I’m writing this in the middle of a snowstorm in the Swiss Alps. This week-long stay is all about me giving up alcohol. This is probably the first column I’ve written without being tipsy. Writing has always been too scary to be done stone cold sober. I need courage. I need to be able to push the little button named ‘send’ and to hell with the consequences. And David? I could never have gone to meet him, that first time for lunch in Locanda Locatelli, or every time after, without a glass of something bubbly. I’m simply not good enough as I am.
The night before I caught the plane at Gatwick, meaning a 4.30am Addison Lee cab, I stayed with my friend Sue in North London. She’s still in the same house she lived in when we met, aged 18. She met her husband on the night I made her go with me to the Jazz Café in Camden. I was trying to locate Trevor, the one with the high-waisted trousers. She left with the man she would soon marry. She now has a grown-up daughter and normal things like piles of fluffy towels in the bathroom. I only have three towels.
We reminisced about the time we had both gone skiing, aged 19, and stayed in a chalet. The chalet girls hated and ignored us, which meant they never cleaned our room: we called it the Black Hole. I was at my thinnest that winter; the family staying in our chalet believed I was Lorraine Chase. I felt the cold horribly. The vats of raclette and hot chocolate were like sunlight to a vampire.
My one date, with a French boy I met in the disco, terrified me so much that sex was impossible. The mirror in the bathroom reassured me I was right to be reticent: I’d developed a huge spot that became more livid in the cold, like a beacon. I’d look at the chalet girls, wrestling chains on to wheels to drive us into town, or my friend Sue parallel skiing, and wonder where they found all that bravado. I’ve always been scared of everything and so, when I discovered alcohol on Millennium Eve, it was a revelation. It allowed me to function.
I’m in a group of five other journalists. I’ve no idea who they are as when introductions were made, they might as well have been speaking German for all I understood, being deaf. They are young and completely lacking in self-doubt. They talk of going freelance, turning down powerful jobs, of writing ‘just one book a year’, and they all live in London: two doors down from some amazing famous person, or near Wholefoods, or across from the park. They tap away on their phones, updating Twitter and Instagram, congratulating themselves on being so interesting and having so much fun.
I was just starting to relax when, on day two, I received an email with some bad news. I’d been planning to rent a flat in London. Not an expensive flat, but in my old stomping ground of Islington. Even when I’d been to view it the week before, treading those wonky pavements round Canonbury Square, I’d had a spring in my step. I knew where everything was. I could even, if I lived there again, go back to the Screen on the Green and watch films in the afternoon. I’ve had enough of the countryside: even boarding a plane means a six-hour drive, having to im-pose myself on a friend. I could get my furniture out of storage.
I told the estate agent I would have it. That first day cold turkey in Switzerland, in meditation class, or prone on a massage table, I’d been imagining moving in. The relief, to be back home after a decade. I’d applied for the flat in the name of my limited company, just before I left for Switzerland. I don’t think the estate agent recognised me. But then I opened the email. The landlord has read all my columns, and there is no way he will rent his apartment to me. It’s just too much of a risk.
You see? I was right to be scared all those years ago. I knew something bad was going to happen. I would never have a husband, a gorgeous teenage daughter, a house with piles and piles of fluffy towels.