Celia Walden
Journalist and novelist
It was supposed to be an interview, not a date. But Piers seemed to have other ideas. The Ivy dinner crowd was particularly amusing that day: Baroness Thatcher to our left, Louis Walsh with a group of X Factor ingénues to our right. In the corner, Salman Rushdie was seducing some improbably beautiful girl. Piers spent most of our lunch foghorning out greetings and taunts across the restaurant. I remember thinking that I’d never met anyone quite so loud. Over sticky toffee pudding Piers casually informed me that I was the chosen one. When I dropped him an email the following morning to thank him for lunch, I felt it only fair to add as a postscript: ‘So that you know, it’s never, ever going to happen.’ ‘Oh it will,’ he wrote back. Five years later, he read out the exchange on our wedding day.
Melissa Kite
Real life columnist
My dates are always a disaster, hence the fact I’m still single. I remember a particularly fraught early romantic foray when a conscientious young fellow took me to a modern art gallery and a two-character David Mamet play in one afternoon.
I made it through the conceptual art exhibition, but halfway through the first act of Oleanna, I confess I told him I needed the loo, crept out, got drunk in the bar, then ran away.
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