Well, thanks to my Friend From The North (he knows who he is) for telling me to carry on with my blog. I have taken a bit of time out of late, A) because I’ve been bumming around in Spain after the drama of my book launch- well, doing a bit of photography too, actually- check out what the sun can do to a plate of bread and squashed tomatoes:


I know, muy bonito, no? (Pan con tomate, the Catalans call it like it’s some form of flash souffle but then the Catalans were never big on modesty). The B reason I’ve not been writing is that I haven’t really been hanging out with any famous people of late and I figured nobody would be interested in my regular ever-so-humble life. But then, C) I was invited to a polo match on Sunday by my friend Genevieve from Veuve Clicquot- one of my old pals from my Harper’s Bazaar days. I acquired a polo saddle from another of my PR mates a few years back (she was organising a bash at a huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ shop called Swaine, Adeney, Brigg in St James’s and not enough celebs turned up so she gave me the voucher- for £1000- originally meant for Bryan Ferry’s son). 
If you are ever looking for a good crop or if you just want to get a big whiff of horsy leather then you should check this shop out.  They do nice luggage but I decided to spend my £1000 on one of the saddles- it was pretty small and a beautiful piece of workmanship. I’ve had it on a barrel in my front room for the past two years- I sit on it when the horsy urge overcomes me but when I got Genevieve’s invitation, I was gagging for the real thing.
Funnily enough, I don’t remember much about the polo match itself because we arrived at midday and left at 6pm and we didn’t stop drinking champagne once. Pink stuff, yellow stuff, gold stuff, sweet stuff. I was aware that we were at a place in Sussex called Cowdray Park and that the match was between a team from Dubai and another lot from Argentina called Loro Piana (which sounds like it might have something to do with Cilla Black and music but is, in fact, a very expensive Italian fashion label).
I wandered about in the VIP enclosure, tucking into crayfish canapes in  gold goblets served with a fork with a mother-of-pearl handle (a tricky manoeuvre when you’ve got a flute of Champagne in the other hand). I kept thinking about the Sunday Times article on Dubai I’d just read on the drive up in the  ‘courtesy coach’ from London. About how you get stoned there and thrown into prison if you snog someone you’re not married to or if you snog someone you are married to in public. And obviously there’s not a lot of room there for big lezza nights out either. Yet now, here we were in the VIP enclosure at this big old polo gathering about to watch Dubai play – and everyone seemed very nice. That’s the thing when you’re in these circles - sitting next to Naomi Harris from Pirates of the Caribbean, swigging back Veuve Clicquot and eating peach foam sorbet in a spun sugar cage on a bed of champagne jelly with an almond langue du chat base - the whole stoning and human rights thing goes clean out of your head.

Here’s the peach foam thing- before you cracked the cage open:


And after:



Mmmm, maybe you needed to be there... Plus, I was too drunk to remember to bring my camera to the table and had to make do with my rubbishy Nokia phone.

Luckily, I was sitting next to a very nice guy called Nick from Mission PR (whose boss looks like a reincarnated Kenneth Williams) who was chatting about how he’d had a discussion the previous night with a couple of lezza friends who were moaning on about how there are a bazillion gayboy bars and STILL- IN TWO THOUSAND AND BLOODY NINE- only ONE lesbian bar in central London. That is the conversation I'm always having with gay boys too- the ones lamenting about how, ‘Oh, but you lesbians are so lucky because you can have relationships but we gayboys can’t.’ I always try to keep calm as I inform them that if you can have loads of sex (as they can) then you can also decide to have a relationship with one of your shags and the only reason that lezzas pack up and move in with another chick on the second date is that they fear it might be another 5 years before they actually meet another dyke.
As it happens I’d had lunch with another gayboy PR earlier in the week in Nobu Berkley Square (the flash sushi restaurant owned by Robert De Niro). He’d agreed with me on the gayboys having loads and loads of cake and not eating any of it front. ‘On any Saturday night in Vauxhall alone,’ he said, ‘there’s one club with 2000 Spanish men dancing with their tops off, next to a club with 3000 Italian men dancing with their tops off and then you’ve got The Hoist and the…’ In short, as Mr Darcy might have said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that it's going to be difficult to settle down into a relationship when you’ve got all that cock around.
My PR friend then informed me how the new club drug is a thing called Five Star General which is a mix of all the top recreational drugs that ever existed: coke and speed and heroin and crystal meth and K. As I was reflecting how Five Star General seems a kind of Long Island Iced Tea of the drugs world (you’ll remember that Long Island Iced tea is supposed to be the strongest cocktail in the world- all the white spirits mixed together - tequila, rum, gin, vodka and triple sec), I noticed an addendum at the bottom of the Nobu menu saying that blue fin tuna is an endangered species now. You expected it to then say that they’d decided not to serve it- I’d read that week that by 2040 there won’t be any more fish left in the world- but it just said something to the effect that it was a matter for your own conscience if you ordered tuna or not. With the Five Star General conversation going on, it seemed churlish not to order the endangered tuna. Kids in 30 years time might never know what fish tastes like but then most people have never tasted peach foam sorbet in a sugar cage and, believe me, you’re not missing anything.
Meanwhile, back at the Cowdray Park polo,  my tete a tete with Nick was brought to a halt when one of the Veuve Clicquot people stood up to announce that the polo match was about to start and to give us a short lesson in how polo is played- lots of refs to ‘chukkas’ although by now we were on to the Veuve Clicquot vintage demi-sec (the sweet stuff) so I’m afraid I can’t remember any of the rules. I do remember though, that there were lots of titter-y references to men in tight white jodhpurs that ‘the ladies will certainly enjoy!’ and Nick and I both raised out eyes to the heavens and thanked our lucky stars for our superior gender politics. Maybe we hoped that in some way this would make up for the fact that some adulterous Human Resources manageress from Entwistle on her summer hols to Saudia Arabia was at that moment being carted off to some grim prison in downtown Dubai…
Re celebs, as I said, there was Naomi Harris who played the voodoo witch in Pirates of The Caribbean. Here she is, sitting at our table in the blue dress.


(Ben Grimes the model was supposed to have come but couldn’t make it). You will see the funny orange cardboard lampshades behind Naomi. These were made by a famous designer called Tom Dixon who was also there:


