You must have heard of Sergei Popov? Even if you aren’t into ballet (I’m not) or exercise (ditto – or not out of bed, anyway), I bet you have his SergeiYoga DVD, just for the pleasure of watching him bending his beautifully supple body into strange positions while looking dead sexy.

It was lucky that the train service between Shrimphaven and London was fast and frequent, for I spent huge amounts of time shuttling up and down between the two. But, like Trollope, I found travelling terribly conducive to creative thought and so wrote much of my novels on the way, penned into large notebooks hand-bound by my friend Jackie (when she wasn’t making enormous quantities of totally useless paper flowers).

Linny brought one of the sequined T-shirts for me, but I said, ‘Linny, you should have had the “Big” deleted from mine because, let’s face it, I’m vertically challenged so my bust measurement is almost the same as my height.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it could be Big as in Bestseller. You’re going to be huge! I can feel it in my waters.’

Yuck.

Then she ate the whole box of Godiva chocolates Sergei sent me, so she was the one who was going to be huge.

Next morning found me printing off a new batch of flyers:

NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY MANUSCRIPT ASSESSMENT SERVICE

Dear Aspiring Novelist,

By contacting Noveltina you have taken the first step on the long and rocky road to success as a writer. If you send me your manuscript you can expect to receive a full and constructive criticism that, if followed, will increase its chance of acceptance by a publisher. Yes, I am that vital stepping stone between the beginner novelist and the published!

I hope that we can work together to achieve your dreams, and I look forward to receiving your manuscript, double-spaced and in clear type, in the near future, plus a cheque made out to T. Devino for the sum of £300, which covers manuscripts up to 150,000 words.

Yours sincerely,

Tina Devino

This was my little moneymaking sideline, and so much more fun than the secretarial temping that I was never very good at anyway, being a fast but totally inaccurate typist easily distracted by ideas for new plot twists. I suppose it was amazing that I had any original ideas while temping, though, because all the offices seemed to have been hermetically sealed full of sterile dust and therefore incapable of nurturing anything but recycled thoughts. If there is any nutritive jelly in the Petri dish of the business world, I didn’t find it.