Philip, from Portobello Books, writes to tell me that I'm big in South Africa enclosing this - Waddling Duck's suggestions for Mother's Day down under(ish).  I can only say, dear prospective readers, that one of these excellent, if rival, books - is indeed a good choice for mothers - especially if they really really don't like their children.  Disgruntled and disillusioned mothers should probably buy it for each other.

Party Line

London is a village sometimes.  Tonight at Eva's gallery Flow there was an opening for a bookbinding exhibition and single friend had pitched up with an entourage of not one, but three men (though not, if you're a regular reader - the sort you would expect to find wandering round a field of Henry Moore sculptures).  There was a chap in a paint stained shirt whose name I didn't catch but who had startlingly bright blue eyes in a tanned face and who, I imagine, didn't get the dabs of white on his plaid shirt from painting the ceiling, darling, but rather had the air of one wrenched from a canvas in his studio somewhere in Trustafaria.  Another, I think, was a Guardian Soulmate who she thought she might palm off on one of us, and the third was the, not nearly ubiquitous enough, Silver Fox type who wore his glasses on the edge of his nose the way I do myself and was, I realised as we were introduced, someone I had met before.  I even remembered his name.

Archie.

I was introduced to him at Justin Marozzi's book launch last year (but don't bother reading the blog entry - he wasn't the poet I mentioned) after I recognised his girlfriend as a mother from the school gates.  As single friend said later, she realised that one of the few, legitimate (I'm wondering what the illegitimate ways are - swinging soirees, tupperware parties? - oh, yes, Giles and I met over the salad crisper...) ways to make friends in London is to have kids.  The girlfriend, a tall striking ash blonde who once educated me in the effects of illegal substances on her love life, had, at that time, an equally tall striking husband who I used to admire as we ushered our respective offspring in their Eastern European forced-march raincoats down St Quintin Avenue to school.  And then he left her and along came his coked-up - subject of many an anecdote - replacement.  I wondered if Archie was the one.  Not really what you want to be thinking when you are shaking hands at a Gallery opening.

In any case, I reminded him that we'd met before.  He congratulated me on my memory which is what men do after a certain age when they meet you at parties, no matter how low cut your frock is.  It's the writer in me, I insisted, so that he wouldn't just think I was a sad old dame who remembered men with white, mad hair that I met at parties because I was a rabid stalker.

I also noted that I didn't know anyone at Justin Marozzi's book launch, and so, naturally, the few people I did recognise stuck in my mind.  Total rubbish.  I'm a walking encyclopedia of faces.  You could use me as a police artist.  I remembered him because he was good looking.

We chatted and he told me that he was going to write.  This was one of the few instances where I might have stopped my eyes crossing and offered up that I worked in publishing while erroneously alluding that I had the power to put him into print - because he was cute - but he didn't ask what I did for a living. Readers, I am that interesting. Instead he said he had bought a new dictaphone machine that one simply plugged into the computer and, using voice recognition, it did all the typing by itself.  It had previously been owned by a Brummie so was attuned to a specific accent, so he would have to reacquaint it with a little RP before it would recognise his voice, however, the first hurdle was that he couldn't turn the damn thing on.  Before I could say anything even vaguely and unwisely salacious I found myself clutching his small machine and offering to turn it on myself.  I've very, very good with electronics.

Five minutes later I returned having found the on off switch, a task helped by reinserting the battery the right way round.  Men.  How did they ever conquer the world?

When I repatriated his dictaphone ('You are an angel,' he said - 'an angel' you hear!)  he was telling my friend Nel how he had driven Mary Killen in a Bentley to Aix en Provence where his girlfriend had a 'wonderful' house.  No man over 40 should have a girlfriend but, that aside, it was obvious he moved in rather different circles from those that I did myself, despite the fact that we had both ended up at the same party.  League and well out of it came crushingly to mind.

'We had sat nav.  I literally typed in Aix-en-Provence in Sloane Square and it almost drove itself to France.  It's the first thing I'm going to write about with my brand new dictaphone.'

