The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  She looked at me in disbelief.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Yes, well, all right, I know I already have . . . but it’s . . . I don’t know . . . just too odd to be doing with that when you know you’ve got a husband somewhere, even if it’s not a marriage any more. Married is married, ’ I explained. ‘Anyway, he grabbed my leg.’

  The disbelief on her face went all the way up to eleven. ‘You’re insane,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You were dancin’ with him! Really well! And he’s ’andsome and fancied you, and it’s been ages since you had a shag, izzeht.’

  ‘Fi, I don’t judge men by how long it’s been since the last one,’ I said snootily, and completely believed it until the next morning, when I woke up and thought, ‘Oh, arse.’

  Back at work, and in an idle moment I turned to Faceache and had a trawl for my Cricket Boy. ‘There he is,’ I told Princess Flashy Knickers, turning my screen round so she could see his profile picture. ‘What d’you think?’

  She looked critically at the tall, handsome man and then said: ‘Tell me again why you didn’t shag him?’

  ‘I’d only just met him!’

  ‘Are you aware we’re in the twenty-first century? You don’t need to meet his parents first these days. And you said he was a really good dancer. You know what that means.’

  I grumbled to myself for a bit, and then she said: ‘Why don’t you make a friend request? He might be back down south and you can meet him again.’

  Horror shot through me. ‘I can’t do that! Oh my God, what if he can’t remember me, what if he didn’t like me, what if he says no?’

  Princess rolled her eyes. ‘Well, poke him, then.’

  ‘POKE him? Are you insane? I’m thirty years old, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, look, just bloody poke him, and then he’ll poke you back, and then you can be friends, OK?’ she said huffily, turning my screen back round and throwing the mouse at me. ‘Click on it! Go on, bloody click on “poke”!’

  ‘Princess Sophia Flashy Knickers Waddington, I am absolutely totally and not, no how, never and no way going to use poking as a method of flirting!’ I cried, as she forcibly positioned my fingers on the mouse and moved the cursor over the ‘poke’ button.

  ‘Do it!’ she growled.

  ‘No! I can’t! I won’t! What if he wants to get married? I’ve still got a husband! Oh Christ, no! He might want his bride to wear white! I can’t! Gaaaaaaah!’ I screamed back, until she brought her fist down on top of my hand and the screen popped up with a message: ‘You have poked Cricket Boy.’

  Silence fell. ‘OhshitwhathaveIdone?’ I whimpered.

  Princess sat back down in her chair with a satisfied air. ‘There. Don’t say I never do anything for you.’

  It sounds ridiculous, but I was genuinely as scared as when you like that boy at school when you’re eight, and are terrified he might find out. I sat, wide-eyed and softly sweating with fear, for ten minutes until I got a message. ‘Cricket Boy has poked you.’

  ‘OH. MY. GOD. Princess, he’s poked me! He’s poked me! Now what do I do?’ I demanded, all of aflutter.

  ‘Make a friend request,’ she said patiently.

  ‘I can’t do that! Oh no, never! I shall return the poke, there, I can do that, that’s easy. Look, I did it all on my own.’ I clicked and looked proudly at Princess.

  She stared at me quietly, then turned to Bridget and said: ‘You’ll have to take over. I can’t deal with this any more.’

  The afternoon wore on, with Cricket Boy and I in a poke frenzy, and each refusing to be the one to make a friend request. It must have happened six or seven times, on each occasion driving my colleagues further into despair, until finally I had the message, ‘You have a friend request,’ and I leapt from my chair with delight. Everyone else was so thrilled their torture was coming to an end they threw their hands in the air with relief, and a sarcastic Mexican wave went the entire length of the newsroom.

  Even Bish joined in, and then said: ‘What were all that about?’

  Bridget and Princess breathed out. ‘Thank God for that,’ said Bridge. ‘Now, will you shut up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quite chirpily, clicking on ‘confirm friend’. ‘But, you know, I’m not used to this flirting business. This is all a bit weird.’

  ‘Only the way you do it,’ grumped Princess.

