One man left standing, one woman sitting down

Filing isn't my only skill.

We had an office move today, supervised by yours truly, complete with a couple of Russians with comedy accents and a lot of drill bits in a succession of cases - like Anne Summers for DIY - and me holding a clipboard, and wearing a headset, barking orders to lowly flunkies, except that there was neither clipboard nor headset, and darling, I am the lowly flunky.

Everybody was supposed to 'muck in' but there were a few conspicuously absent employees who didn't so much as look in our direction as we heaved furniture and carried boxes, but one of whom nevertheless, bless her/him/it, took enough time from their busy non-participatory morning to send me an email to tell me that the photocopier was broken.

Imagine it. You're slogging up the face of The Great Pyramid of Giza with a boulder the size of Iraq on your back and one of your fellow Israelites painstakingly gets out a tablet and chisles: 'Oy Abe, there seems to be a bit of a problem down by the Sphinx with the water cooler, do you think you could get someone in to look at the fuse?'

I don't think I am cut out for office life. Really, I was born into the wrong class. I should be called after some Lonely Planet spot on the backpacker's trail like Ambryl (no on second thoughts that sounds like a brand of sleeping pills - well then Ind-ya then, with a nice Hippy-style drawl), and have a stately pile somewhere in Wiltshire and a trust fund, or at very least a husband who's willing to share his. Instead I have an ex-husband who is abroad 'working'- his italics, not mine, lest I think that staying in a five star hotel with room service and dinners in destination restaurants hosted by various foreign ministries is fun (I grant you - when in Sweden, possibly not so much - when I went with him once in the pre-ex days they entertained us with 'freedom songs' sung by a man with a beard and an acoustic guitar. Tears, I'm telling you. And not of Joy). In the meantime, I drink cup-a-soup and tote the bale at work, then come home and do the domestic version.

The house was eerily quiet. Son No 2 and I were sitting on the sofa whilst I read him Spanish vocabulary in an Italian/Scottish accent which he claims sounds like Portuguese, when suddenly we heard a shout. This is the Kidulthood part of Notting Hill that Eric Fellner does not make films about and which, instead of Julia Roberts and token disabled person, features a great number of boys in hoods, the odd vagrant who pees near your dustbin, and assorted drunks and yobs, all of whom are on 'best friends' terms with your daughter, and who, when she says: 'Oh Cupid, I love him, does not mean the cuddly god with wings but the six foot two Nigerian with the Willesden branch of Ratner's slung round his neck.

'I think we have a visitor,' said Son No 2, ominously.

'Hello,' came a low, tentative voice from the hall.

So not Cupid then, whose usual greeting is sweet, toe kicking, embarrased, silence.

Maybe it's Ned Flanders next door trying to attract our attention because our hedge isn't cut to regulation height (yes we live on the front line of suburbia but nevertheless, it is suburbia and some of us, namely Ned, have standards to maintain) or perhaps I had committed the style crime of planting yellow primulas some time in the 80s and the darn things just keep on having the bad taste to bloom.

Son and I looked at each other.

'Who was that?' he asked, as we, reluctantly, rose and decided to investigate. I gave out my best and snarliest straight-up Scottish accent with a twist of the knife Rab C Nesbit 'What the * is going on?' bellow, and walked out into the hall.

A man stood there, short, stocky, filling up the hallway like a bollard, and looking rather uncomfortable, as you might expect, given that he was an intruder.

In our house.

'Your door was open, but I did call out!' he said, like a Russell Brant sketch where the person robbing you has very good manners and thinks that issuing a verbal warning should be sufficient to allow him to walk into your home and take your stuff.

'Oh yeah great, that's okay then, help yourself to the valuables,' I said.

Well no, I didn't.

'Thank you,' I said. 'And now you can leave.'

(Still polite, see.)

He stood there looking at me peevishly, while I noticed that though he had claimed the door was open he had closed it, carefully, behind him. ( Well mannered or what? Even the hoods are civil up in North Ken. The tone has certainly risen since David Cameron moved in around the corner. I bet our would be crim even wiped his feet.) He then inched - the way you're supposed to retreat when you meet a grizzly on the Appalachians - backed down the hall, unlatched the door and let himself out, only marginally slower than it takes paint to dry. Really sinister, scary paint.

Son and I calmly returned to the sofa and continued our recital of verbs on Crime and Law Enforcement, and then after fifteen minutes it dawned on us in Evening Standard headlines.

Bloody Hell, We Were Nearly Burgled.

