by Grace Dent
Reporting on famous people didn’t interest me, but writing about real people did. Being twenty-seven, with no babies, no steady boyfriend and literally nothing to tie me down gave me freedom to jump on long-haul flights at a few hours’ notice.
‘Right, Grace, it’s a waterpark in Hernando County in Tampa,’ Marianne, the editor of M, would say. ‘They have a daily mermaid display where local girls in fishtails swim about doing aquatic tricks. I need you to go and audition to be a mermaid.’
‘But I’m not a brilliant swimmer,’ I’d say.
‘That makes it funnier!’ she’d laugh. And by 5 p.m. I’d be in Boots at Heathrow Airport panic-buying a verruca sock. The weekend would be spent jetlagged wearing a spandex fishtail. The following weeks would feature a trip to the Bakken amusement park outside Copenhagen for the World Santa Claus Congress, where thousands of avuncular men dressed in red velour suits swapped tips on fake beards and dealing with advent grotto burnout. After that I was off to a nudist resort in Catalonia to play giant chess in the buff with a team of enthusiastic naked Germans.
Phone calls home to Mam and Dad back in boring old Carlisle began to grow further apart. Friends I’d had in my first months in London – Clare, the Eva team, my old uni crowd – fell by the wayside, replaced by fourteen-day American excursions to Miami and Upstate New York or to Negril in Jamaica, travelling with photographers who very often I’d met only for the first time at the airport before embarking on days of winging it, interviewing and photo-sessions in full Magenta Devine mode, before returning home to the UK to type it up through the night in my tiny box bedroom in Putney. Still, there are few things, I was starting to see, that are lonelier than pushing a trolley through the arrivals gate after a super-exciting foreign trip to find absolutely nobody at the airport to meet you; than no one caring that you’re home safe as no one really noticed you’d gone. Because everyone has largely given up trying to keep track.
However, each time I appeared in the newspaper, something made up for any of these minor stabs of self-pity.
‘Are you … that girl from the Mirror?’ a woman asked me one morning on the Victoria Line.
‘Yes, yes, I am,’ I said.
‘Oh good, I like you, you’re very funny,’ she said and walked off.
And there it was. At last. That feeling was terrific.
Strangers knew my name. It felt better than love. This was exactly the kind of fabulous, starry, spiritually cleansing incident I’d dreamed of when I sat in the Binns café with Darren and Caroline, thirteen years previously, under a pile of crimped hair reading out my minuscule NME debut. Soon, something even more triumphant appeared on the horizon. My first ever TV appearance: on a late-night regional debate show hosted by one of my heroes – a glamorous female football manageress called Karren Brady. The topical debate I was chipping in on was the heady topic of whether having sex with 100 people during a one-week package holiday in Kavos was really good for one’s self-worth. Rather prudishly, I was arguing possibly not.
On the train to Nottingham to film the show, I felt bilious with fright. My new slimming obsession, the Atkins Diet, wasn’t helping. One solitary boiled egg for breakfast, then black coffee for lunch and dinner with occasional pieces of grilled chicken had indeed given me a size-ten body and cheekbones like razors, but I also had breath like Satan’s bumcleft and the occasional minor blackout. Importantly, though, I was camera-ready, as they say in showbusiness – which means suitable at a given moment to slot into a TV show. This actually means twelve pounds under your body’s natural resting weight and with a haircut that costs at least £100 a trim. I was camera-ready to meet Karren Brady, and at midnight I sat on the front row of the audience feeling hot and bilious, repeating inside my head the two clever lines that I was determined to say regardless of whatever question was asked. As the camera panned towards me, somehow, in some manner, I stuttered them out. At least, I think I did. I made a noise, for sure, and received some sort of minor applause from those around me. I floated into the green room afterwards as high as a kite. I had been on live television, for thirty-three seconds, after midnight, on a channel that broadcasted mainly to Nottingham. More people would have seen me on CCTV if I’d been shoplifting in ASDA.
Still, I was a television star.
