The said frog sat there, supposedly attracting money into my house, which it hadn’t, and luck; so when I sent off an entry to a competition in one of those idle moments between books one year and won a year’s supply of chocolate, Jackie said, ‘There, that’s your lucky frog’s doing!’

And I said I didn’t call winning a year’s supply of chocolate lucky because if I ate a bar a day I would be hugely obese, spotty and possibly diabetic by the end of it, and what was fortunate about that? So I embarked on a giveaway spree, and I can tell you, I was the most popular house in town on Hallowe’en for the trick-or-treaters once they realized they got three bars of chocolate each, and I’m sure some of them came back several times, only I couldn’t tell in those masks. Some of them were big enough to be parents, which I call plain greedy, but not as greedy as I would have been had I kept all the chocolate and pigged out on a year-long basis.

Then I got rid of temptation by handing out boxes of the stuff to the local children’s ward at the hospital, which seemed a bit Lady Bountiful but went down well, and to all my friends’ teenage children, especially Mel, who had just started at the local uni and therefore knew lots of hungry students.

Anyway, to get back to Brown’s Blooms, the photo shoot was great fun. Two of the other Flowers were considerably more overblown than me, and the only man among them looked like something that might sidle up the plughole and scuttle around your feet while you were in the shower. I simply can’t imagine how he gave the impression that he had a lot more than two legs, so perhaps he was related to my good-luck frog.

Miracle phoned again to ask how the next book was going, though since she was supposed to be ditching me after Dark, Passionate Earth I don’t know why. I said it was doing very well, and told her all about the Brown’s photo shoot, and then she invited me to meet her at the Ritz for coffee in the expansive sort of way she used to do occasionally, before it finally dawned on her that I was not so much a blonde bombshell as a brunette banger.