Tom is not a fashion designer but what they call a ‘product designer’. Usually these people are more boring than accountants (as opposed to fashion designers who are always very entertaining) but Tom was once in a 1980s British funk band called Funkapolitan and he has a gold tooth so the Wallpaper lot think he’s cool. I also saw  Donna Air, who used to be married to Damian Aspinall who is referred to in the papers as ‘multi-millionaire socialite Damian Aspinall’. In the milieu, he is better known for being the son of John Aspinall, a crazed, self-important gambling magnate who had himself crowned a Zulu warrior king in Africa and who ran a zoo in England with a trendy policy that you could go in and stroke the tigers in the cages if you wanted to. My friend, India-Jane Birley’s brother got his face eaten off when he was 11 during a day trip to this afore-mentioned trendy zoo.
Anyway, Donna Air who I think used to be a TV presenter, looked much happier and less anorexic without old Damian around. I’m not convinced he’s that much  into the ladies anyway. I was once on a fashion shoot with Donna and Damian and Patrick Cox. At one point, Damian took the tissue paper out of the toes of some Cox shoes, stuffed it up his jumper and started saying to Patrick: “Look! This is what girl’s do, isn’t it- rub tits!” He then put the paper down his crotch and told Patrick to rub up against him.  Patrick thought about it and then said, “No I’m not going to. You’ll like it too much.” I thought that was cool of the Canadian famous for his Wannabe loafers that were big in the 1980s. Maybe the Interesting product designer, Tom Dixon had a pair.  Maybe Patrick was too interesting for his own good though because, as my Nobu PR friend informed me, Patrick Cox went bust earlier this year. David Guest, Elton’s husband, is now supporting him while Tom Dixon is making bucks from orange cardboard lamps for champagne companies.
Isaac Ferry was also there- remember, the one who didn’t turn up to the saddle party at Swaine, Adeney, Brigg? I went up to him and said hello. We’ve met a few times, after all - the first time notably on a trip four years ago to Bangkok with Detmar Blow where Isaac- the second of Bryan Ferry’s four sons- told a cute story about how he’d once found 22 lady birds on his lamp in his room at Eton. Only when I said hello to him on Sunday, he claimed not to know me and in fact, he claimed not even to be Isaac Ferry. ‘Yeah, I’m afraid I’m not him,’ he announced. ‘I hear he’s inside in a black jumper’. The give-away was that Isaac said this in the same quiet gentle voice that he’d used to tell the ladybird story  in Bangkok. It was sad really but I wasn;t too sad because at least I'd once got a free polo saddle becasue he (really) hadn't been at another party. London life’s obviously hardened him. Or maybe the fact that his dad (63) is now dating one of his ex-girlfriends, 27-year-old Amanda, another of my party PR friends, is what has hardened him.  Not that I want to encourage anyone to read the Daily Mail, but you can get the lowdown on the story here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1200776/Heres-youre-missing-son-Bryan-Ferry-63-frolics-sons-ex-girlfriend-27.html
Interestingly, Bryan’s ex-wife, is now married to the guy, Robin, whose face was ripped open by the tiger at Aspinall’s zoo. Small world, huh? Like I say, ‘High Society’ has always reminded me of the Lesbian Underworld.

Oh, and when we got home, look what  Jake and I found in our pockets:


It was that naughty Champagne what made us do it.

Most people need a hot shot agent or millions of book sales to get themselves a slot at the prestigious Hay Literary Festival. I have neither, but what I do have is a penchant for hustling. Remember that night  back in March - the Harper’s Bazaar party where Viv Westwood said that A Partial Indulgence reminded her of vomit (see my first blog entry)? Well, that night  I got talking to burlesque superstar Immodesty Blaize about Hay and at one point, she said, ‘We should do something together.’

Naturally, I followed this suggestion up and so it was that I found myself last Saturday night with a walkie talkie box strapped to my G-string and one of those Madonna microphones strapped around my ears,  about to enter stage left onto a massive stage with a 1000-strong audience. Immodesty was doing her rocking horse routine and then she had to leave the stage to take off her 18-inch corset during which time Julian Clary and I were supposed to ‘banter’ up there in front of all the punters. Here is a pic of me and Julian half an hour earlier at dinner.


Julian has just turned 50 ('too old for Alcopops, too young for Midsummer Murders') and he’d just been given a packet of cheesy balls by one of the old ladies who came to buy his new novel, Devil In Disguise, which he’d just done a talk about. It’s a good book – funny and engaging- almost as good as his first one, Murder Most Fab, and I’d recommend them both… I was going to say ‘as beach reads’ which is what everyone says about a certain light type of book.  This annoys me as I always think, Why shouldn’t you read something a little darker on a beach- something about freaked-out aristos and meditations on the after-life? I’m referring to A Partial Indulgence, in case all you dear readers out there still haven’t shelled out for a copy.

Meanwhile, half an hour later everyone was all of a kafuffle back stage at the Guardian tent. Julian was outside puffing on a series of fags and I was trying to work out how on earth I was going to be able to link my gothic ‘literary’ novel with Immodesty Blaize’s Tease which, she unashamedly declares is a ‘bonk buster.’

Here’s Immodesty earlier that day posing with her Independent Magazine cover and her novel, Tease. It was cute. I told her that things don’t get much better than this in publishing and that your first novel is always your most exciting time.


Meanwhile, back in the back stage area, a wall of bright red feathers suddenly arrived and it was Immodesty herself- all 9 foot of her including the plumed head dress. She had a red sparkly whip, the 18-inch corset which did look really uncomfortable and she kept saying ‘I feel as if I’m missing something’ followed by, ‘pass me my glass of Champagne’ which I thought was a good bit. In this sanitized world ( at least, front of house, they would have us believe that it is sanitized) nobody is supposed to slug back mouthfuls of champagne to give them Dutch courage before a big performance- models do it all the time too- and supposedly nobody smokes fags any more. But sometimes you NEED fags and you NEED booze and yes, maybe they are bad for you but nobody ever said that show biz was good for your heart.
As I watched Immodesty parade onto the stage with her two showgirl side kicks, I wished I’d brought my glass of warm white wine with me from the dining tent but soon the music sprung up (Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet mixed with some deep base house music) and I peeped out from the curtains at her as I simultaneously bopped along with nerves. I mean, I felt like I was at Sunday Night at the London Palladium ie it was all well out of my league. The last time I’d been in front of an audience even half this size was back at my convent school play and I only had to play Herod then in a non-speaking, non-moving tableau vivante production (as the nuns pretentiously referred to it).

 In fact, I felt absolutely terrified and absolutely excited at the same time which, funnily enough is an emotion I often try to describe in my novels. Meanwhile,  Immodesty suddenly came off to thunderous applause, and Julian Clary went on and started doing his MC bit- about how he’s a famous homosexual in that dead pan way of his – which I like. He told the audience that he was now going to be having a chat with me about my novel (that was a good bit, to hear the very famous Julian Clary, who I was a massive fan of back when I was a frustrated teenager,  announce ‘A PARTIAL INDULGENCE by Stephanie Theobald’).

But then it was kind of weird. I walked up the wings and onto the stage and everyone clapped and then we sat down like on Wogan or something and started to talk about Burlesque- his sister had been a Tiller Girl in Madrid when he was a teenager and he’d gone over to see her and apparently fallen in love with the idea. And then I started to say how I’d got into the stripper girl thing from the more seedy angle ie lesbian strippers in Soho- and the fact was, I’m not sure the audience were ready for that- I seemed to hear a resounding silence as I spoke anyway. Julian proceeded to make a few jokes about ‘…um…how long is it going to take Immodesty to change out of her corset…and um…’ But still Immodesty didn’t return and so Julian  ummed a bit more until it struck me that he was sort of corpsing- as they say in the show biz world. I thought I’d better try and get the conversation going so I brought up the fact of him having gone to a Catholic Benedictine school- which he’d told me over dinner. I said maybe he could write about that in his next novel and then I said that I went to a convent school - which is true- and that at this convent school, the nuns used to take the door knobs off the doors- which is not true (although this did happen at my Paris flat mate- Caroline’s convent school).  I couldn’t quite believe I’d said this, even as I was saying it, although from sniggers in the audience, the punters seemed to know what I was talking about. When I think about it now, maybe Julian wasn’t corpsing – maybe it was just a ‘dramatic pause’ like you hear about in the theatre. Luckily, Immodesty then came on and we proceeded to chat about our respective novels. At one point, Immodesty brought up the idea of ‘body horror’ which occurs in my novel and she said she liked the whole ‘blood’ thing in my book and said something like how ‘shit, blood, spunk, piss’ are all part of life. I had a vision of her as a crazy Catherine wheel going off and spluttering out ‘shit, blood, spunk and piss!’.
It’s funny that a lot of A Partial Indulgence is about death because sitting on that spot-lit stage in a very large, dark room in front of hundreds of people you couldn’t see felt a bit like an out-of-body experience.