I quashed the thought that this was a man with a somewhat overeager fondness for the DIY in both dictaphones and driving which did not bode well in other areas of life, and wondered what the voice in the sat nav of a Bentley sounded like.  Did it harrumph like a public school headmaster:   'One should drive for a hundred yards and not expect any deviations until one finds oneself perpendicular to a public house when one should turn left, not stopping for traffic because of course, in a Bentley, one always has right of way.'  Or would it purr fruitily like Joanna Lumley:  'Come on now Darling, pay attention, you need to turn left up ahead, after the little jewellers on the corner with the frightfully nice rings.'

He claimed not.  He said it was very common and said 'Pardon' instead of 'What'.

Sat navs talk back to you these days?  I should get one.  It would be one up on the ex who never said a word in the car.

'Pard...' I began before wisely picking up another glass of wine from the circulating tray.  He went on to tell me that he had found an estate in Scotland for a French family who wanted their children to go to summer camp in the Highlands, and since no such thing existed, had hired two teachers from Gordonstoun to teach them about fly fishing and deer stalking.  I tried to interest him in hiring my beautiful, bluestocking, arty, Oxbridge educated eldest as a tutor who has just come back from Montpellier, fluent in French and impoverished in Euros.

He was very keen to meet her.  But not, I fear, in her conversational French.

The term 'girlfriend' began to make sense.

Table talk

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.

Gordian knots

Tweeter is good for something.

According to one of the recent posts which the Guardian bombards me with on a seemingly hourly basis, I discovered in the Politics Blog that: 'The prime minister, 58, has hurled pens and even a stapler at aides, according to one; he also says he once saw the leader of Britain's 61 million people shove a laser printer off a desk in a rage.'

Though I struggle to see what that fact that he's 58 has to do with it (except perhaps to insinuate that he's a tad too old for such childish outporing of rage) if he would like to come to visit the Pedantic offices I would be very happy to give him a Canon printer that he could kick to his heart's content.

Indeed, the new printer, as the wise men and soothsayers of Corvus upstairs anticipated, is not the new Messiah but a false idol who nevertheless requires some fairly slavish worship.  Like a spoiled toddler it expects constant attention and is liable to throw tantrums when you are busily trying to get on with your work.  When printing out a large document don't even think about pressing PRINT and walking away and forgetting about your document.  On the contrary, you must get up from your desk and go and stand beside the machine in a suitably servile manner, head bent in supplication as you wait for pages to be delivered from the mouth of the giant because, approximately every 150 pages or so, the paper jams.  This means getting on your knees and giving the machine an extensive proctological examination.

This is the stuff career dreams are made off.  I'm sure the Prime Minister, 'leader of Britain's 61 million people,' feels my pain when he can't get a sodding document to print.

Vacancies

Friday night.  My younger daughter has gone to a 'Pimps and 'Ho's' Party wearing a corset, a pair of shorts and four inch heels - just marginally more than she wears to school if you count the false eyelashes.  My long dead mother speaks from my mouth to ask if she's really going out like that and urge her to take a coat.  She smiles - an unusual event, for the sun of her pleasure rarely shines on me - and leaves with my last ten pounds without saying goodbye, slamming the door with a demolition bang, the perfume in her wake so strong it makes my eyes itch.  It's only after she goes that I realise the scent is mine.  Some heavy Hermes stuff the ex brought me back from an Airport on one of his conference trips.  I never liked it.  I'm glad one of us is using it - albeit as a means of deforestation.  I'm also glad to see my daughter go out for a change.  Even dressed as a hooker.

My elder son has come back from a holiday in the States where he and his girlfriend stayed with my ex's family, sleeping, like Goldilocks, in my bed - or rather the one I slept in with my husband for every one of the 20 odd Christmases we went there.  It's uncomfortably Freudian, seeing yourself replaced and duplicated.  'Did anyone ask anything about the break up?'  I wondered, not really expecting the answer to be yes as I haven't heard from any of my husband's family since he left a year ago. 'Not really,' he said.  'Nobody mentioned you.  They mostly talked about getting a new dog since the old one died last year.' 

It's wonderful to be missed.  If only I had been born a Labrador.

Elder daughter, back after three months in France, doesn't like her father coming round to help out with household maintenance.  'He's getting his cake and eating it too,' she says.  'I don't want him here, and none of the others want him here - he left, let him stay gone.'

I protest that I do need a hand around the place as I can't do everything myself.  I'm not the maintenance manager, I remind her.  And also I don't actually mind his presence.  I can set aside my hurt feelings for five minutes of conversation now and again - company, even sometimes the company of miserable ex husband is better than the sound of a slamming door.

