Ivy league

To the West End celeb-haunt The Ivy for an S&S sponsored dinner with Richard and Judy. For our North American audience: R&J are essentially Oprah manqués - day time chat show hosts with a Book Club of their own.

Richard has a book coming out, Fathers & Sons, due out in October. If you only know him from his motor mouth TV persona, you are in for a shock. The book is extremely well written. It is part memoir, part family history, and the bit about his grandfather is truly affecting.

I talked to Richard for a good while and felt at ease. Mostly because we talked - about our fathers, football. You know, stuff. For a long while afterwards, though, I was next to the S&S PR girl named, inevitably, Emma. At least an hour, I think, I had to small talk. This I am not good at and we sat in occasional lapses of uncomfortable silence. Mostly because she seemed incapable of talking about anything that didn't have to do with S&S and publicity.
Of course, maybe it was we just didn't click and she was also thinking how dreadful it was sitting next to me. After a few glasses of wine I asked her where she lived in London. 'Crouch End,' she said wearily, and I realised that was what I had asked her maybe 45 minutes ago.

I have so much difficulty schmoozing. I am not good at the theatre of publishing and bookselling, this party-hearty sort of 'hello, darling, how are you?!' Air kiss, mmmmh, mmmmh. In fact I despise it.

I do have publishing people I love to see, but I realise I have met all of them one on one or in very small groups and built a relationship. And they are people I would like as friends if I cannot indeed count them as friends yet. At the Organ's 150th, there were quite a few of these people there.

But I realised why I like certain people. AG came over late-ish in the evening. I am actually really jealous of him because he is brilliant and speaks five languages fluently. He has a sexy Italian wife. He and EM own their own indie publishing company, produce beautiful literature (both content and physically - the production and design they use is top-notich).

Here is why I love him. The first question he asked was not - what do you think the Christmas number one will be, what about the latest PFD gossip - or any of that publishing insider bullshit. It was, what are you reading? And when I told him - Mansfield Park, actually - he was able to talk about it, and not in a how many units did it shift, is there a good marketing buzz around it, but about the book itself.