Only she’d read somewhere that we were friends, and she’d always loved the ballet though due to her arches she couldn’t take it up professionally, and wanted to know whether he was half as gorgeous in real life as he looked on screen in that documentary about his life they did a couple of years ago. You know, the one with the memorable sequence where he danced naked in a forest, unfortunately slightly out of focus?

I was just assuring her he was twice as gorgeous in the flesh when we had to hush up and listen to the speeches, followed by some media celebrity smugly twittering on for twenty minutes, blithely informing a room mostly full of published novelists (many of whom had been earning their living writing for years before Ms Media had decided to cash in on her name and write her debut novel) that if we all worked terribly hard, and were as talented and lucky as she was, one day we might just manage to attain a similar glittering seat in the firmament, and become professional writers like wonderful her – I mean, patronize us, why don’t you?

She was blonde, too: they were all blonde, but I vowed not to let myself get a fixation about it, for I am an accredited Brunette Bloom.

After all that, and when the award had been given (and I’ve never been sure what the significance of something that looks like a silver pomegranate on a stick is), Miracle suddenly surged up beside me shedding wonders faster than a dog sheds water, and said gushingly that I looked wonderful, and sales of Spring Breezes were even better, and perhaps we ought to get together again to discuss the future …

Smiling, I agreed. ‘That’s such a good idea, Miracle, because now I’ve found a new agent to take over for my next book, we do have a few details to sort out.’

‘Oh, I hope you haven’t done anything hasty, Tina!’ she said sincerely. ‘It’s so hard to get a good agent, and actually I realized almost immediately that we’d been friends so long, and I have so much faith in you as a writer, that it had all been a mistake and I didn’t want to lose you at all.’

So I said it was a pity she didn’t tell me immediately if that was how she felt – or even later when we met at the Ritz, come to that – but actually she was quite right about a change of agent being a positive move for me, especially to someone younger and more go-ahead, like Nathan Cedar.

‘Nathan Cedar of Bigg and Blew?’ she said, eyes widening.