Minutes wasted trying and failing to look like Red Carpet Girl 297, minutes spent putting navy silk dress back on 2, number of times worn navy silk dress in last year 137, cost per wearing of navy silk dress since purchase minus ￡3 per hour – therefore navy silk dress actually more profit-making than self. Which is good. Also Buddhist.
10 a.m. Just setting off for Greenlight meeting in new outfit! The Leaves in His Hair seems to be galloping on apace. A director is attached: ‘Dougie’! The meeting, as usual, is ‘exploratory’, like at the dentist when you know you’re going to end up being drilled.
10.15 a.m. Just caught sight of self in shop window. Look completely ridiculous. Who is this person in shirt buttoned up to neck and skinny jeans, which make thighs look fat? Am going to go back home and change into navy silk dress.
10.30 a.m. Back home. Am going to be late.
11.10 a.m. Bumped into George in the corridor as I was running hysterically along in the navy silk dress. Screeched to a halt, thinking George had come out of the meeting to tell me off for being late and always wearing the same outfit, but he just said, ‘Oh, Leaves meeting, right, right, sorry, conference call. I’ll be with you in ten or fifteen.’
11.30 a.m. It’s much more relaxed, now, with Imogen and Damian, and we waited happily in the boardroom for George and Dougie, eating croissants, apples and miniature Mars bars. Tried to bring up skinny jeans issue but Imogen started talking about whether it was better to get clothes from Net-a-Porter in the fancy packaging, because it was so nice opening the black tissue paper, or to go for plain ecopackaging because it was easier to send them all back and also save the planet, and I tried to join in pretending I actually buy things off Net-a-Porter instead of just looking at them and going to Zara, when George BURST through the door, minus Dougie, with his usual ‘I’m on the move’ swooping movement, and talking in his deep powerful voice, whilst clicking through his emails.
‘The trouble with George is that he always seems to be somewhere else,’ I started thinking piously, whilst feeling my phone vibrate. ‘He’s always either just about to talk to someone else, or talking to someone else or emailing someone else or just getting on or off a plane.’ I glanced down to open my text, thinking, ‘Why? Why? Why can’t George just be where he is? “Oh, oh, look at me, I’m in the air, I’m a bird, why don’t we all have breakfast in China?”’
Text was from Roxster.
<Shall I sneak round after the kids are in bed tonight? So I can give you another blow-by-blow account of last night’s rugby?>
The whole George distraction issue means you have to fit everything you want to say to him into the length of – appropriately enough – a tweet. Though, actually, maybe that’s good in some ways. You see, I’ve noticed that, whereas men, as they get older, get all grumpy and grunty, women start talking too much and gabbling on and repeating themselves. And, as the Dalai Lama says, everything is a gift, so maybe George being so busy is a way of teaching me not to gabble on but—
‘Hello?’ George loomed up right in front of me, jerking me back into the present moment.
‘Hello,’ I said confusedly, quickly pressing ‘Send’ on my text to Roxster. <Blowjob by blowjob?> Why was George saying ‘Hello?’ when we’d already said hello in the corridor ten minutes ago?
‘You’re sitting there like this,’ said George, then did exactly the same imitation Billy does of me with a vacant expression and my mouth hanging open.
‘I’m thinking,’ I said, turning off my phone, which emitted a quack. Hurriedly turned it back on. Or off.
‘Well, don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t think. Right. We’ll have to make this quick, I’m just leaving for Ladakh.’
You see! Ladakh?
‘Oh! Are you making a film in Ladakh?’ I asked innocently whilst preconceivedly judging him for going to Ladakh for NO REASON except to go to Ladakh, and glancing down to see who the quacking text was from.