No more rats

So, sitting at my window with the baby gurgling contentedly on my lap I check my emails. I see one from the agent. I convince myself that because she emailed not called it's a no. I decide not to open it. Tears drop onto baby Bruno's head. He turns around and gives me a puzzled look.

V: What? Your aunt is a failure. What?
B: Dazzling smile.
V: Oh bugger it, I'll look then.

I open the email. She's read the first 100 pages. She likes it. She wants to meet.

4.30 next Wednesday in Soho.

I am wetting myself in anticipation. Bruno has given me an enormous celebratory fart. It's a family thing.

Schrödinger’s mouse

Oh, misery, misery, as I sit, wracked with tubercular coughing amidst the dust of my little garret, bringing you the next instalment of my sorry existence….

Er…. Oh alright then. Slightly pissed off at having developed bronchitis due to weekend excesses, I am safely installed on the sofa at my friends’ lovely house where I am looking after David, their cat, and twenty-five tomato plants. So far the tomato plants have presented little trouble. David, on the other hand is high maintenance. Too much or too little attention brings the same punishment or reward – a mouse, brought to my bed in the early hours of the morning.

Yesterday I thought I had the balance right. Light tummy tickling for fifteen minutes, quick scratch behind the ears and then I went to bed to listen to Radio 4 with the door firmly closed. It was as if we’d been married for years.

At 2.30 am I am woken by a scrabbling noise, followed by the sound of something running very fast up and down the stairs. I put the pillow over my head. David starts to fling himself at the door. I realise that he is trying to bring me a mouse.

I am terrified of rodents. I start to sweat with horror. Not daring to turn on the light, I get a chair and wedge it under the doorknob. I sit, hunched in bed, trembling.

‘If you had a girlfriend,’ I think crossly to myself. ‘This wouldn’t be a problem. There would be someone to go and sort it out. Why haven’t you got a girlfriend? Why? Why?’

The mouse issue has become a symbol of my single status. I begin to sink into a pit of despair. The thudding gets louder.

‘Maybe,’ I think, ‘it’s not David. It’s the mouse. In fact, it’s not a mouse, it’s a huge RAT. Maybe David wanted me to save him and I failed him. Now the rat's going to break in and devour me.’

I am drenched in sweat at the thought of the killer rat. I begin to calculate how long I would be able to stay in the room. I unearth a bottle of water from my rucksack and a packet of throat sweets. I decide that I could stay for days. I decide that, in fact, I might rather like to be trapped in the room. I could hide in it. I would never have to find out what the agent thinks of the book.

The mouse has become a metaphor for the reading (and judging) public.

Suddenly the noise stops. After a moment of relief, the fear returns. The sound of silence is even more oppressive. I become convinced that the mouse/rat is waiting quietly outside the door to make me think it's gone away and then when I come out it'll pounce. It's lulling me into a false sense of security.

I sit for the next two hours trying to work out whether or not there is a mouse behind the door, dead or alive, victim or predator. If it’s dead then perhaps I could just wait for it to rot away before I come out. If it’s alive, then I can't leave.

The situation is brought to a head when I begin to need to pee. What begins as a slight, uncomfortable sensation quickly turns into pain. I begin to hop around the room, trying to distract myself but it doesn’t work. I think I’m going to wet myself. I realise that I would be absolutely rubbish in a hostage situation.

At last, I have no choice. I remove the chair from under the doorknob. I put on a pair of shoes. I open the door, poised to run.

David is sitting on his own, looking forlorn. He lets out a small miaow. I give him a hard stare.

I told you I was going to need careful handling...

Teutonic totty

So, now that I have been released from the British Library, I am available for less high-minded pursuits. And thus it was that I found myself on a lesbian stag weekend to Cologne.

Sicily, M and I arrive at around eleven pm and trot off to the quaintly named Bastard Bar to meet the girls, who are downing tequila shots, smoking furiously and shrieking in true, er, stag party fashion. We then take cabs to another bar, which is very dark and very empty. I try to make conversation with one of the group.

Me: So, what do you do?
Her: I’m a media lawyer. I specialise in defamation.
Me: Oh, so if I publish a book and I get famous and someone says something libellous about me, I could hire you?
Her (tossing her head): You wouldn’t be able to afford me, darling.

I decide in that case I probably can’t afford to buy her a drink, either.

The second night we regroup in a strange shopping mall-type place where we are going to eat and whose menu appears to be built mostly around white asparagus. We frisk about under a giant glitterball, posing for snaps and confusing the other diners, who are respectable middle-aged couples. By this point I am feeling somewhat confused myself. This is probably due to the shots of melon schnapps that appear every few minutes, mixing uneasily in my stomach with the buckets of white wine that preceded them.

On the way to the Elle-Word, the club night that, we have been told, will be attended by 1000 women, I catch sight of the nails of the wildly glamorous French opera singer who has just joined us.

Me: Oh my god, you’re wearing Chanel Rouge Noir!
Her: I know. I had to go on the waiting list to buy it!
Me (excitedly): Yes, it sold out in two weeks, didn’t it? I’m wearing Rouge Peche on my toes.
Her: Cherie, are you REALLY a lesbian?
Me: Er, not a very good one…

We arrive at the club, somewhere on the side of a large roundabout on the outskirts of the city. On entering, we are enveloped in a fog of smoke and hormones rising from the dancefloor and I remember why I don’t go to these places in London. Sicily, M and I decide to have a nice, cooling glass of prosecco, and stand at the bar drooling in anticipation of longstemmed champagne flutes. Imagine our despair when we are handed three small cans of warm fizzy wine. With straws. Sicily is almost apoplectic with wrath. I just drink mine as quickly as I can and move on to gin.

In Cologne you don’t pay for your drinks as you get them. On entering you are given a small piece of paper like an old-fashioned dance-card, and the barperson ticks off boxes as you get your drinks. Dangerous. The bar staff are all male and loving the power as a thousand drunken women crowd about the bar, brandishing their dance-cards as desperately as Jane Austen heroines at a ball.

At three-thirty in the morning, M and I decide that one of the barmen looks a bit like Zoolander. We get thoroughly over-excited. He looks slightly nervous.

M: Can we take your photo?
Barman: Uh, ja, if you want
M: Can my friend stand next to you?
Barman: Er, ok, then.

And so it was that, in the middle of what was supposed to be teutonic totty heaven, I end up with my arm round the barman, grinning inanely and having my photo taken.

I give up on myself.