But I was prepared to do anything to promote my novels, and anyway, if I signed lots and lots of books at least they couldn’t send them back to the publisher, so the bookshops would make a push to sell them … perhaps. So we settled on Thursday and Friday.

She emailed me an itinerary and, just as I remembered from last time, the bookshops were all over the place, involving much backtracking and tube journeying.

I stayed over in Linny’s palatial guest suite, since she’d volunteered to come with me again, though I bet she wished she hadn’t when the weather turned cold, rainy and dismal.

Well, we visited six bookshops in quick succession, and each one went much the same: a slightly scrofulous young man met us, led me to the designated spot – usually standing at the corner of the cash desk, or on the edge of a prominent book display (someone else’s) – and left me with a pen and a pile of virgin copies of Spring Breezes.

I signed them all with a flowing ‘Best Wishes – Tina Devino’, and then we girded up our Burberrys and went on to the next.

We were exhausted by the end of the first day, and my wrist hurt, my feet ached, and I’d forgotten how to spell my name. But the next day went much better after Linny insisted on going by taxi everywhere (she paid), and the day started with a signing at Harrods, where they were delightful, giving me a comfy chair and a nice pen and one of those ‘signed by the author at Harrods’ bands that they put around the books.

We ended up later that afternoon at Selfridges, where someone actually asked me to sign a copy she was buying, and by that time Linny was wearing the Harrods ‘signed by the author’ band paperclipped into a tiara, drunk on the smell of new books.

When we got home Tershie had come back from whatever moving and shaking he’d been doing and insisted on taking us out to dinner at the Ivy, where he frequently seemed able to magic a table up at short notice. He was so kind, rich, and away such a lot that I told Linny that husbands didn’t come much better than that, if you had to have one at all, which I didn’t, but if Salubrious did dump me I might soon be in the market for something similar.