The doors to heaven had been flung open wide.
March 2000
Despite now being a bona fide Z-list celebrity and international jetsetter, there was one genre of journalist invitation that instilled fear in me. Gastronomical extravaganzas, where the crowd would be mainly food or wine experts – such as a trip I was offered to Paris to celebrate the opening of a spectacular new wine cellar, featuring an overnight stay at the luxurious, totally unmissable George V hotel just off the Champs-Élysées. The guestlist was a crowd of wine experts from trade magazines; there were a lot of Huberts, Pierres and Hectors. After RSVPing yes, I fretted for days about the decision. The way people acted around fine wines and wine lists was terrifying. It felt like a secret language requiring decades of experience, rooted in childhood, which I could never catch up on. Before leaving my grand hotel suite on the Friday evening to meet the group, I necked a shot of Drambuie for courage. Waiting for me in the lobby was a group of rather well-upholstered men from the Home Counties with wry smiles, red veins sweeping up from their noses and wispy eyebrows. There were also two women with straight, mousy hair; one had a velour Alice band, the other seemed to be called Boudica. In the twinkling lobby they swapped anecdotes about recent trips to the Napa Valley, Languedoc-Roussillon and Patagonia. They name-checked specific vineyards, soil slopes, water run-offs and mineral levels, and debated the arguments for and against traditional Quercus robur barrels. I wanted the floor to swallow me up.
As we took our places at the magnificent table, a myriad of staff began to flap about making everything perfect, as they always do when the table is full of journalists. Why did I come on this trip? I asked myself. My fleeting knowledge of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz would only stretch so far before the truth was known that I was, beneath all the swagger, just a gap-toothed Eliza Doolittle. At any point the sommelier was bound to ask me to choose wine for the table, forcing me to flap through his multi-paged laminated hellscape of un-pronounceable names. As Hector – resplendent in a tweed waistcoat and natty bowtie – took the chair beside me and the waiter tucked him in, I closed my eyes and regained my composure. Then the hell inside my head began to be enacted in real life.
‘Madame,’ said the sommelier, ‘would you care to choose some wine for the table?’
He was brandishing a thick, hardbacked book.
‘UghghghghdoIhaveto?’ I said
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, craning to hear.
The entire table stopped talking. They gazed at me, then at the sommelier’s voluminous tome, then back at me.
Mercifully, at this point, a hero jumped in and saved me.
‘I’ll take that,’ said Hector, with a wink.
‘Sir,’ nodded the sommelier, handing it to him.
‘So what are we thinking … what are we eating?’ said Hector casually, as if talking to no one in particular, and in the blink of an eye the sommelier sprang to life, rabbiting on about bottles he had taken the liberty of ‘allowing to breathe’ and other rare ones he hoped we’d be kind enough to taste.
‘So, you don’t like choosing wine?’ Hector said quietly after the sommelier had left.
I opted to come clean. I had nothing to lose. I knew relatively nothing about wine. I’d only come on this trip for a night in a fine hotel in Paris and to stock up on mascaras in the big Sephora. I thanked Hector for stepping in before I tried to choose an affordable red, mistakenly ordered something rare worth 10,000 francs and had my passport confiscated by gendarmerie.
‘Well, tell the sommelier when he arrives that you don’t want to spend a lot and ask what he recommends.’ Hector laughed.
‘But then he’ll want to talk to me,’ I blushed.
‘Oh, he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ Hector said. ‘He wants to talk at you. It’s just a game. The sommelier’s job is to know everything about the bottles on the list. Your only job is to drink it. The winning tactic,’ he continued, ‘is to seem genuinely interested when they harp on. It’s simple, really.’
‘But … what about when they pour some?’ I said. ‘What do I say then?’
‘Again, very little,’ he said.
He mimed the act of picking up the glass by the stem, staring for a second at the colour, stuffing his nose in it for a small sniff and letting the barest amount enter his mouth.
‘Good,’ he said.
