You could tell this was a proper literary party from the exclamations of disgust that greeted the doggy bags that had slim volumes of poetry1 in them. There is always one book on the shortlist that you want, three you’d quite like to read and one which you will be given.
What I wanted from this party was Susanna Clarke’s book. She was there, since it was shortlisted; and I had a glimpse of what her life has turned into: at a party where everyone else was absorbed in gossip, nibbling, or good champagne, there were people clustering round her for autographs. She did not win the prize.
Bumped into Steve Rose. “I have made up with Richard Dawkins”, he said. “I can’t dislike anyone who calls Bush ‘a deeply stupid little oil spiv’. Besides, he signed up for the first version of the Israeli academic boycott.”
The strangest thing in the doggy bags was the perfume. The woman ahead of me in the exit queue, a rather terrifying Guardian columnist said “Oh, they’ve given me aftershave”. But it was stranger than that. It was a perfume, specially commissioned for Waterstone’s, which you are meant to spray on your writing paper. I have smelled this and can confirm that it is a very good idea, if you are writing to creditors and want to add verisimilitude to your claim to have started a new life managing a brothel in Minsk.
1 In fact this has fine stuff in it, which I should blog later