We then thought that it might be a good idea to check the rest of the house to make sure that an accomplice was not already upstairs.

I took the poker, he took the brass candlestick. No further intruders were found.

Mind you, by the look of the bedrooms one could be forgiven for imagining that the house had already been burgled - or at least trashed after a very good weekend party - they would have had to tidy up before they could even find something to steal. But there's nothing of value in the kids rooms except most of my my make up and my 'lost' mobile phone which my daughter 'borrowed' from me before Christmas and has been using as an illicit replacement for her own broken one.

Thieves?

We breed our own darling. We don't really need to import them.

The writer's life for me.

Well, I hope you see me tapping away in my scholarly study like a shot from that page they have in the Guardian review, with a few well chosen, tasteful black and white photographs (which elicit comments like:  oh yes, Obama, he and I go way back...), a low angle-poise lamp casting a pool of light across the desk, piled high with foolscap pages covered in neat, yet artistic, handwriting, enslaved to the muse. Maybe even a quill or two. An old, sit up and beg typewriter. Me in a smoking jacket.

I see myself there too, but that's not where I'm sitting. Not only that, but with I haven't written more that three words in longhand since 1999. Now we have chip and pin I don't even have to use the signature that I spent so many years perfecting on the back of school exercise books. Who would have guessed that I should have been practicing easily memorable four digit numbers instead?

So, a room of one's own?

To hell with that. I don't just want a room, I want a loft with an en suite bathroom, a balcony facing the sea somewhere in Italy, a fully stocked kitchen and a team of happy smiling family retainers to keep it all running, all just for me, all by myself.

My favourite fantasy, after writing out the author's equivalent to my Oscar's speech - the acknowledgements' page - is lying in bed imagining exactly what I would need to stock my own pristine,  full-fridge paradise, however the truth is it's all a tad unnecessary.  I manage fine with a laptop and the kitchen table. I don't really understand the whole fetish for 'writing space' amongst the authored classes, especially since most of them seem to write perfectly happily in the crowded sofas of Kitchen and Pantry on Elgin Crescent, surrounded by chatting, squawking trustafarians and their mewling, puking offspring, all accompanied by very loud music, swooshing coffee machines and aggressive Polish waitresses. I've seen them. I've been them.  There are more writers cluttering up London's coffee shops than you can wave a publishing contract at. What are they all writing about I wonder?

I admit, the clamour of other people's coffee cups doesn't disturb me at all. On the contrary, when a nice blonde, boho mommy, waiting in line for the bathroom, looked over my shoulder and asked me if I was writing a book, I rather thought that I might go out every day and advertise the fact that, yes, indeed, I was.

You know with a badge or something.

'And, yes, actually, I do have an agent.'

'And,' modest cough, 'even a publisher.'

'Really who?'

'Waddling Duck', I say casually.

Blonde Bohemian looks impressed.

I know. I am pretty impressed too.

At home in Suburban Terraces, however, nobody really seems similarly affected. As it is, I do have a study at home, but it's the size of a coat closet with wall to ceiling bookshelves full of boxes of assorted computer cables for computers long ago defunct, coils of mobile phone chargers (ditto), shoes, out-of-season handbags, old jigsaws - you know - the usual detritus of a creative life. There are no photographic prints, tasteful or otherwise, but you can see your breath misting in the air like ectoplasm since the room has no heating but, instead, has natural air conditioning (whose affects I have tried to minimise by plugging the glass frame with strips of clingfilm - an interior decoration accent you don't see on Location, Location, Location).

You can also see the strange, skinny man in the house opposite who plays the drums nude, so it's a lot more comfortable to forgo the supposedly sacrosanct workspace and just take my laptop and go out.

As well as being (almost) published - imagine the joy - I also have a job in publishing, toiling away at the hand-tooled spine of literary fiction and quality scholarly works. My days are spent knee deep in other people's commissioned manuscripts, which it is my job to arrange neatly, in alphabetical order, with post-it notes as they wind their way around the office. I also get to answer the phone a lot and say 'Pedantic Press' in my best RP - more difficult than it sounds as there are an awful lot of consonants to annunciate for someone who usually drops them, and then to transfer the caller to the appropriate MUCH MORE IMPORTANT PERSON, of which there are many.

It's very heady stuff.