Here is me signing books after the event.


Actually, that bloke isn’t a punter, he’s one of the Hay book shop staff pretending to buy a book. And that, dear readers, is one of the realities of being a ‘literary’ novelist- you don’t get masses of teenaged fans clamoring to buy your book and ask you about your moves on your rocking horse. Still, Immodesty rocks as far as I am concerned. She is hot and brainy and she invited me to stay in her pad in the Dordogne this summer to eat foie gras and swim in her pool so, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

Meanwhile, this time last week I’d been having a big gay weekend in Blackpool with my Scouse mates and I have to say, I did enjoy that more than Hay (although Hay is good because you get to see a lot of lambs gambling or rather, gamboling, and also there are lots of horses. Here is one who is enjoying a stick of rock (stolen) from a Blackpool kiosk.


And here are a couple of pics of views outside my bedroom window. One was taken from my Hay bedroom and one was taken from my Blackpool bedroom. See if you can guess which is which:

I was thinking about last weekend's trip to Moscow with Pablo Ganguli. It was a bit like one of those disaster movies where a group of eccentrics are thrown together by circumstance. There was the crusty Oscar winning director (Stephen Frears), the 65-year-old composer with the 25-year-old child bride (Michael Nyman and Florence), the mystery daughter of Lucien Freud (Lucy Freud), the sexy Fiennes family member (Martha Fiennes) the cocky young fashion designer (Henry Holland), the jaded older fashion designer (Stephen Jones), the aging Young British Artist (Gavin Turk), Madonna’s knackered-looking music producer (William Orbit), and the society divorcee and erotic sonnet writer (Amanda Eliasch).
William Orbit turned up on the first night during a dinner in a Versailles-style restaurant and I'm sorry but he looked like he'd had one too many late nights. He told us he was flying off to Siberia the next day to do a rave and then to return a day later to Moscow to do a talk on fashion with Stephen Jones. You wondered if he had the stamina. He looked like you’d imagine a man to look who’d committed hundreds of murders and tried to keep them all under his hat…
Sorry I have no picture of him but I do have one of the mystery guest Lucy Freud who is a mature art student and one of the many offspring of the British painter and love rat, Lucien Freud (who is rumoured to have 40 illegitimate children). Forty-something Lucy was from one of the the first broods and it was weird because  her eyes are exactly the same as Lucien’s cruel, cold, bird eyes and yet Lucy is as friendly and comforting as a nice warm sock. ‘Lovely here, isn’t it?’ she kept saying  in her Dot Cotton accent. As one of our group pointed out, ‘She’s more like Mabel from Peckham than Lucy Freud.’ Here are those eyes:



She later told me that she was five years old and she’d just come out of the Saturday pictures when her mum turned up with a van and told her and her 3 siblings that they were all moving to Kent. It's kind of poignant really because Martha Fiennes later asked her how she got on with Bella Freud (the fashion designer) and Esther Freud (the novelist who wrote Hideous Kinky). Both of these Freuds are the glamorous ones with posh accents who are in Harper's Bazaar party pages all the time. Bella is the bossy one while Esther is much more more mouse-like. Anyway, Lucy had to tell Martha that she hadn't really met Bella and Esther properly. In fact, it seemed she hadn't seen her cruel father for many years either.

Then hat-maker Stephen Jones came to sit on our table in the Versailles restaurant. He had such good conversation that you only noticed later that he has three fingers missing on one hand. He talked about how 62 000 people had come so far to see his hat exhibition at the V &A and also about how he’d been invited to Patsy Kensit’s wedding to husband number  four, the Dior DJ Jeremy Healy. Everyone had had to sign release forms apparently because they’d sold the rights to OK mag and nobody was allowed to bring in cameras or mobile phones. Everyone thought it was a bit of a rum business but then the OK deal meant they had loads of booze and food, so after a while nobody noticed what a weird set up it was. The only sadness was that 
John Galliano, Healy’s best friend was supposed to have been the best man but he was called away on a shoot with Giselle at the last minute.
Here's Stephen at the airport with his boyfriend, Craig (and GQ editor Dylan Jones displaying serious Blackberry addiction).


After the dinner was over, we all went downstairs to dance to William Orbitt's set. It turns out Stephen Jones was two years above GQ editor Dylan Jones at St Martin’s and Dylan remembers hearing Stephen play in his punk band, The Pink Parts.  I talked to Dylan for a bit about recreational valium because I bought some in India when I was on the Pablo Ganguli literature trip to Mumbai a couple of years ago. I’ve still got it at home- the 10 mg ones although I've only ever taken it once in my life - in Thailand on a beach  and everything became like marshmallow and I went swimming in my diamante jewellery. I felt really grouchy the next day and found everyone realy irritating.

Dylan said that Recreational Valium would be a good name for a pop group which was funny, because the next day, during his talk on his book on David Cameron, he was very cagey about drugs. When someone asked him if Cameron had ever taken drugs, Dylan said, "I’ll take the fifth on that," meaning, apparently the Fifth Amendment meaning the right to silence.  (He also said that Cameron liked ‘middle brow art’ and that this was a good thing- although why would that be a good thing?)

We went to have lunch in a Moscow pub (the John Donne). My vodka hangover was starting to kick in so I didn’t eat too much of my steak and Kidney pie. (Also temperatures were by now like a hot day in July) I was on the table with the fashion lot- Henry Holland and Stephen Jones and his boyfriend, Craig.  Henry wanted to go to the flea market to buy rabbit pelts. He's been  a bit obsessed with them ever since he learned that the Olsen twins, have a black bed with a rabbit pelt bed spread- all the skins are sewn together with the little paws hanging off down the side.
Stephen Jones said how the Moscow flea market was great and when he went there a few years ago there were dancing bears.

Meanwhile, It was soon evident that the art and the fashion lot weren’t going to mix. In fact, the art brigade (Gavin Turk, Danny Moynihan -who’s movie of his book Boogie Woogie is out later this year) and Michael Craig Martin always palled up with Stephen Frears (the most famous man on the trip) at every meal. The most boring man in Moscow turned up at our table. He was an ex-pat journo with bad breath who asked me to order the steak and kidney pie even though I wasn’t hungry because he said he might review I for the Moscow Times.

We went onto a new boudoir-style gallery where  Michael Nyman played a few tunes from his repertoire in a bit of a Chas and Dave style- maybe due to the piano which was a bit of an ‘old Joanna’.
(Michael Nyman did all that ‘beep beep’ music for those Peter Greenaway films and also did the music for The Piano (or ‘that rape movie’ as my lesbian feminist friend Laura Cottingham calls it).
Here is Michael banging away at the ivories and here are Stephen Jones and Gavin Turk listening heroically on.