  I sighed. ‘Yes, but the point is you guys are used to it,’ I said, waving a hand at the screen. ‘Internet etiquette and when to poke or not to poke, dancing with someone in a bar and going home with them if you like them. I’ve been with one guy for the best part of a decade, and last time I was single we didn’t have poking. We barely had email, for God’s sake. This is all new and strange, and I don’t get it. It’s like being a Tudor peasant suddenly dumped in the middle of the M25 with a Bluetooth headset and a laptop. It’s freaking me out.’

  Bridget looked at me. ‘You didn’t flirt with Twatface after you were married?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe I should have.’

  And I should have danced more, too. Next time – if I get a next time – I’ll try to keep on flirting and shaving my legs, and won’t leave the nice knickers at the back of the drawer. And it would be nice – although I know the thinking behind this is as much of a fallacy as Father Christmas – if my next lover was someone who could whirl me round the floor like Cinderella and make an effort to avoid my toes.

  Just then my screen flashed. ‘You have one new message.’

  ‘Hello, Cinders!’ wrote Cricket Boy. ‘How’re your feet?!’

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE

  ‘SOME clever chap – apparently there was one, once, like, ages ago – said that all beliefs were a matter of faith, right; so that means believing in Father Christmas is just as valid as believing in God,’ I theorized to the bar at large, pleased at myself for sounding so intellectual despite being horizontal on a manky sofa, with an inflatable beehive on my head.

  ‘Yes, but right, that’s bollocks, isn’t it?’ said Bridget, who was on her hands and knees under the table looking for a 20p piece, using the light of her mobile phone.

  ‘Why? Santa’s probably got a slightly bigger following than God, and at least he hands out presents once a year rather than all this guilt and afterlife crap,’ pointed out Porter from a precarious bar stool.

  Bridget banged her head on the underneath of the table in her outrage. ‘People live their entire lives based on their faith, you know, and do nice things with it as a result,’ she insisted, lifting her reddened face into view and puffing her hair out of her eyes. ‘Found it. Where’s that sweet machine?’

  ‘Yes, but, OK, there was this other bloke who said that faith is just the way you hold on to an idea that you’ve already arrived at by logic,’ I continued.

  Buff, who was lying on the floor trying to drunkenly text a hooker he did a buy-up with two weeks ago, after which he had announced, ‘She’s not that bad, y’know, for a fifty-year-old brass,’ decided to butt in. ‘How can you have faith in something that’s logical?’ he said. ‘That’s like trusting that something which already works is going to work. It’s ridiculous. It’s not like the sun coming up in the morning is an act of faith, it’s a matter of astrophysisis . . . isis . . . cisic . . . it just happens.’

  ‘My phone’s dead, I can’t see a bloody thing. Was it on the left or on the right?’ wailed Bridge from a darkened corner of the dingy bar.

  ‘Look, you know what I mean,’ I said. ‘The point is, right, that . . .’

  ‘Seriously, where’s the bladdy machine? I’ve lost it!’ Bridget howled a semi-octave higher.

  ‘. . . that I was trying to make before I was so rudely interrupted by Bridget’s quest for another jelly baby – IT’S OVER THERE BY THE BOGS, for God’s sake, woman, it’s the same place it’s been in all night! – is that faith defies logic, by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. QED.’

  ‘But you can lose your faith and retain your lo
gic,’ pointed out Porter, tossing peanuts into the air, one at a time, and looking surprised as they missed his mouth and bounced off his nose, chin and then an eye. ‘Ow.’

  ‘Soooo,’ I said. ‘And this is the point I’ve been trying to get at for the past half hour, right, if you lose your faith and then deduce there is a Santa or God or whatever, it’s not faith, it’s deduction. If I work out whether to trust Cricket Boy not to do the same as Twatface, is that actually trust?’

  There was a thunk and a mechanical grinding noise and Bridget came back, chewing joyfully. ‘Got the last one,’ she said happily, plonking herself down on the sofa and upending the dregs of a bottle of Number 17 Reserve port into a beer glass. ‘Your problem with Cricket Boy is not whether you can trust him, it’s when you’re going to get your leg over.’

