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was that I got a kick out of mingling with faces from the shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper.
    I liked chewing the fat with the hacks and the stars of the day; adored getting slewed; lived for the moment when the weals and eructations on the hand of the wine waiter, the powder congealed in the crowsfeet and clogging the pores of the waitress offering stuffed dates, quails’ eggs, chicken satay, tempura caused feelings of almost overwhelming tenderness to well in me. (Always the signal then to slow up.)
    Slipping into a room where the buzz was on and gorillas were mock-menacingly twirling worry-beads at the door (I knew most of them by name) to me was like being lifted out of a rough sea by helicopter. The noise, the smoke, the fracturedness, the social treachery and superficiality … all the things that so many people of my acquaintance would cross continents to avoid, were what drew me and started my juices flowing.
    (The thing I would cross continents to avoid, even now, are the faces of those friends and contemporaries which I remember – it does seem only yesterday – as being emulsified, as being rich with optimism and confidence, and are now, to greater or lesser degrees, opaque with disappointment and the baggy accommodations we have all had to make with reality.
    (I’m not talking here only about money: some of the richest are also the most disappointed. Or even about disappointed ambition. Probably the most chilling look is the look of ambition realised – the hollow haunted look of disgust with achievement. You know: Pa-dum-da-da-dum-dee-dum … Is that all there is to the circus? That one.)
    Most afternoons now, in these weeks close to the end of the year, I come back from my walks with the smell of wood-smoke and garden bonfires rising off me in waves with the cold. This was the smell of my pillow on all those woozy mornings after the nights before. By washing my hair less often than it should be washed – not difficult, given the state of the plumbing (and the condition of my follicles) – it can be the smell of my pillow here in turniptown.
    On my infrequent trips to London I can still pull on a coat or a jacket in the reasonable certainty of stabbing my finger on thetoothpicks and cocktail stirrers that have collected in the pockets.
    My clothes and the bags I carried in those days are littered with match-books for enterprises that went under almost as soon as they were launched and invitations to bashes which nobody in their right mind could ever have hoped would pay their way. Also with cards giving the addresses in ‘toney’ raised copperplate of men whose names would add up to a bizarre network if anybody – the police, say, or a reporter or freelance snoop – ever went to the trouble of tracking them down.
    (I have no idea why this thought should suddenly occur to me now; but the picture of my life which would emerge from such an exercise – sparked off by … what? my disappearance? my death? – would be so distorted and grotesque that I have made a mental note to have a major clear-out the next time I go back.)
    My determination to be always next to the action was a standing joke among my friends, none of them exactly wallflowers themselves.
    One example. One afternoon sometime in the fifties when I was up there, riding high, my agent asked me what I was doing for the weekend.
    ‘After Sammy’s finished his show on Saturday,’I said (Sammy Davis was in town filming with Peter Lawford and playing the Pigalle), ‘I’m flying to the Italian Riviera with him, Betty Bacall, Sarah Churchill and Cary Grant. We’re staying with the Rex Harrisons in wherever it is they live overlooking the sea.’
    This reply – I honestly couldn’t see why at the time – broke him up. His face turned the unbecoming kippered maroon of the leather inlaid into the top of his desk, he laughed until tears streamed from his eyes. ‘I kvel when I think of you, Alma,’ he said. ‘Do you know what