Then there was a performance by Amos, the performance artist which caused a bit of a to-do. Amos’s usual show is to lie naked on the floor and get audience members to paint bits of her body. Only the owners of this Moscow gallery didn’t want paint in the gallery so Amos thought she’d get people to stick her with bits of gaffer tape. She asked Lucy Freud and me to stick some pieces of tape on her. I didn’t want to be too obviously erotic about it so I stuck some tape on her fingers but then also stuck some gently on the back of her buttock down he back of her leg which I have to admit was quite an exciting thing to do. But then this Russian artist, Svetlana K-Lie came up to me and hissed ‘Where is the tape! I want to stick on some tape!’ and before we knew it , she ran over to Amos with the glee of someone about to shoot the president, grabbed some tape and proceeded to stick it on roughly to Amos’s nipple.  I actually took a pic of this in action:



Amos confessed afterwards that she’d opened her eyes when Svetlana did this as she assumed such aggressive moves could only have come from a guy. Then I introduced Amanda Eliasch and her Cloak and Dagger Butterfly erotic sonnet collection (which she composed entirely on her Blackberry). Here she is with the translator, Alex:


In the talk, I said that ‘erotic’ is a bit of a naff world but that the more honest word ‘dirty’ is seldom used because ‘erotic’ is more commercial and will get you more money if you are an artist. I got in a plug for A Partial Indulgence, saying that writing about food and sex was pretty much the same thing. I noted that Michael Nyman had nodded off in the audience.
I later asked the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed translater, Alex, what the state of literature in Russia was. All Russians talk about Pushkin as if he were David Beckham so things seem quite healthy in that department.  I told him that in Britain nobody reads novels any more, they all read Misery Memoires. He said that in Russia, misery is not exotic and ‘Moolah Memoires’ or non-fiction books about poor girls marrying rich oil oligarchs are increasingly popular.

Got a taxi home back to the hotel with Michael Nyman and  Florence. On the way, Michael pointed to a building and said to Florence, ‘That’s where I met Paul McCartney.’
Florence looked suitably impressed.

The next day when I went down for breakfast, I  was eating muesli as Stephen Frears came over to my table. ‘Muesli!’ he sort of scoffed and snarled all at once (he is very dry, is Stephen).  In fact, this is his normal demeanour (with Dylan Jones who had temporarily lost his Blackberry):


That afternoon, we went to the Sergei Eisenstein  Library where the film talk was to take place between Stephen Frears, Martha Feinnes , Danny Moynihan and a Russian director Stephen called ‘Crazy’ who is called Andrei Konchalovsky and who is the brother of the internationally famous actor and film maker, Nikita Mikhalkov.

All the directors were obsessed with the problem of getting money to make movies. At one point, Frears blurted out to Konchalovsky, ‘Russians own our country and why isn’t Abramovich making movies rather than wasting his money on art?’ It was kind of a jokey comment and indeed, this was the first time in the weekend that I’d seen Frears smile:


Konchalovsky said it was really hard to get Russian movies seen in the West He said sometimes he was lucky enough to find people with ‘some money and little education’ who would agree to fund a movie although a real problem was that ‘the Russian Elite tend to worship the West’. Martha Fiennes said some good stuff. Her famous films are Onegin and Chromophobia (and her brothers are Ralph Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes)  She said that even when you’ve made the movie, it’s the distribution which is the ‘sticky wicket’. She had a good message for all of us who struggle to write plays and novels/do art/ or make movies. ‘To convince people of your vision is always going to be a treacherous path. As my agent told me the other day, we live in a culture of ‘No’ but you just have to push on.’
One of the Russian journos asked Stephen Frears what he thought of Moscow and he seemed a little stumped. ‘I’d like to see where Anna Karenina killed herself,’ he said. Unfortunately, it turned out that the train station where she committed suicide was in St Petersburg.

That afternoon, we went on to The Garage contemporary art gallery. You'll see my thoughts on it in the post below but just a thought here on Russian art. It's weird because the stuff you read about in the papers and see at art shows (like the Rodchenko and Popova exhibition I saw at the Tate Modern with Jake last week) is really ‘fig roll’ stuff ie it’s very dry. All those lines and spheres and that avant garde Constructivist thing. I personally favour double fudge chocolate brownie kind of art. And yet when you're in Russia you realise that regular members of the Russian population love naff, schmatzy art. I kept seeing statues of cuddly bears and the flea market was  full of naff paintings of teddy bears which I loved. I also saw this at the flea market:


Our final stop was at a restaurant called Chocolate where the talk between Stephen Jones and William Orbit was to take place. Alas, the rave in Siberia had taken it out of Orbit – when I saw him in the afternoon he looked like he’d murdered 20 more people since the previous day and he didn’t show up for the evening panel discussion.

Stephen Jones and Henry Holland were up for it though and as they talked about things like commissions for Kylie, a group of Rude Mechanicals grew in one corner of the room made up of Stephen Frears and the art lot: Gavin Turk, Danny Moynihan and Michael Craig-Martin. Free vodka was making them all very bold and when Stephen Jones admitted that he rarely refused a commission, Stephen Frears shouted out:
‘What a tart!’
‘Well exactly,’ Stephen Jones riposted. ‘The fashion business is full of tarts!’

Still, I found the fashion bunch much more friendly than the art bunch. The YBAs were swigging back bottles of vodka and talking loudly about ‘fucking Goya,’ occasionally lifting an eye to take note of the hat fashion show taking place around us. I noted that Stephen Jones was looking with passionate seriousness at the show in front of us.  See, that’s why I have more respect for the fashion world than the art world. It is easy to fake profundity- a dirty, unmade bed? And empty studio with a blue plaque commemorating your presence? (Gavin Turk’s first famous art piece). It’s easy to find depth in such work when you’ve gone off and thought about it for a bit. But you can’t fake shallowness- a hat looks great or it looks rubbish- and for this reason I have the greatest respect for fashion designers.

 The next morning when we headed off to the airport at 5AM, I was in the car with Danny Moynihan and Stephen Frears.  I wondered if I should get the conversation round to A Partial Indulgence- Frears likes making movies about completely disparate subjects and he hasn’t made one about the art world yet, as far as I know. But it was tricky to get a word in. Stephen pointed to some houses and said ‘I should imagine (Soviet spies) Burgess and McLean lived in somewhere like that,’ adding that McClean had gone to his school (Gresham’s school in Norfolk). Frears said that Jessica Rothschild had asked him to direct a new play and that he was thinking of doing it. He apparently started out in theatre directing John Malkovich in a play called Burn This. ‘He was dazzling,’ Frears said. They then talked about Daniel Day Lewis who is, said, Frears, ‘very Heathclife- all brooding’. He keeps an eye on Malkovich, apparently, since he his second wife left him.
There was a pink cloud in the sky as we arrived at the airport. ‘This is the light Bacon liked to paint in,’ Danny Moynihan pointed out. ‘Raw light.’ I took a quick snap of this Bacon Light when we finally reached Moscow airport:


When we finally got to Heathrow and were walking to get our luggage, Frears confided to me that he’d been glad to escape to Moscow before the ‘terrifying business’ of appraisal of his new movie, Cherie, began. But when we came to say goodbye, he said to me, ‘thanks for looking after us all’ and it struck me that he believed I was one of the PRs. So much for seeing A Partial Indulgence at a cinema near you any time soon…

So, only one more shopping day for you all to get hold of this week's Grazia. I've finally checked out the photo and I'm glad to see that lots of low lighting was used . And the way they edited the article wasn't too bad- for a mainstream mag. I'm glad to see they kept in the line: 'I realised that heterosexuality was just a habit I’d got into.' That's quite a hardcore bit of lezza propaganda for a magazine whose other priorities are  summer floral prints and Lilly Allen's latest tiff with Cheryl Cole. I like the idea of Ms Grazia Reader flicking through the pages of this week's mag with her mates in Starbucks and suddenly announcing, "Sod dancing round our handbags at the  cattle market club tonight, I think the waitress fancies me and you lot should all check out gaydargirls.com..."

