The last week or so has been entertaining. I got a taste of what it's like to be a proper glamorous media type and decided that it's good fun but bad for the liver.
The alcoholism started when my best boy mate, Mil came to stay, with his utterly stunning girlfriend, Margret, and their gorgeous kids. We spent the afternoon playing pool, which did nothing to curb my biological clock because their youngest kid (referred to as 'Second born' by Mil) was so adorably cute when he was playing pool, and their elder kid (shockingly enough, 'First Born') was so adorably cute when he was allowed a pint of coke, which he could pretend was a pint of beer.
After much pool playing, we went back to the flat and I sorted dinner (I took the wuss approach of giving the kids pasta and sauce from a jar, because apparently, they like it, and I figured that attempting to cook something that they'd like would be far trickier than going for a known quantity.) Once the kids had gone to bed, the wine was opened and, as is only polite in such a situation, we proceeded to get royally hammered.
The next day, I was woken by Margret and the kids bringing me home-made pancakes (cue more biological clock ticking) then, feeling deeply hungover, went off to the Hay Festival of Literature on another press trip (I approve of press trips; people are paid to be nice to you and ensure you always have a drink in your hand.) leaving Mil, Margret and the kids to look after the flat/have somewhere to stay while they did the London thing.
After what seemed like a gazillion hours on a train, we (me, the PRs and a selection of journalists along with their guests - I took one of my best girlie mates, Avril) arrived in Abergavenny, a mere £40 cab ride from Hay. Despite everyone trying to be 'media blase', we were stunned to find that we were staying in the place where Channel Four filmed 'The Regency House' - a gorgeous stately home that made me wish I was loaded enough to live somewhere so glam all the time. The bath was antique, roll-top and so deep that I could sit in it with water up to my shoulders and the bed overlooked the grounds, which had deer grazing and peacocks doing whatever it is that peacocks do (which mostly seemed to entail making a loud shrieky noise early in the morning, as an alarm call, and late at night, as a way of terrifying the poor PR who was staying in the apparently haunted bedroom.)
Although we were there to report on the Hay festival, there was far more time allocated to eating and drinking than actually being cultured; something that I approved of as, much as I adore writing, I'm rubbish when it comes to knowing who won the Booker, the Whitbread and all manner of other clever awards. I did go to see Germaine Greer and Jo Brand talk about their latest books though; both were fab, even if the tent Jo Brand was in was hotter than hell when the air conditioning's broken.
Saturday night saw a big glam party at another stately home, which felt very Jilly Cooper; waiters went round topping up the champagne as soon as you'd drunk a sip of it (obviously, we made friends with our waiter, Ron, who made sure that we got utterly hammered) and they had a dead classy buffet (which did little to soak up the alcohol, but I think I'd have had to eat several shopping bags worth of food to soak up the amount I drank). Avril and I spent most of the evening chatting to Marc, the founder of the fab Ignobel awards for improbable research that makes people laugh, then makes them think (sample winner: a bloke who did a paper on "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.") and his wife Robyn. I was most excited to discover that Marc knows Tom Lehrer, a total hero of mine - and offered to give me his phone number, which I'm dead excited about (though it will only really be useful if I ever end up in Boston, where Lehrer lives.)
The following day mostly consisted of hangover recovery, which lasted well until Tuesday, when I was off to the Orange Prize for Fiction (at which point, I was beginning to feel like I'd wandered into someone else's life, because I don't go to glam events most of the time). Again, there were those magic waiters who top up your glass invisibly, so you have no idea how pissed you are until you try to stand up. I went with Avril (again - 'cos she's dead cultured and had actually read one of the books on the shortlist) and a couple of boy mates/colleagues (who, like me, hadn't read anything on the list). We still cheered in a 'Gosh, she so deserves it, her prose is magnificent' kind of way when the winner was announced though. It seemed only polite.
And then, life returned to normal; namely, sleeping and writing. Which has rapidly become writing and sleeping, because I've realised that I've got a fuck of a lot of book to write each day if I want to hit my deadline. Which, obviously, I do. So, I'm currently collecting casual sex stories from everyone I meet (if you have one, please add it in to the comments here, or mail me) so that I have less words of my own to write (the book is a guide to casual sex - I'm not just being a random perv.)
No matter how many times I look behind the sofa, there isn't a waiter with a bottle of champagne waiting to discreetly top up my glass. There isn't even someone waiting to top up my coffee. All there is is my computer, sitting there, staring at me every time I dare to do something inessential like, say, eat, and chuntering about the amount of words that I have to write. As a result, I'm rapidly coming to believe that the last month has all been a dream, and rather than being away on glam holidays and at fabulous parties, I've actually been asleep and imagining the entire thing.
But if it was a dream, it was a bloody nice one.
Posted by emilyd at June 17, 2004 03:08 PM