I was slathering egg white on the shortcrust pastry with my bare hands, thinking, “Just as well Hens isn’t here to see this” when the doorbell buzzed downstairs.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of having to set up a kitchen all anew. Thing is, I’d have a pastry brush if I’d just bought that issue of delicious magazine at the bookshop last week, ’cause this month the magazine is giving away free pastry brushes. But, oh, they are so evilicious as to offer said brush in blue (sky), or green (mint), or pink (pink), which meant I had to lay all three out in front of me on the magazine rack at Borders and look back and forth and back and forth till I felt ill, at which point I had to say to myself, Leave, just leave, don’t buy a bloody thing, just bloody leave.

Oh, well, or I guess I could just go buy a pastry brush.

In any case.

The dinners have begun, people; come, come, do not be shy. Last night: a chicken tagine in an orange pot—I was flinging in spices without a care in the world, cumin and coriander and sweet paprika, even, oh, how we like large stewy pots; a peach tart, the recipe copied, so covertly—so covertly and quietly, quieter even than a mouse, as quiet, perhaps as a mouse breaking into a mouse’s house—the recipe copied in a corner upstairs at the Borders down the street, from Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion, which, honest, I would have bought, had I an extra thirty-five pounds fighting their way out of my pockets; wine all around; and tea on the carpet, which is to say, we sat around, post-dinner, on the carpet drinking tea, BUT ALSO someone, who will remain unnamed, (hi, Henny!), spilled tea on the carpet, it’s a party now!.

(Although I suppose one could say it’d already been a party much earlier than that, like maybe when me and Henny and Elaine broke out the Cointreau, waiting for the boys to arrive.)

The company was half-unknown, which is to say, Henny’d said, Let’s have dinner, and I’d said, Okay, and didn’t have a clue who was coming. Eventually, around the table: Hens, of course; Elaine, who, apparently, is moving in; Loke, who drove; Nai, who put on the Flaming Lips; and Dan, who said, when I asked where he was coming from: “Notting Hill, and I’m English.”

At one point Nai and I were talking about Justin Timberlake and the chatter in the rest of the room stopped, which goes to show that no matter how much one discusses international politics, evaluating implementation this and regulation that and NGOs the other, one ALWAYS has an ear open for what really matters.

(You may mock me with the Justin Timberlake, but you don’t know how much I don’t know. The job I have not applied for, and now the deadline has come and gone, and I think this is for the best, is to be a staff writer at Smash Hits magazine.

See, before I came out to London, my sister, oh-please-tell-me-some-more-good-ideas, said: “Maybe you could go work for Smash Hits!” This because, once upon a time in the tropics of my teens, I wrote a letter to Smash Hits and mailed it all the way to far-off Britain, AND THEY PRINTED IT. I don’t remember now the precise fascinating content of my letter, but the editor’s response read: “What exactly do they put in the cereal in Singapore?”

And then I got out here and saw the job listing for staff writer, calling for someone who knows what teenage girls want, and it was CLEAR to me that ALL THE PLANETS WERE ALIGNED. Still, a girl’s got to do her research, so I handed over two pounds at the newsagent’s and got a current issue of the rag. Two pounds in London can get you approximately nothing at Harvey Nichols, OR an issue of Smash Hits, complete with an extra signed poster book (“BUFF BOYS SPESH”) and a set of eight—EIGHT!—smelly coloured pens.

How I tore open the box of pens at home!, like an Eighties-era glue addict in the void decks of Singapore—revelling in the grape-smelling purple pen, the lemon yellow, the strawberry red....

I was paging through the signed poster book later, as confused as if I had been handed a flipbook of Turkish film stars: McFly? Who? Nathan from One Tree Hill? What? Lee Ryan? Where AM I? And then the magazine: page after page of shiny happy pop stars, and I must have known maybe one of them. By the time I tried to refer to the group Girls Aloud by calling them Boys Alive, Thusha had just about fallen over laughing at my plight.

Maybe I should have saved the pens for after....)

So,

but.

Dinner.

At another point I was quizzing Loke about his wheels: “Tell me about your car,” I said. “Is it actually a Vespa?”

“No,” he said.

“Is it a Mini?”

“No.”

“Well then I don’t care, do I.”

But I did, really, so he showed me a picture of it, (I know, right?), and I said: “Oh! It’s cute!” But his brow furrowed, so I said: “Oh, no, wait. It’s...hot?”, which didn’t seem to go over much better either.

(And I’m sorry, but now that I am talking about the Vespa, I remember that a guy came to see about the boiler yesterday afternoon, and, look, you think “Meh, guy coming to see about the boiler, he’ll be large and grey and boring,” don’t you, and you dress in smudgy glasses and your raggiest potter-around-the-house clothes. Well, DON’T GO THAT ROUTE, my poppets, because CLEARLY when I thought “large and grey and boring”, I was thinking about the BOILER. Guy-who-came-to-see-about-the-boiler was hot, the kind of hot where you forget what you were saying, the kind of hot spelt H-O-T-T. Matthew from Brighton, with tattoos up his arm. And last night he was going to Tooting, where his brother will do him more. “I’ll probably get these flames finished,” he said, “and add another skull here.” “So no happy tattoos, then,” I said, to which he said: “All these skulls are smiling!” HA HA HA!

Oh, but, with the Vespa—he’d said he rides bikes, (I know, I know, not Vespas), with the Vikings motorcycle club, and I said, eyes darting around and wide with possibilities: “So many questions!” And my first one—I went to journalism school, so you see I am well-trained—my first question was: “Do you wear the hats? With, y’know—” and here I mimed a pair of Viking horns smiling up from above my ears.

COME ON, you were thinking it, too.

The answer, by the way, comes with a bit of a bemused smile, and is: No.

Also: They go biking all over Europe, and it’s boys-only, no girls allowed. “What if they’re just hanging on off the back?” I said. “Oh, that’s alright then.” “Well, well, well,” I said. “Well, well, well.”)

But,

so.

Last night? Dinner party for guests unknown? A-plus all around: Henny and Elaine and I are crashing a research trip to Morocco; Nai and I are going to have a “Chungking Express” screening party, oh, Wong Kar Wai you are so clever; and, plus, now I have a date for the Seu Jorge show on the thirty-first.