Still, I thought you might want to have a look at the bits of the original article that were cut by the Grazia eds.


By my late 20s, I was sure of my sexual identity: a Lesbian Lothario enjoying the up-sides of being a sexual outlaw. The reckless excitement of the playground is one of the benefits of the lesbian dating game and a busy dyke bar on a Saturday night, heaving with a variety of hot female bodies contains all the mischief of an  X-rated Mallory Towers. Once I realised how exciting it was to have sex with a woman, I wanted to do it with every woman of every shape and size. One of my cruising buddies once observed, “You’re like a freak in one of those seaside competitions where you have to swallow as many hard boiled eggs as you can within 60 seconds.’
     Still, the first inklings that I didn’t necessarily believe my lesbian separatist rant was the night in the mid-1990s when I went to the Way Out Club- a friendly transvestite disco in the East End with clientele ranging from trucker trannies to early Veronica Lake lookalikes. When I saw a beautiful young man with amazing cleavage in a fierce red cocktail dress, my ‘blood flow increased significantly’ (this was the measurement of genital arousal used in a study in Toronto last summer to test the potential bisexuality of a group of men and women when shown various pictures). The idea of tits and a dick all in one package turned me on immensely and this pretty creature became my secret wank fantasy for many years to come. It also made me realise that bi-sexual is a pretty lame word because there are more that two ‘sexualities’. Where would my Gentleman In Red fit in, for instance?
 ...   
When I first met Jake, he told me he used to go to a bisexual group where he’d look around the room and pick out the straight bisexuals and the gay bisexuals. I thought that was funny and imagined a bisexual group version of that ‘who would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?’ game.  On one side of the table you’d have the straight female bisexuals (Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie) and the straight male bisexuals (David Bowie, Brett Anderson). On the other side, you’d have the gayboy bisexuals (Oscar Wilde, Rupert Everett) and the lesbian bisexuals (Vita Sackville West and Dusty Springfield).

I suppose you can see why they cut these bits. Imagine if chicks started saying, "Phwoar, I dont half fancy that bloke over there with the 38DD cup..." The world would be too, well, too exciting for words...

Actually, I just remembered. I concluded the Guardian Bisexual article with:

At midnight, there’d be a knock on the fantasy dinner party door and the beautiful man with tits and a dick I met one night at the Way Out Club in East London in the mid 90s would arrive.  S/he would inform the room that that bisexual is a rubbish word because there are more than two sexualities. And that by the way, a bunch of biological female tranny fags were on their way…

I assumed the Guardian eds didn't want their readers choking on their wheat-free muesli or maybe they wanted to give the space over to another dull article about eco sustainable carbon neutral cat food...

Hey, check out my first You Tube posting! This is the Andrei Sharov party in Moscow (where we had spam and cucumber as nibbles). You can see Michael Nyman and his child bride and Stephen Frears looking surprisingly un-grumpy. Sorry about the wobbly hand but I'd had a few of the vodka/espresso/cointreau shots by this time...

Did you see the story in this week's Grazia? Another bisexual thing. I admit I haven't dared open it yet- apparently I look very serious in the picture...
Meanwhile, I'm still recovering from a manic trip to Moscow this weekend with Pablo Ganguli and his merry band of cultural freaks including Stephen Frears, Stephen Jones, YBA Gavin Turk, Henry Holland and exotic heiress and erotic sonnet composer Amanda Eliasch who is like the naughty girl in the school dorm who initiates the midnight feast. (Very apt, actually, as her grandfather Sydney Gilliat was the creator of a lot of the St Trinians films). She lives between London, LA and Paris where she resides in Tamara de Lempika’s old studio in Montparnasse.
Anyway, here she is with mein host Pablo Ganguli himself at a Saturday night party at the house of Moscow's most famous fashion designer, Andrei Sharov:


The nibbles of the night were Spam and cucumber and whenever you told them you were tired and wanted to go back to the hotel, the Russians would tell you to have one of the vodka/espresso/cointreau shots they were serving at the bar. (Actually, they did work pretty well).

Meanwhile, the Standard called up this morning wanting a story about the 'AngloMockba Festival' so I cant give you the total low-down just yet. But before I forget and to make Pablo happy, can I just say that the BMI business class seats from Heathrow to Moscow and back were were like big, comfy pillows (Oh, actually, you have to say bmi becasue they get very cross if you use uper case) and the Swissotel Krasnye Holmy was great too. They had a range of pillows you could order from reception although by day three I was so tired, I kept walking into the mirrors that lined the walls of the room under the impression that they were fresh rooms.
Anyway, until the Evening Standard piece comes out, here are my favourite pics:


This is Henry Holland, the T-shirt supremo and best mate of model Agyness Deyn - they both come from the suburbs of Manchester. Henry was 4 days into a month-long no-drinking policy as he'd overdone it a bit of late and was getting ready for his birthday at the end of May. I liked the cute locket around his neck:



He said 'people always ask me what's inside and then it's a bit embarrassing because it's me- on my first day at school...'
Note the bitten fingernails. I love neurotic creatives – cigarettes, chewing gum and bitten nails, the mark of true genius. (Moscow, by the way, is an ideal place for fag smokers as you are still allowed to light up anywhere. Stephen Frears, Gavin Turk and Henry Holland are big puffers.

I also like this pic of Michael Craig-Martin, Amanda and her mystery friend, Julia in Red Square in front of St Basil's cathedral which is where Amanda's driver took us after the Spam party:


Michael Craig-Martin (on the left) is an artist and was the radical art school teacher to the YBAs. He seems sweet and quite shy. He said his face is so white that it usually disappears in pics but I think he looks OK here. He was really useful when we went to Dasha Zhukova's new art space (Dasha Zhukova is the girlfriend of that football bloke, Abramovich and also the new editor of Pop magazine). The space is called the Garage and when you go in this is what you see:


ie it's a bit like the Tate Modern and everyone says 'Wow, what an amazing space' as soon as they get in (becasue they can't think what to say about the art?) The scull here is by Subodh Gupta and it's made of kitchen pots and pans (although, entre nous, how bored am I of seeing sculls on every T-shirt, piece of jewellery and handbag these days. Can't they fetishise some other part of the human body- big toes, for example?). Having said that, the 'Fetish' show was excellent. Shoes are by Christian Louboutin (think stilettos with spikes coming through the soles, think pervy ballet slippers with spike heels and needle heels in handcuffs) and photos by David Lynch).
Still, the locals are a bit pissed off because there's not a single piece of art work by a Russian and they already had a contemporary art space (called Vinziwood) which is done in a much more 'cosy' Russian style.