  ‘Exactly. You’re not about to get married after a couple of pokes on Faceache, for Pete’s sake! Christ, women are mad!’ grumbled Buff. ‘Besides, if ever there was an argument that there could not possibly be an intelligent creator it’s Bish. I mean, look at him. Who would design that?’

  We all regarded our news editor silently, as he lay quietly and near-horizontal in an armchair, tie askew and shirt undone, paunch spilling forth, with a plastic flower sticking out of one ear and the words, ‘If found, inform police’ scrawled across his forehead in marker pen. He snored softly, a Christmas cracker paper hat somehow still perched upon the thick brown hair he insisted was his own.

  ‘Proof, if ever any were needed, that life is a chaotic system,’ said Porter definitively, brushing the nuts from his hands and standing mostly up. ‘There’s no way you can explain Bish unless all of life is completely random. And that means you need to stop fretting about stuff you can’t know, and just shag this bloke and see what happens.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, pulling the beehive from my sweaty head and giving it a scratch.

  ‘Really. It’s a traditional method which works perfectly well for the rest of humankind, so it’s good enough for you. You don’t want to buck tradition, it’ll only bite you on the arse if you try. Right, I’m off home. The Minicab Rapist has already left, right?’

  ‘Ages ago,’ I assured him, knowing full well the photographer in question was lurking outside, waiting for someone to hail a taxi so he could ask to share it and bag himself another victim for the darkroom wall.

  Riding back home by myself in a cab – having given it twenty minutes for Porter and his would-be assailant to get gone – my inebriated mind turned, as it is wont to when there’s no one to snog, to matters philosophical and whether what was traditional was necessarily clever. Tradition tells us to do the same thing, over and over, without questioning it, and in the belief that what’s always happened is what should continue to happen for evermore. You see your family at Christmas, you have the same arguments with your folks you’ve always had; you meet a boy and jump into bed because there’s no reason not to. But if we did what’s always been done, wronged spouses would stay with their Twatfaces, we’d all be living in the villages our grandparents were born in, and Isaac Newton would never have wondered why apples drop down rather than up.

  The real reason we celebrate Christmas has less to do with the supposed birthday of an alleged prophet and is more closely related to the fact that for tens of thousands of years humans have had a big party in the middle of winter as a way of marking the halfway point. The tradition of slaughtering a big fat animal, roasting it, and everyone gorging themselves until they’re sick, has its roots deep at the back of our skulls, along with the pituitary gland and the libido and all the other important bits that tell us who we are. If you stripped out the pagan stuff from Christmas no one except the Queen would bother with it any more. And she would soon get bored.

  But that’s the thing about tradition: after a while it kills the true reason for things, and you forget why you’re doing it in the first place, so you tack on meanings that don’t have much to do with the cause. Habit inures you to the rut you’re in, so that you never question it or try to climb out, which is why I’m actually starting to feel frightened about what will happen when my divorce comes through.

  It has been the central pivot of my life for so long that considering what will happen when it’s no longer there is like being told there’ll be no oxygen tomorrow. What am I supposed to do without it?

  And then there’s Cricket Boy. It’s a safe flirtation with him hundreds of miles away in Leeds. Sometimes we text so much it seems ridiculous, but if I had to speak to him in person or he asked to see me I think I’d take to my heels like Forrest Gump. I haven’t even told him I’m married and getting divorced. Are you obliged to tell people up front, like with HIV?

  He’s just the next boy in the queue, I expect, nothing important or special beyond being Mr Right Now. I need to go through a few different boys, I think, not so much to live it up but simply to heal all the bits that are broken.

  Mr Wonderful, were he here right now, would be confronted with someone too terrified to speak to him in person, who would go mental if he left the toilet seat up. The only way I can see to fix that stuff is to practice, over and over again: how to flirt, how to date, how to hold someone’s hand or let them meet my friends.

  Each chap is a stepping stone to being better at those things, so that when Mr Wonderful pitches up I don’t have to say: ‘Hello, nice to meet you, could you possibly come back in a year or so when I’m sane?’

  It was all so much easier, last time I was single. Why does it have to be so flipping complicated?

  By the time the cab got home I had given up overthinking all this rubbish, which was exactly the spirit in which I had gone out that night in the first place.

