I struggled on, but due to non-participation I’d run through my stuff like greased lightning and was starting to lose the will to live. Anyway, I carried on with the last bit, all about how to aim a book towards a particular market slot for the best chance of success, and then they woke up and got all puckered round the mouth, and were going: ‘Oh, no, no, no! We couldn’t possibly write a novel aimed at a market, we have to write what is in us.’ And: ‘We don’t write for the money, only for art’s sake.’

I nearly asked them if they thought that Charles Dickens was just writing for art’s sake, or whether he might possibly have had one eye on the market and the other on the money, but I didn’t want to lose my life over it and honestly some of them were starting to give me the evil eye in a very Wicker Man kind of way, though that might have been the fluorescent strip lighting. And just when did some novelists start going all precious about what they were writing, as if we weren’t all ladling different bits of stew out of the same pot and trying to live on it?

But of course they were all writing Great Literary Novels that the public would jump on with glad cries because they were so brilliant, and the inference was that I was only a hack capable of writing cheap little potboilers, and never read anything more literary than Mills & Boon, because they’d pre-categorized me as a romantic novelist, who of course are all (a) the same and (b) bad.

So I said, ‘Have any of you actually read one of my novels?’ None of them had, or any of ‘that kind of thing’.

I tell you, it was a bundle of laughs all the way through, and except for needing the money I would have left at coffee time because I felt I was beating against a closed door, not to mention being patronized by a lot of amateurs.

And to top it all, Luella came back in, although she didn’t say anything, so I don’t know what for except to scupper any faint empathy that might have sneaked into the group in her absence.

When I looked at my watch to see how far time had dragged its weary carcass, she said: ‘Is that it, then?’

Then two people said they had to dash for the bus and just left, so there was no vote of thanks at the end. Everyone else straggled out and Luella sighed and said I might as well follow her to the front desk and she would pay me, so I did, though she clearly didn’t think I was worth it and that she was being done.