Diary – 19 January 2008

In the month of back to basics, I no longer hanker for parties or cut-price cashmere, just the long, deep bath of my dreams. We spent New Year with friends in Cameron country: lovely Oxfordshire farmhouses, big fires and buttock-honing walks. My husband emerged glowing from his bath and said very sweetly that he would run me a fresh one. Nooooo! Any fule kno you never get more than one tankful at a time in a country house, however well appointed. But he is a city boy so I said, ‘Thank you, darling,’ raced for the plug and sat in the remaining five inches, covered in gooseflesh from the navel upwards. Now I leaf through boiler brochures in a manner which verges on the pornographic.

Back in London and bumping into an old neighbour who has moved to a grander place, I ask how it compares with her old house. ‘Heating doesn’t work,’ she says. ‘It’s just one of those houses where it never does.’ As her husband is a successful investment banker and they are famously good at interiors, this is puzzling. I grope for a polite way of saying, ‘Oh but you’re so well off you could surely have the whole system turned hydrotastic?’ She catches my drift straight away. ‘Still wouldn’t work,’ she says. There is something very British about this.

My other winter vice is watching reruns of the BBC’s Grumpy Old Women. It taps into that moment before you are officially middle-aged but suddenly start thinking, ‘That plastic twine is so horrible, Must save bits of proper string.’ Early grumpy list for 2008: people who use the phrase: ‘Your old friend X’ when they are really trying to score a cheap point.