The guards on the door were a bit over zealous on the security front. Photos were forbidden  but ha! Check out scull pic,  Mr KGB officers! They also confiscated our bottles of water (did they think we were boarding a plane?) and by the Jeff Koons hanging heart there was an alarm bell that went off if you got too near. But then, as Michael Craig Martin pointed out, The Koons heart (which formerly hung in Versailles in a recent exhibition) is worth 25 million pounds…

Meanwhile, my favourite bit of the weekend was my lone trip to the Izmaylova flea market. I was supposed to be going with Michael Nyman ( composer of music for The Piano). We'd arranged to meet at 8.30 at breakfast but he didn't show. His new girlfriend is a 25-year-old though and he fell asleep at various events throughout the weekend so I'm saying nothing...

Besides, Michael had talked about taking a car to the flea market, but as anyone will tell you who’s been to Moscow, the Metro is one of the wonders of the city- like a big underground ballroom with chandeliers and ballustrades and gilt, or a big art deco museum, depending which station you get off at. I took a Metro map and pointed at the stop I needed. To start with I asked the babushka old ladies. But while they were very nice, they didn’t speak any English. You soon realised that the young people with a certain fashion sense would be the best to help you. Not all the Metro stations are like ballrooms- the flea market stop called Partizanskaya is like a big, marble  art nouveau museum. Imagine if they had one of these at Picadilly Circus:


Best of all, unlike the so-called cutting edge West, you actually get chicks enshrined as revolutionary heroes in Russia. This foxy lady in silver is called Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya:



She was one of the most revered heroes of the Soviet Union for her role in trying to stop the Nazis in World War II. She was apparently inspired to dedicate her life to saving her country by a note her classmates sent her in school telling her to chill out a bit: ‘Know that most people are egoists, flatterers, insincere and you can't depend on them.’
She decided not to be an egoist and a flatterer.
The flea market was good- housed in a kind of wooden medieval palace- although there were no rabbit pelts- only more exotic pelts such as wolf and fox. Here’s seller trying to flog me a stoat thing:


The furs are slightly spooky because they’re like the alive animal but with all the meat sucked out.

Meanwhile, when it comes to learning Russian from the £4.99 Berlitz CD don’t bother with ‘how much is this?’ when it comes to commerce, any good seller will have learned English. Much better to put your efforts into  learning ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘straight on’ for directions.

OK kids, that's all for today. Stay tuned...

Went to Pablo Ganguli's party at Sketch last night (to celebrate this weekend's trip to Moscow) and I got a sudden sinking feeling that the group might be filled with needy, middle-aged men. There was Norman Rosenthal, the former Head of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy, who is usually described as 'temperamental and flamboyant'. He kissed my hand when I was introduced to him and it always makes me feel a bit queasy when a man does that. Stephen Frears was huddled in a corner looking grumpy, claiming he wasn't going to go to Moscow unless Meena Khera went too (she is a hard core PR chick who sent me to a brilliant psychic last week and who had taken Stephen to St Petersburg last year). Also skulking was Hanif Kureshi who asked me where we had met before. I told him, Marrakesh, as was the case and hoped he didn't remember that I jeered at him under the influence of too many funny cigarettes for not daring to put his feet in the swimming pool at Richard Branson's sister's villa.
The party was lively - we drank white wine and gin and Meredith Ostrom, the ex girlfriend of Nick Rhodes (of Duran Duran) did a show squeezing tubes of paint all over her naked body, although as paparazzo extraordinaire Dave Bennett  pointed out, it would have been better if she'd come out from behind the sheet of paper to do it (it was a tasteful shadow affair). Michael Portillo was there and also some chick called Lauren Crow who is putting together an American blockbuster book on Isabella Blow. When I asked her if I was in the story, she wanted to know my name and then gave a little shriek when I told her. 'But you're on my list!' she said, adding that we must go out for 'a boozy lunch'.
Meanwhile I am preparing myself for the Moscow trip - I've just bought a £4.99 Berlitz 'Learn Russian in 60 minutes' CD. I just want the basics like 'pri-vyet' (Hi) and 'Skol kah' (how much?). Sue Webster the artist told me to check out Dasha Zhukova's new art space called The Garage where she and Tim Noble are exhibiting at the moment. She also recommended going to the flea market- called the Izmaylovo market, because they have a good selection of rabbit pelts. I'm a bit obsessed with these at the moment. I fantasised all winter about covering a hot water bottle in one although the weather seems to have perked up a bit now. Still, as the saying goes, "cast ne'er a clout til May be out", so I might have use for one after all.
Here's a pic of me doing another reading at Gary Fairfull's night at Home in Shoreditch.


The chick in pink looks bored out of her scull, right? Also, it was really dark near the mike and I couldn't really see much but I bumped  into a chick called Vanessa who is Brett Anderson's manager. Brett, as you will know, is the Suede front man and has now gone solo. This time last year I met him through Meena Khera and he had a broken heart then. But now, Vanessa tells me, he is happy again and is getting married in May to an alternative therapy chick (I wonder if she knows Meena's psychic) so that was nice to hear. Brett is also recording a new album which should be out in September. Vanessa let me listen to a track on her touch screen Ipod- it was good, having that elegaic quality that Brett does so well although it is to be hoped that happiness does not damage his art as it has done to so many others.
Meanwhile, these readings and 'book boutiques' are springing up all over the place. I guess it's cheap entertainment in a time of recession. Jake went to one in Shoreditch house last week and the woman he sat next to at dinner started going on to him about the bisexual article we wrote in the Guardian (see 'Journalism').  Before the prawn cocktail starter was even over she was going on about how she was a bisexual too. I have had this experience of late as well- following that bloody article. Ie people doing Ancient Mariner stylee  confessions about their flexi-sexuality. It's a bit like that scene in the Life of Brian when all the about-to-be crucifed people suddenly all start claiming to be Brian of Nazareth:
'I'm Brian!
I'm Brian!
I'm Brian and so's my wife!')

Hooray- It's all over! And I'm not yet burried at the bottom of the Thames in a concrete overcoat. I think enough famous people and, well, niche famous people turned up to make the hotel PR happy ie people youve heard of if you read glossy magazines- Pam Hogg, Stephen Webster, Immodesty Blaize, India-Jane Birley and Kim Hersov my fashion stylist friend from Harper's. There's a great selection of pics on Daffyd Jones' site at
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/47093,life,in-town-last-night-stephanie-theobalds-gothic-fantasies

where you will be able to see my naked lady dress (naked Marilyn Monroe on the front) in a bit more detail-  'bold'  the Evening Standard called it, meaning only just on the right side of diaphanous.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of snaps I took on the night of  me and Pam...


