Actually it worked terribly well because everyone thought she was someone famous incognito and so I got fame by proximity; and in that safari suit with the unfortunate breast pockets and the billowing waistline that could have hidden six pregnancies, and bearing in mind the scale she’s built on, she could have been absolutely anyone, male or female, but with a leaning towards the Attenboroughs.

My talk on the sexual imagery of flowers seemed well attended, but mostly by men, oddly enough, and some of the questions were a bit offbeat in a scholarly sort of way. Strangely, there seemed to be a clear division between the literary academics who would quite happily argue minor points and references all day in a dry-as-dust finicky manner, and the loose cannons like Hereward Brunswick, who just wanted to dig dirt.

But they all seemed to have read the newspaper serialization of Sergei’s memoirs and had made their own minds up about me, and why men should think that because I got up to fun and frolics with one man, I was up for it with any of them I simply didn’t understand. I doubted whether some of them had looked in the mirror within living memory, but it was always so. I had to verbally slap a few of them around the head before I could escape from the tent with my virtue more or less intact.

Oh, and Elvira Pucklington was there, because she introduced herself afterwards and said she was a huge fan, and she knew my aunt, the other Tina Devino, who had been a great help in getting her published.

‘Oh, yes, she’s a batty old tart and I’m afraid we’ve rather lost touch, but I hear she’s living quietly in Shrimphaven, running some kind of literary agency, these days,’ I said quickly, and just then Hereward bounced up and said he was going to escort me to the refreshment tent for a stiff bracer, which was all right by me as long as he wasn’t it.

When I staggered out into the sunshine again I found Linny had been searching for me and she said, ‘Why do people keep asking me for my autograph?’

‘Because you look like someone famous, but they don’t know who, so they’re hedging their bets. What did you sign as?’

‘Sigmunda Rigley, my pen name for M & B,’ she said proudly, so that must have puzzled them.

I went to Hereward’s talk, which was a lot of entertainingly salacious froth, really, about his recent book-signing tour and what else he had put – or tried to put – his name on besides books. The audience listened to him with total respect because he was (a) male and (b) writing thrillers, which were mostly read by men, and so obviously several rungs up the literary ladder above my mere romances.