‘Is that all I say? Good,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re not tasting for flavour, you’re checking it’s not off, which it won’t be,’ he said. My head was spinning by now.
‘OK, but what if I look in the book and it’s all really expensive?’ I asked. ‘What do I say then?’
‘Oh … OK, here is what I would do,’ he said. He beckoned the sommelier over in a very blasé fashion.
‘Incidentally, what are the house wines? If we make this a long night,’ he said. ‘Are they drinkable?’
This question was miraculous.
Hector was saying ‘we want the cheapest bottle you possess’, but instead of the sommelier sneering at us, he began justifying why these wines were the cleverest choices on the list – they were his own personal choices. So versatile, so pocket-friendly. He and his staff drank this themselves after-hours.
‘We’ll have two of each later on,’ said Hector.
I’d learned enough about wine in eleven short minutes to prepare me for a lifetime.
Weeks later, I chose wine for the table at The Ritz Carlton in Montreal on a trip with the son of a prominent Tory MP and the exceedingly posh brother of a New York It girl who had one of those second names that make conversations stop and people crane forwards. Over three nights I developed a liking for vintage Armagnac and ate my very first truffle, plucked from Montferrato woodland crevices and grated over oeufs cocotte each morning. It tasted oddly of unwashed feet, if I’m honest. I also unknowingly ate my first foie gras, which the boys thought was very funny as they reminded me which part of the goose this actually was and how it was extracted.
‘I just think for the amount they torture the goose,’ I cried, ‘it might taste less like meaty snot!’
A few weeks after that, I flew to Israel first class to be whisked around Eilat’s most elegant and artsy boutique hotels, before a dreamy sojourn at a Dead Sea spa resort hotel, where I floated in the salt lake and was fed kubeh, chraime and knafeh by Israeli tourist-board officials as they told me what a bright utopia the place was for each and every one of the residents. These trips were completely free. Or at least they came with secret price tags: a glowing travel piece here, a glowing review for a duff movie or atrocious perfume there. Yet, with each trip to a far-off place, the etiquette of dealing with fancy living became less opaque. It was not any of the stuff I’d read as a little girl in those ‘Dos and Don’ts’ lists they’d print from time to time in the paper, advising women to walk with books on our heads to achieve refined posture. Nor was it merely saying ‘Sorry?’ instead of ‘Yerwhat?’ No, the rules of sneaking into upper-class spaces and passing as posh were much more nuanced; it was a spurious cocktail of bluffing and well-timed name-dropping, mixed with an air of pseudo-effortless confidence and sometimes, when faced with someone who was trying to impress you, giving almost no reaction at all.
In early March 2000, I landed at Dulles International Airport and walked through arrivals, pulling my Samsonite suitcase, checking my missed calls on my Nokia, but opting not to bother picking up the voicemails as I was absolutely too busy and possibly more than a little full of myself. I’d had my face on TV a bit more that week on a BBC Two show about Eighties nostalgia, plus a tentative offer of a book deal to write children’s fiction. Plus, here I was, in Washington, DC, about to go straight out for dinner with a long-distance boyfriend I’d met on a job in the Caribbean. As we drove out of the car park, I noticed another missed call from Nicole, an old Marie Claire friend, which I was much too busy to take, and I ignored other calls as I arrived at Martin’s Tavern, a bar and grill, for cocktails. I ignored those bleeps and buzzes for a while longer, but after my first very strong dry martini with an olive, I deigned to pop outside into the fresh DC evening air and listen to these messages from people who were very probably trying to get me to write for them, what with me being a rising star. The very first message was from Nicole. She said, ‘I know this is a shock, but it’s about Clare. She didn’t tell many people she was ill, but, Grace, over the last year she’s had ovarian cancer and, well, it was all very quick. We were trying to get you, but anyway, she went home to her mum’s up north and … well, here’s the thing, she’s died. But she wanted you to know this one thing: the summer you all ran rampage across London was one of the best times in her whole life.’
I sat down on a nearby wall and I opened my mouth and I howled.