...and me and Immodesty:


More esoteric guests included Anthony Hayden-Guest, who wrote The Last Party, one of the best books about Studio 54 and about clubbing/druggy culture in general and who spent most of the night schmoozing the London Evening Standard books editor, David Sexton. There was Ivor Braka, the art dealer that same newspaper recently referred to as one of the most influential power players in London. He is a bit funny-looking (skinny with straggly hair that he thinks looks divine and I think he came because he fancies both Kim Hersov and India Jane Birley. There was Martin Creed, the artist who did that brilliant running installation at the Tate Britain and Sue Webster of the Tim Noble/Sue Webster artistic duo.  Oh and the people the Scousers termed the 'International Gate Crashers'. The pic they used in the Evening Standard (below) has one of them in the background which is a bit of a shame because it makes it look like the party was full of frumps. Basia Briggs, the wife of Dick who runs the riding stables in Hyde park, pointed them out immediately to me . 'They come to every party,' Basia said, sinisterly. 'They're impostors, you know..."

Meanwhile, this was the official version of events in The Evening Standard the next day:


They say that Ozwald Boateng was at the Langham, but actually, he was  only at the after-party in the 'unfinished' Josh Lilley gallery (the ever-charismatic Frances Barber was there too- fresh from Madame de Sade at the Wyndam theatre where she plays the whip wielding countess). Poor Marc from Grazia came to the Josh Lilley after party too and got head butted by one of my friends from Paris (a normally erudite soul who says that Apollo was the god of boxing and poetry). Alas,  his thoughts had swung to the boxing end of the spectrum as he staggered around the 'unfinished art gallery' in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Still, as Marc philosophised, there is something quite glamorous about a bloody eyebrow after 3 previous hours of drinking Ruinart and vodka cocktails in the art deco bar of a five star hotel (and a lot of fish-based canapes. In fact, I noticed that quite a few of the guests I spoke to in the course of the night had prawn-breath so I didn't eat anything for the duration of festivities and by the time I finally got home at about 2, I was gagging for the tin of Heinz spaghetti I'd laid aside for the occasion- it was such a relief to eat spaghetti on toast after all that).
One of my favourite guests at the Langham was endlessly genial Nicholas Grace who played the fop Anthony Blanche in the only credible version of Brideshead Revisisted -the one filmed in the 1980s. He didn't witness the head butting finale at the after-party  because he was way-laid by the star-struck Langham PR who invited him to dinner the hotel.   Nicholas said he accepted with alacrity and yet he soon found he had to sing his way through the night ie by doing endless impressions from his Anthony Blanche role. The PR was especially keen on the scene in the film about Brandy Alexanders where Blanche buys a round of the cocktails for Charles Ryder, going, “Two for you and two for me, yum yum”).
Here's what Nicholas Grace ('Knicker' to his friends) looked like at the Langham party:

And here's how he looked in the famous 'Bwandy Alexander' scene:


I thanked him for keeping the PR happy and said I owed him a drink next time I saw him. But Knicker just said, with the pragmatism of a true actor, 'Oh don't worry about it, I got a free dinner after all.'
Apparently, at pretty much every dinner party Knicker goes to, he's  asked to perform renditions of his stuttery scenes from Brideshead (especially, “Nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you m-m-meaty boys." So maybe the Brandy Alexander line was a bit of a holiday for him...)
Sounds like a good idea for a one-man play to me, the actor who is forever hounded by a bit part he played in the past but who is philosophical about it because at least he gets to eat steak and exotic cheeses once in a while.

Here is me, Jake and Pincus in my parents room at the Langham at about 5.45, about 15 minutes before we made our descent down the grand staircase at the beginning of the night


You probably can't see it, but as well as wearing a doublet and hose number, Pincus is also sporting a cheeky orange stick-on eyelash. Pincus was amazing on the clearing-up front at the Josh Lilley Gallery which was pretty much like a building site when we'd arrived there that afternoon. Jake was good too. He'd never been there before and looked horrified when he saw how much sweeping up there was to do- I just made my excuses and said I had to go to Selfridges to get my face done.

Oh and here are my parents in their room just before the party.


It was sweet to see them so excited about the hotel room- my dad was even  taking pictures of the carpet.

Meanwhile, back to the Langham party I felt, to be honest, like one of those Second Life people all night, ie an avatar or a person impersonating Stephanie Theobald because I went through all the motions of saying hello to people and saying, Oh thank you so much for coming', and posing for the paps (as Dave Bennet, pap supremo commented: 'Who'd of bleeding thought that we'd of ended up snapping you!') and yet it wasnt until about 9pm when everything was calming down a bit that I realised, Wow, that was it- I did it!
It was defo a good party compared to lots of the glorified business meetings you go to these days and I was pleased I'd got out all the names of the sponsors during my speech and made the joke about Salman Rushdie not having Maxmara stockings in his goodie bag at his book launch (naturally, he didnt even have a goodie bag). I put the good atmosphere down to the fact that a lot of my friends (like my old journo friends from The European) have kids now and hardly ever get out. Although, come to think of it, the Scouse posse actually DO get out rather a lot but they never seem unable to have a good time...

Meanwhile,  I was glad that the pic came out OK in the Evening Standard.  Bronwyn Cosgrave, my fashion friend, advised me to go to the Chanel counter in Selfridges to get my make up done beforehand which I did. (This is a good tip incidentally- they make you look fantastic and then you just have to spend £20 on products. To get a professional make-up artist round to your house is upwards of 150 quid).

Anyway, for those of you interested in the novel as opposed to the gossip and make-up tips, I will be doing a reading tomorrow evening, April 24,  at Lenin's Promise in Shoreditch at 7.30 (106 Leonard Street, EC2, entry, £5.00)

....No, this is not referring to the Grazia shoot that happened today but the bloody party tomorrow night, or should I say parties. I'll let you know how they go very soon but here, to sate your appetites for a little glamour is a pic I took after the shoot today:




There's Jake Arnott in the white t-shirt (that lean cuisine diet of the past week has served him well)  and Marc Morgan, the Grazia art director. The guy with the funny fingers goes by the name of Perou. He was the photographer and apparently he's been on Make Me A Supermodel so all the people in his local shop know him, although he is better known for taking pics of the rich and famous.  He was really good on the gossip front but when I told him I had a blog he told me not to dish too much dirt. Apparently though, Eminem is cripplingly shy and Dita Von Teese did well to get out of that Manson relationship. There, that's quite enough excitement for one day. I'm off to get an early night...

