipstick on her teeth or loses her sock in the legs of her jeans.  She has read the entire Orange longlist.  Already.  She probably has a ruddy book on it as well. Her fingers self-manicure.  She can speak in public without stammering and blushing.  She can, actually, just speak in sodding public and she definitely doesn't have a Scottish accent, though if she did she would sound soothing and sleepily seductive like Kirsty Young. SUPERMARION thinks hips are something you make tea out of, and even if she had them, their only use would be to balance perfect sprog no 2 on as she straps no 1 into the Merc, who she had (without pain relief) when my youngest was starting secondary school.

'In short, SUPERMARION is absolutely nothing, nada, niente, ma shi like real Marion,' I say, looking at Louisa pointedly.  'And there is no way she would sit around at home at night with a pheasant in the oven and a plate of home-made pistachio meringues that she's cooked for a man who just cancelled ten minutes earlier by text because "his grandmother-in-law has been taken to hospital" .  Nor does she simply shrug and say, "oh never mind, I like him," and give him another chance!'

Louisa looks unconvinced.  'But he's so interesting.  I always feel I can tell him anything when I see him.'

'So why don't you start by telling him he's an unreliable prat [I called around the office for alternatives to the noun I had originally chosen that is more often used to describe something you hold to open a door, but twit and wally were the best we could come up with] when you see him, and that he's not fit to wipe your Le Creuset casserole with?  Nobody should have to bother with this sort of nonsense.'

SUPERMARION, you see, she just wouldn't put up with that and you shouldn't either.  Do you think people don't return Caroline Michel's text messages?  Do you think people blow off Gail Rebuck for lunch without even calling on the basis that "well, she hadn't confirmed"?  Tell me, really, really, really, would Sam Taylor-Wood do internet dating and let fat men who describe themselves as "athletic' and "someone interested in all that London has to offer" flick past her picture?  Would Nigella sit for five minutes listening politely to a man who thinks listing his DVDs merits a conversation?'

'Yes, but I'm hardly...'  she begins her own list of her perceived imperfections.  I stop her.

'That's beside the point.  You have to put more value on yourself.'

'So, does it work?'

'What?'

'The whole SUPERMARION thing?'  She has the eager to hear the good news look on her face of a child who still believes that there are fairies who deliver coloured paper to your bedroom while you sleep (I know - it's odd, but nevertheless, my children were charmed by the paper elves until they were at least 19).

'Erm, well it's still in its infancy.' I confessed.  'It's a work in progress.  I spent the other evening listening to a monologue about what a guy did over the weekend in real time.  I put the phone down, poured a glass of wine and came back and he was still talking.  And he didn't ask me a single question about myself.  You know, it's only a theory as yet...'

'I wish I could wear sleeveless dresses,' she said wistfully, scraping the last drop of yellow custard from the plate.  'I'm thinking of going to a health farm.  SUPERLOUISA would be the kind of woman who worked out and still buys her clothes in the children's department.  I've been eating so much junk recently.  Karl (her five year old son) only eats fishfingers and there isn't anyone to cook for.'

'I had half a packet of chocolate chip cookies for supper last night.'  I confess.  I'm in no position to judge. 

'I had five pistachio meringues and a bar of chocolate.'  She said ruefully.

'So what are you having tonight?'  (We're scintillating conversationalists...Mariella watch your back).

'... oh leftover pheasant.'  she sighed wearily.  'I bet you SUPERLOUISA never eats leftovers.'

Face it girls.  SUPERLOUISA never eats.  Full stop.