She wasn't convinced but I was, and so I agreed that she was quite right.  I would be more hard line.  The next day I rushed home from work to see her and found her on her way out.

'Where are you off to?' I asked.

'I'm going round to dad's,' she said.

Oh.

She has now gone back to France for a few days to get the rest of her stuff before moving back in as Joint House Mother.  She has already put me on a diet, told me to join the gym and counted the bottles of wine which she is ostentatiously not drinking.

It's like a hotel.  One in, one out.

Younger son has returned to University leaving a large dent on the sofa where he settled for most of the month he was here after the G20 summit left him with nothing further to demonstrate about.

'What about Sri Lanka? I thought you might have joined in with them being that you don't want to be a one cause anarchist.

'Nah, I don't know anything about it,' he replied, not taking his eyes off Chelsea vs Arsenal.

'I need some help in the garden (as we laughably call the Sleeping Beauty castle of briars in the back of the house).  Do you think you might come out and rake up the grass cuttings for me as I can't move my shoulder very well?'

'I don't believe in gardens,' he said.

'Since when?'

'All gardens should be turned over to food production.  Flowers are bourgeois.'  Indeed.  Unlike public school boys.

'Well get a spade then and I'll give you some seed potatoes.'  That was an idle threat.  I don't have any seed potatoes though there are some in the cupboard with more eyes than the Stasi which would probably take root if I planted them, but I don't think my son would know a seed potato from the couch potato that he has rapidly turned into.

'I have to work,' he protested.  'I have a Portuguese Oral Presentation on Monday.'

'But you're not working.  You're watching ruddy football.'

'I'm having a little break.'

I really should stick the pitchfork up his Arsenal but I don't have the lifting capability to swing it over my head and in any case I was so angry I mowed through the electric cable and had to down tools myself.

The lawn now looked like it had had a really bad haircut with a pair of nail scissors.

'You do know the meaning of a workers' collective, don't you - it means we all work for the greater good, not that some of us slave so you can sit around playing Football Manager on your laptop with a parallel text of Don Quixote open on the table.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' his eyes said as they rolled back in his head.

Back in the kitchen the Palestinian National Team comprising a nicely ethnic line up of players were into extra time.  It looked like they might go to penalties.

I tied up four bags of brambles and grass clippings ready to fly tip at the end of the road under the cover of darkness outside the posh restored chapel on the corner which is the areas official dumping ground.  We leave garden rubbish and old Ikea desk chairs missing a swivel  and, as regular readers know,  Lady Bountiful from the ugly house puts out half a dozen loaves from Mr Christian's Deli in an artisan basket.    I planted my coriander seeds in a pot by the back door - food production don't you know - cleared out the shed, wound up the ragged ends of the power cable I'd cut through and came in to find the young radical had left the building.

A few seconds later he appeared holding a sandwich that, despite having a fridge full to bursting with politically correct produce from an evil conglomerate supermarket who occasionally pay me to write for them, as well as every conceivable tofu and quorn product, he had gone to the cafe to buy.

Never let it be said that he won't make the effort.

So tonight it's just me and the first born son.  I asked him if he wanted to have a drink, watch a DVD, something to eat.  Yes, he said to everything.  That was two hours ago and I haven't seen him since he turned on his computer.

The tumble drier is moaning under the weight of his laundry in the kitchen and so to get away from its nagging I wandered round the corner to Nel's house where she and Tom were sitting in the back garden hunched over a barbecue, drinking vodka.  My kind of evening.  I sat down on and moved my chair a little closer to the fire and one of the legs sanks into their vegetable plot into which Nel has just planted several rows of rocket and Swiss chard.  The leg of the chair cut through the soil like a hot knife through soft butter and I tipped over and landed in the earth.  One way to end up in bed, I suppose.

I didn't spill the vodka though.

I wish I could say that I only did it the once...

Kind Herts and Coronets

Three of us on our way to visit Henry Moore's house which has recently been opened to the public. It's the ex-wife club plus one - a single friend who has been working the personals in her search for true love, or at least truish liking.

'What are the chances of us meeting single men at this place?' she says from behind the Guardian in the back seat where she has been banished like a teenager because, since she cleverly can't drive, neither can she navigate.

