I do hate private parties. There’s always someone who gets you in a corner and tells you at enormous length about the wonderful novel they’ve written, and how it’s all absolutely from their own life experience, only it’s got a truly original plot, and if they sent it to an agent or an editor someone might steal it, mightn’t they? Which, sure enough, is what happened at Jackie’s party. I told this woman that no, they wouldn’t steal her marvellous idea even if she’d got one, but I didn’t say that she looked like she’d never had an original thought in her life, because she was bigger than me – though that’s not difficult: practically everyone over the age of twelve is bigger than me as I’m only five foot two inches tall.

So then she said she’d allow me to read it as a great favour and I said thanks very much but I was much too busy writing my own to read other people’s except for money. She said I’d soon feel differently once I’d read Clacton Stole My Heart and she’d drop it off the next day and then she just went.

If I found out who gave her my address they would be straight off my Christmas card list because, lo and behold, there was a cardboard box on my porch the following morning when I staggered down, with a note saying here was her baby and to be gentle with it. It wasn’t a small box either. And when I opened the lid there wasn’t a manuscript in there at all, just a stiff moggy, so I rang the number on the letter and she went hysterical and said she must have buried the manuscript instead of poor Fluffy, who passed away while she was at the party, and did I think that was a bad omen?

I said no, I thought it was just carelessness and what did she want me to do with Fluffy?

She said she’d have to go out and dig up her manuscript like that Pre-Raphaelite poet did, the one who put all his poems in his lover’s coffin and then had a change of heart later and had her dug up. Only Fluffy wasn’t in there with it, fortunately. And then she said she’d be round later to swap boxes, and I said I could hardly wait and she’d find Fluffy in the porch.

Sergei took me to Lemonia for lunch on the following Monday, which I felt I had quite deserved after a morning spent being Spring, scattering daisies in the path of the rampant faun or something – I never seemed to quite grasp his plots – and Russian tea and fish eggs would simply not have been sustaining enough to get me home.