  One of the more addictive traditions we all hold to at this time of year is that at the works Christmas party you have to get the drunkest you’ve been all year, or indeed at any point previously in your life, in order to forget it. It’s a habit which in Fleet Street turns the festive season from a time of drunken peace and goodwill into a Saturnalia so debauched even Nero would make his excuses and leave.

  Earlier that night the female reporters had all squeezed into new frocks and shoes, cackling and gossiping and sharing mascara in the ladies’ loos at the office. Our male counterparts had gone so far as to straighten their ties as they waited for us to pile out, giggling, like an advert for hold-it-all-in big knickers, and jump in a series of taxis. Bish had made a proper effort, with a clean pair of corduroys and a fresh packet of Woodbines, while Evil Elliot had decked himself out in a pristine white shirt, black suit, and shoes so polished he could see up his own snooty nose. Tanya Banks, inexplicably, was in a mud-brown tight dress that made her look like a stool sample. I’m not being mean, she really did.

  Our crocodile of cabs wound their way to a bar in the West End which used to be trendy and is now slightly run-down, and therefore available at a knockdown rate to the staff of a newspaper whose budgets are always being revised downwards. Despite the ‘current economic climate’ The Editor had splashed out on a £50 chocolate fountain, a sweet machine which dispensed jelly babies for 20p a pop, and a CD with the word ‘megamix’ on the side, which was played in a loop for hours while we scoffed the kind of miniaturized food which is always served at these things.

  We turned up at the same time as the photographers, who, in their normal monkey fashion, had gathered in a pub over the road for a quick chimp about lenses and a couple of drinks to stiffen their spines before they had to enter a bar without straw on the floor. The fellas had struggled in from their patches all over the country, from Nick the Wop who sat in a corner like Marlon Brando receiving requests, ‘On dis, de day of de Christmas pardy,’ to Matt the Missile, a photographer so slow and steady and unlikely to get the picture that he is for ever put on overnight watches, sat on his own in the wee hours in a freezing cold Mondeo while everyone else sleeps. I waved at Nick on my way to the bar, and he squinted short-sightedly at me while pouring himself a large glass of Chianti.
r />   ‘Oo zat?’ he said.

  ‘It’s me, Nick. You’ve forgotten your contact lenses again. Want a drink?’

  ‘Nah, mite, I go’wan. Es’cuse me, I ’av to talk to sam people.’

  I wandered to the bar, but got waylaid by the Missile, whose guidance systems usually bring him straight up to me before anyone else.

  ‘Hiiiii,’ he said to me slowly. ‘How aaaaare . . .’

  ‘Oh, hi, Matt, I’m fine. Gosh, you look well,’ I said quickly, desperate not to get stuck. ‘Oh look, is that Nick waving at you?’

  I backed away while his attention was diverted, safe in the knowledge it would take fifteen minutes or more for the Missile to realize he was off-course and do a U-turn, and I had just ordered a couple of bottles of fizz for the girls when Mike the Bike bundled up to me. As a man who spends most of his days freezing in motorcycle leathers on street corners, sucking on a dog-end before gunning his Kawasaki and chasing fleeing celebrities through London traffic or up the motorways, he is unused to the social niceties, and so began shouting in my face about how ‘fookin’ BRILLIANT’ the party was, but how he wasn’t going to take any shit off the Wop, ‘Just cos he thinks he’s the FOOKIN’ boss of me.’ I stood and looked at him, noted the pupils so dilated they’d spread behind his ears, wiped some spit off my cheek, and asked him politely whether half past six wasn’t a little early to be starting on the marching powder.

  Just as he launched into a diatribe on the beauties of cocaine, tiny wee Jock Beckett ambled up in his normal Glaswegian fashion and picked a fight with Mike about how he’d managed to lose a TV presenter’s bright red Ferrari on a wet day last week, and I was able to escape back to my fellow blunts to get hammered. Someone had brought some unfunny inflatable sheep and wigs, and it didn’t take long for us to be drunk enough to find them amusing.

  Now at every Christmas do – and Fleet Street is just the same – there are only two rules: 1) You will have to talk to the boss, and 2) You can’t get drunk until after you talk to the boss.