CHAPTER 7
Limitless Gravy
March 2008
In a booth decorated with a framed photo of Sid James in Carry On Camping, I’m having an early dinner with Mam and Dad. We’re in their favourite restaurant, the Toby Carvery, Carlisle, just off Junction 43 on the M6. In the eight years since Clare died, I’ve thought many times how much she’d have enjoyed my various victories in my route to small-time fame and fortune. She’d have loved seeing my face cropping up constantly on TV, sometimes three times per night, on shows with names like Britain’s Favourite Biscuit on Channel 5 and then, hours later, on Newsnight Review on BBC Two discussing Ingmar Bergman. Clare would have rolled her eyes at my ability to sit on a chair with a camera on my face and have opinions on almost any given subject – Space Hoppers, Scottish devolution, the Backstreet Boys – as long as there was a little money involved. She’d have definitely enjoyed seeing me promoting my string of Young Adult novels, which led to me giving readings and small motivational talks in schools all over Britain – although my own former secondary school were peculiarly unkeen to hear my memories. She’d have seen me begin writing a TV column for the Guardian, appearing on Radio 1 doing book reviews and starting to use my lilting regional accent for voiceovers. But best of all, me and her would have been able to drink wine together around the kitchen table in my little house in East London, the one I put a down payment on using the proceeds of all these things. Also, along the way, I’d met a man – a record executive – fallen madly in love, eloped to America and got married. It rankled me quietly that Clare and I had bickered over some boy who felt so important to me at the time yet who had now faded to that level of importance where I wouldn’t care if he bumped into me in the Spar when I was wearing my dressing gown.
It’s 4 p.m. at the Toby Carvery. Now that they’re retired, Mam and Dad like to have their teas out early. Sometimes fish and chips in the Morrisons’ café or a jacket spud in a local garden centre. Lately, though, their hearts have belonged firmly to the Toby.
‘I’ll have a glass of Shiraz,’ Dad says to the waitress. ‘Jacob’s Creek,’ he winks to me. ‘Australian.’
Dad knew very few facts about wine, but he delivered them with great certainty – not unlike your average Islington dinner-party wine buff. As Dad aged (he was now just past seventy), wild silver shoots began to fire from his jet-black hair at tangential angles. Mam nicknamed him ‘Frowsy Freddy’ and spent a lot of her time handing him a comb and nagging him to put on a nicer jersey.
‘He’ll wear the same thing for days,’ she would complain. ‘It’s like he’s determined to look like a tramp.’
My parents had sold the family house, Mam having drastically devalued it with a heady blend of pebble dash, breeze blocks and Artex swirls. They moved to a small retirement flat on the opposite
side of Carlisle, cramming the same number of ornaments, mock-Victorian knick-knacks and horse brass into an eighth of the space. Dingley Dell, I call it, preferring to live in a minimalist Scandi-influenced space where the lounge contains one slate-coloured sofa facing a television and some artily arranged books. The only way to keep this minimal space tidy is to shred every piece of household paperwork as it appears and hover vigilantly with a Muji lint roller, removing bobbles and random cat hairs from the citrus-coloured Habitat pouffe as they land.
‘OK,’ I say, recapping on the etiquette. ‘I can go back to the vegetable section as many times as I want?’
‘Yes,’ Mam says.
‘But I can go to the meat section only once?’ I say, glancing over at a man in chef’s whites slicing at a ginormous turkey crown.
It could feasibly be emu. You could imagine Rod Hull chasing Michael Parkinson with it hooked over his arm. Why am I eating here?
I’ve lived in London for about twelve years and have sweet-talked and sharp-elbowed my way into some of the capital’s strangest concept restaurants, but none of them have been quite like Toby’s. The walls are covered with photos of British comedy classics: Mr Bean is playing golf and there’s a young Jim Davidson. Beside the turkey is a honking lump of very well-cooked beef. Not a scrap of blood left in it. Then a large slab of mystery meat that Dad assures me is roast pork.