...Gosh, such a lot has happened since I last wrote, (she said, breathlessly). Well, actually, nothing much has happened. It's been a really stressful week as it goes, and then today, a little fashion-bunny-ness fell into my life and things got much better. I went to Giles Deacon's studio off Brick Lane to get fitted up for an outfit for THE party next week. I got the chance to borrow an outfit from 'Giles' (as he is known to all serious fashion bunnies) through my friend Marc from Grazia (Jake and I are doing a shoot with them on Monday morning on the old Betty Bothways theme - on similar lines to the Guardian story that was published this week (check out 'journalism'). I'm kind of glad that interest has moved away from the celebs and onto something that I care about a little more passionately ie sexual politics. Still, it's pretty weird that a mainstream mag like Grazia is interested in that kind of thing but actually, I think Marc from Grazia fancies Jake a bit although maybe I'm wrong and he wants to further the cause of the gender liberation struggle.
Meanwhile, back to Giles' massive, light and airy studio at about 5pm this afternoon. I was met by a friendly chick called Alcie who showed me some camouflage dresses with wings and flaps on them and also some more shere stuff (one with a blurred print of a naked silver screen actress on it). She said it'd be OK to change in the loos and I was about to walk to the door when Giles lui- meme comes rushing up, saying that no, no, of course I mustn't change in the loos and that there was a special room for me to go to. He was being jovial about it and when he gave me the 'bise' (the kiss on both cheeks) I told him that he smelled nice. "Really?' he said. "Yes", I said. "Like churches."
 I think it might have been that Comme Des Garcons perfume that smells of Catholic mass but  I figured bringing up other fashion brand names might not be good form. Anyway, he left me in the posh room - another white, airy and light room- to try on the outfits. I tried on a yellow camouflage dress and a pink one and then a cool chick called Hazel came in and took some pics of me in both dresses on her Blackberry to show me what I looked like. She said lots of nice, encouraging things like, "Yellow's best because it suits your colour and shows your legs off more.'
Here she is:

I know, lame photo because I've cut off her fantastic shoes- purple Prada platforms. She also had a cardigan with gold cats appliqued to it which she took off for the pic. She designs for Mulberry and Giles and we both agreed that varitety is the spice of you know what.
I was nearly sold on the yellow camouflage dress and then I tried the one with the naked chick on and - well. Giles came in and said 'THAT is the one!" He has a great manner- very easy and jokey. I wondered if it was a bit too see-through and he just said, 'Oh no, all the better!'. Both Giles and Hazel are from 'The North' and I hope they didn't mind when I slipped into my northern accent to  make jokes about how apt it was to have a naked actress on my body the night of THE party. Even though I'm from Cornwall, I've been doing this Northern comedy accent since I was 16 and went up to London to visit my friend Helen who'd just started university and was living with this Sloane Ranger in Fulham. They used to watch TV together and make funny comments about things in Northern accents. Anyway, I'm still doing it. I think all those early years of watching Coronation Street influenced us all a lot, although my favourite place in the North these days is Liverpool. Actually, it's my favourite place in England, after Falmouth.
Meanwhile, I love the way that Northern people  are flamboyant in the way they dress. When  Shaun Ryder, the smack head one from the Happy Mondays  moved down to London he said something like, 'I'll have to start dressing down now I live in Hampstead.'
A lot of people assume that Giles is gay because he's in fashion, but as far as I can see, he's just a hetero man from the north who likes clothes a lot (although naturally, like most fashion designers he just wears jeans-and a t-shirt to work - but very clean ones). 
Anyway, I'll probably be wearing this naked actress dress for the party because it looks great and there's probably some line I can spin about having a lesbian frock on.
Meanwhile, the best thing about the trip to Giles' studio was this:


Check out Giles' bike - and that's him, in a comfy leather chair, on the phone. The bike is one of those really impressive ones with only one break that I'm not sure how they work. I didn't realise until I was leaving that he was a cyclist. We could have swapped notes on good waterproof clothing to wear. It was tipping it down all afternoon but luckily I had my neoprene galoshes on. They're amazing- you zip them on like a frogman and your feet stay warm and dry. Scarily enough, I picked up info about them from a leaflet in a cycling shop written by that Boris Johnson bloke but I normally keep this under my (non-waterproof Rapha) cycling cap. Anyway, as you can see, Giles was on the phone, so we couldn't stay and chat about sprockets and Hybrids versus Racers but he said he is coming to the party at the Langham so that's good.
I then cycled down to Erdem's studio five minutes away on the Bethnal Green Road. Erdem is in much more of a fledgling stage of the fashion business (I got changed in the handicapped toilet at his smaller studio) but he's doing well and he manages to combine impeccable politeness with a swish of cynicism. I actually met him a few years ago at a lezza mate's party (known as 'Soho Alison'). Erdem is Canadian and kind of looks like Yves Saint Laurent. He definitely has that attractively nervy Saint Laurent manner about him. Here he is holding a Toile de Jouy-print frock which comes from this season's Spring/Summer collection:


I told him it was a great coincidence because API has a big Toile de Jouy theme in it- well, there's a lot of Toile de Jouy wallpaper. As you might know, Toile de Jouy has lots of woodland scenes and sprigs of trees with nymphs and goddesses and hunting dogs springing out of them. Erdem's toile dress concept is to make the cloth look as if it has been lying out in the sun for a while and then maybe it has been rained on a lot. I think it's great and I'd probably wear it teemed up with a leather jacket- although the naked actress concept takes some beating.
Here's me and Erdem pretending we're at one of Soho Alison's crazy parties. (Erdem's coming to THE party too):


As I cycled home in my ludicrous waterproof outfit, I realised how I miss the fashion world. There is a lightness of spirit about it and that is a relief after all those dark art parties where people burn their arms with cigarettes for effect. The other good thing about fashion is that it gives you a big boost to your ego. As I was prancing around in Giles's posh room with Hazel going "oh yes, fab- that one's really you!" I felt something like a sugar rush pass through me and I wondered later if that was narcissism or vanity. Narcissism is when you love yourself without need for flattery from anyone else and vanity is when you are gagging for people to give you compliments. So maybe it was a mix of both.

Oh yes, talking of vanity, I had a stroke of luck with a peacock today. In this clothes shop called Bolongaro Trevor opposite the Harper's Bazaar offices on Broadwick Street I noticed all these stufffed birds in glass cases- among the hareem pants and the chenille blouses. Most magnificent of all was a stuffed peacock! (Symbolic of vanity, as it also struck me on my bike ride home). So, perfect to have on the bar at the API launch party (there is a lot of vanity in the novel for those of you who haven't got round to reading it yet). I spoke to one of Trevor's people and it turns out I can borrow the peacock if I give them a mention on my post-party press release, which is fine by me. As my publicist from Hodder said, 'You're amazing at blagging stuff'. I couldn't help but agree with him although it did cross my mind that he could have made some similar comment about my writing skills. Hey ho. On the morning of my last book launch party- for Trix- my agent called up to tell me she had a great idea for making money. Writing a series of blockbusters about the lesbian underworld, I surmised? Writing the screen play for Sucking Shrimp for the movie Stephen Frears is desperate to make? It turned out to be neither of these. "Espadrilles!" she exclaimed down the phone. "You know, espadrilles are really cheap in Spain. You could make a bunch of money if you imported them to the UK'.
That woman is no longer my agent.

Oh, and I will be doing another reading next Friday, April 24 at 106 Leonard Street in Shoreditch at a new book salon place called Lenin's Promise. It's run by a man called Gary Fairfull who is pally with all the YBAs. He used to have an illegal bar in his house which used to open until the early hours (in the days before the YBA's- Tracey, Damien, the Chapman brothers and now Gregor Muir with his fat cat job running Hauser and Wirth gallery- got all full, fat and forty). The illegal bar was closed down a couple of years ago and Gary was thought to have run off to the Bahamas but he's now back. The place opens from 2pm to 3am every Fri and Sat, apparently but that's all I know so far.  Stay tooned for further details.

Meanwhile, I must go now and get an early night. The thing I have noticed about successful people (cf Giles and Erdem) is that they work very hard, often on weekends. I have to shut myself in my bedroom  and cobble up a new take on the Betty Bothways story for Grazia....