Heady in the way that when, on Friday, a former colleague from my days on the forefront of glamorous food journalism came into the office to have a meeting about his new book, I said hello to him and instead of the expected response: 'mwa mwa, what a surprise to see you here - how are you darling', he looked right through me (no mean feat given that 2008 seems to have supersized me), while barely bestowing on me the sort of non committal greeting especially reserved for lowly girls on the till at Tesco's, and assistants who know their place and don't step out of it except to ask you, grovellingly, whether you want sugar with your coffee.

He didn't.

Want sugar I mean.

So I sat back down and went on alphabetising.

That's the difference between the old me and the new me. The old me, you see, would have pulled myself up to my full I'm-just-as-good-a-writer, if-not-better, than-you height in straight-from-the-taxi high heels, and given him the raised eyebrow. But the new me comes by bus, wears trainers. I might have a book in the pipeline but it doesn't yet have a mini-series or a Get Out of the Remainder Bookshop Free card yet, and I like my job. It has real people in it as opposed to those I made up, so I don't particularly want to get the sack for being rude to the talent.

Ah, how the mighty are fallen to filing clerks.

Tea anyone?

Going, going, gong...

I called the Mr Me on his mobile and told him that the contract had arrived. I was so excited. There it was sitting on the table with the logo at the top of the page, and numbers with zeros after them. And then I did what they warn you to beware of on the tube. I minded the gap. It was there gasping in front of me, this long sigh, this indistinct nothingness. No feeling of happiness, no feeling of achievement, just a gap.

I am forty nine years old. I have written a book. I sat down and started on page one and kept going until page five hundred.  Along the way I have been humiliated by the agent who told me to give up and forget about it because I had no plot, no voice and no style, and who suggested that I should try writing a Marion Keyes (if only I could), and then hugely flattered when another editor took me out to lunch and told me I was a find.  I had to put my dark glasses back on to hide the tears.

Then I got my own agent and, with the passage of rejection, hope and further rejection, oh joy, someone bought it. I succeeded. But 'happiness doesn't exist unless you have someone to share it with'.

I don't know who said this - apart from me, just then, I may have found it in a Christmas cracker or heard it in a film trailer, but it struck a chord.

I waited for the husband to come back in the evening. He did. He walked in and I showed him the contract. That's great he said, in the way Osama Bin Laden would behave if you asked him if he fancied a bacon sarnie.

I said to him: you act as though I'd just told you I got a free shampoo sachet through the door. 

And he said; This isn't working out. I need some time on my own. I think I should leave and sort myself out.

I felt the familiar plummeting in my guts, as though somebody had gouged out my innards like a Hallowe'en pumpkin.

I went on the Lindsay Lohan diet but without the drugs and alcohol. In one week I ate a slice of pizza, a couple of plates of salad and a bite of whatever I was making for the kids to eat. I couldn't drink, couldn't face food, and sat with my arms clenched around myself like I was freezing to death. I didn't even lose weight.

I told my eldest that there was a distinct possibility that her father was leaving. She took the news coolly. I don't think so, she said. Oh yes, so, I insisted.  Oh not dad, don't be silly, she said. I can't imagine he would go. I mean it's a big step. If he leaves you, he leaves all of us.

Don't turn out like me, I sobbed in the car, hoping she would protest and tell me I wasn't so bad.

She didn't.

I made plans for my new single life. I applied for a job as a shop assistant in a local gift store. I applied for a job in the library at LSE.  I sent off for a down filled mattress cover and four fat goose down pillows so that when I was alone in the bed I would feel comfortable. I rallied my few long suffering friends and took it in turns to moan to Anne, Eva, Mara, Ria, and Nel. Audrey rang from the states and told me that it wasn't the end of the world.  But I wasn't convinced.

Apparently neither was the Mr Me who turned to me late in November and said "Oh, by the way - I'm not going anywhere" and after I had dragged it out of him like a breech foal from a reluctant mare he said he had decided that, after all, that he couldn't leave 'his family' of which I  am a part even if I don't get a place of my own, but am merely wife part of the holy trinity that also includes children and house.
Now I don't trust the floor to bear the weight of my expectations and so I don't test it. 

I feel so sorry for myself that it's almost a full time job leaving no time for anything else, let alone editing the manuscript which has to be finished and substantially changed by December, but since this morning I got a letter from the shop telling me that I hadn't been successful in my application for minimum wage shop assistant, while the LSE never answered at all, that's just as well.

The Mr Me walks around looking like a man who has walked across Antarctica with no coat on, his skin almost flayed from his face and took himself off to see a shrink.  

He told me:  It's strange, because he doesn't say anything. I talk and he sits there in silence.

Welcome to my world, I thought.