I think, unlike us, they're pretty slim, but add that frankly I'm not sure that I would want to go out with a man I met wandering round a sculpture park on a Saturday afternoon in Hertfordshire with his two single friends.

'Yes, they'd probably be gay. would they?' she muses. 'But it's interesting. What you're really saying that you don't want to meet someone like yourself.'

It's true. But it's not the Groucho Marx thing of not wanting to be in a club that would have me as a member, rather it's more that, I'm not really looking for a male equivalent of myself. I live with me and I'm already bored with myself - why would I want multiply knowing the answers to all my own questions by two?

The other ex-wife used to bemoan the fact that her former husband never wanted to do the same sort of things that she did - like visit museums or galleries, while mine was as interested as I was in such places and would have loved the Henry Moore sculptures. We often did such things together but the idea of running into his replacement with two of his mates out on earnest cultural pursuits isn't up there with a 'great sense of humour' on my list of must haves.

Secretly, or okay, since I'm writing it here, not that secretly, my heart sinks like a bar of soap in a very deep bath at the thought of spending the rest of my life trailing round exhibitions, stately homes and gardens with my girlfriends like I'm on a WRVS day out. Much worse to be sitting at home knitting twin sets for my cats, or indeed, even to have cats, of course, and yes, yes, yes, how lucky to have friends who will bear my company long enough to actually get in a car with me for a long journey in which there may be singing, but still...

I can't quash the feeling I should be wearing a pair of white gloves and a hat.

This isn't helped by the fact that my single friend around town is wearing a very pretty silk tea dress with a net underskirt and a cream duster coat, and I'm in a geometric print 'wiggle dress' and have my mother's pearl brooch pinned on to my lapel.

'You do realise that we are only three corgis and a pug short of being in a PG Wodehouse novel?' I mutter as we trailed round Henry Moore's house listening to the guide tell us that 'he got given a lot of fings by people who visited him.'

'The ex's parents have a Henry Moore drawing,' I whisper. They bought it in the 1950s - apparently they came here and met him.' I had a momentary vision of a younger version of my diminutive mother-in-law perched on a sofa in the sitting room surrounded by 'fings' having just spent a month's salary on a small brown drawing. It's probably one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life and now hangs behind the door of their dining room so that it is hidden from sight, both from thieves, and guests, as she also shuddered with dislike every time she looked at it. It's a shame we've split up. I was so looking forward to inheriting it and selling it for a Howard Hodgkin or and Albert Irwin.

We shuffle on through the cramped, over-furnished rooms like animals on the way to the abbatoir - from the office to the dining room and into the tiny kitchenette which is so authentic that the authentic period hand towel looks like it hasn't been washed since the eighties. 'Mrs Moore didn't ever cook in this kitchen. She had a cook,' the guide informs us as we squeeze through. 'But it still has the original fridge,' she adds. Fancy - an hour and a half up the A10 to look at an original 1980s fridge that its owner probably never opened. If it had a latin name we'd be writing it in our notebooks.

'I love this one,' says Eva as we are finally released to roam around the large sculptures set in the grounds. Single friends looses the duster coat, slips on her shades and turns her face up to the sun. Eva points to a reclining (what else- with all that leisure time, no wonder his women were always lying down) figure on a small hillock in the middle of a field surrounded by sheep and suggests we try and get a little closer.

Five minutes later and we are picking our way gingerly over grass which seems to be primarily composed of sheep droppings encrusted with orange flies. Eva strides ahead while single friend and I - she in her snakeskin Emma Hope sneakers (ah - so this is the sort of women who buys the velvet baseball boots) - try to step between piles of dung.

Once beside it we gaze at it wordlessly. Or rather single friend does say something about the lack of identifiable male characteristics but it can't be repeated here on the grounds of taste.

I look on the map. There's a number 5 and a small picture with 'reclining figure' written underneath it. Well that's clear then. I can't think of anything further to add.

'Aren't the lambs cute,' says single friend and gets out her iPhone and begins to take pictures of them.  We pose beside a group of reclining sheep.  'You look like Welsh farmer's wives,' says single friend.  'Ex-wives.'  I reply.

My heels gets stuck in the cattle grid on the way back out of the field and I steal a glance at my watch to see how long it is until lunch. Eva has thoughtfully booked us a table at a local hostelry. I begin to dream of chips.

