I was at Liberty looking for a birthday present for Ren, being very restrained and not even considering buying anything for myself, when I realised that my dear old friend would want nothing more than for me to be happy—so of course I wandered over to the Stila counter to play with their lip glosses. But really I was just looking, I swear, so how come all of a sudden a slim young man with dirty hair and the eyes of an angel was saying to me, “Just pop up on here, my sweet,” and patting the seat of a leather stool by the make-up bar? I popped up on there, and he brushed the colour on my lips and said, “Cranberry is my favourite.” Then another boy, this one with a square head and limp wrists, came round the corner and said, “Oh I love it. But let me just try this—” and here he magicked a fat brush out of nowhere and plumped blush on my cheeks. “Peony,” he said, and before I could explain to them that my make-up routine is highly irregular and ultimately dictated by the day’s level of laziness, (itself generally high), he said: “You have to do lips and cheeks. You can do eyes alone, or lips alone, but you cannot do eyes and lips. It has to be lips and cheeks.” At least I think that was what he said; I got lost in the permutations and combinations of my face. Also, I was wondering how I had come to be taking make-up advice from an indie rocker in a leather jacket and skinny jeans, and an import from the Castro.

It is very swank in Liberty, and every time I glanced at myself in a mirror, I said, (quite quietly), “Oh, you hot, hot thing.” I made my way home through the fashion crowd of Carnaby Street and Soho, and I was very glamorous and glossy-lipped. Then I got back to my flat, went to the bathroom, and in the natural light realised I looked like a whore.