'You know you're right, Marion. I just can't see our three male equivalents getting excited about Henry Moore tapestries,' sighs single friend as we sit on benches and watch a film from the 50s where some women with very glossy monochrome hair try on scarves designed by Cecil Beaton with exaggerated expressions of delight, while wearing frocks that don't look too dissimilar to the ones we are wearing ourselves.

She is fiddling with her iPhone looking up film listings. 'And I bet you anything that, even if they did get excited about fabrics they wouldn't then rather sadly go and see a movie together afterwards.'

'No, but they might go down the pub,' I suggested as we pile back into the BMW with our selection of postcards and Henry Moore prints and do the manly thing ourselves, and drive off for the much anticipated lunch.

'Oh, look,' crows Eva, excitedly, as we wind past one thatched cottage after another and pull over beside The Bull Inn. 'A garden centre,' she whoops. We can have a look round later. They also have a lovely garden you can visit!' Single friend and I look at each other with trepidation, gather up armfulls of Saturday supplements and find a table outside in the beer garden - more of a beer patio really, where the waitress insists on bringing us a menu which turns out to be a three foot tall blackboard, dragged in and ostentatiously set down in a flower bed.

Eva is fingering a small brochure for a nearby stately home and murmuring something about Virginia Woolf's birthplace. 'I'd so like to see the garden. Do you think we have time?'

'What would you like to drink?' the waitress asks.

'I'll have a glass of white wine,' says single friend, rather loudly.

'Me too,' I concur.

'Large or small?' she wonders.

'LARGE!' we reply in unison, without consultation.

On the way back Eva puts on a Leonard Cohen CD.

'I listened to four hours of this on my way back from Wales yesterday,' she says.

You see, that's my point. I love the Cohen, but I definitely don't want to go out with a man who listens to four hours worth of his depressive singing in the car and who knows all the words to Suzanne. Not even after a large Sauvignon Blanc.

Largesse

There's a chapel at the end of my road that, in the spiritlessness of the times has, predictably, been converted into a luxury home of the sort not usually found in our 'hood complete with, it is rumoured, an infinity pool in the basement fashioned from what was once a full immersion font.  Nobody knows much more about it except that the architect's wife refused to move here to 'the middle of nowhere' and so it was sold, for a ludicrous sum, to someone who immediately frosted all the windows, put up blinds and built a tall fence ringed with pampas grass.  God forbid the local suburbanites and hoodies should be able to see them sunbathing on their decking, or sitting on the balcony at the back of the church that, mystifyingly, they managed to get through planning in our conservation area though it doesn't quite seem to fit in with the vernacular. 

David Cameron, round the corner, had problems with his wind turbine and we can't get a skylight window in the front of our dreary terrace, but a red brick, Victorian Baptist chapel with a steel balcony stuck above the altar - terrific, stick it up there.

So, last night we went for our customary late evening walk round the neighbourhood and there, outside the Architectural Monstrosity, was a pretty wicker basket, full of fat round soft foccacia. Oh dear, I thought, they've probably come back from their country cottage somewhere suitably picturesque and forgotten to take the last bag in when they've been emptying the BMW or Mercedes estate.

My inner meddler kicked in and I immediately rang the bell on the servants' entrance on the side entrance where the basket sat on the pavement and a few seconds later an expensive English accent answered.

'Hello, I think you must have forgotten a basket out here on the street,' I said.

'Yes, I know.  I put it there,' said Mme Haughty.

'Oh,' I replied, eruditely.

'Do you want it?'

'Me?' (Me  Why would I want your leftover loaves?)  'No,' I gasped, outraged, transforming from friendly neighbour to homeless skip groveller in the space of one second.

I scurried off hurriedly lest Mme Haughty spot me from her overhead security camera and mark me down as Needy of North Kensington.  'What was she thinking?' I asked significant other, 'Did she actually think that someone would take her stale bread, or was she just too lazy to put it in a garbage bag?'  I mean, I know we're in the midst of a credit crunch but eating stuff left out out on the street?'  

We walked on down the street to the Camerons' where, as far as I know, nobody plays Marie Antoinette with the locals by leaving out baskets of bread for those hungry enough to fight off the foxes, stray packs of Staffordshire Terriers and rats to eat from the pavement (though if you have any spare Smythson's diaries going begging Samantha, I'll happily go through your bins).