My dinner with Meryl

Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This is all true, mad as it seems. And as I outstayed my welcome, as I always do — you can rely on it — I even caught Ms Streep washing up. ‘Meryl Streep washing up!’ I exclaimed. ‘Next, it’ll be Tom Cruise putting the bins out.’ She smiled graciously as she rinsed out a mug. God, she’s lovely.

I was invited, along with several other women journalists, to a private screening of the film and then an ‘informal supper’ at the Islington home of Phyllida Lloyd, the director of The Iron Lady who also directed Meryl in Mamma Mia! and put her in dungarees, just to show she may not need a man even though, in the end, she did. I don’t know why I was on the guest list, although I suspect, as sometimes happens, I may have been confused with the Guardian columnist Deborah Orr, who is more important and cleverer and a far better writer, although, for future reference, I am prettier and also know a card trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. (I can also make an origami swan, which may be a boast too far, but there you have it.)

 Meryl is waiting for us at the front door when we arrive, wearing a print shirt and black trousers. She looks beautiful, and is beautiful — astonishing, nearly translucent skin— but has the kind of fascinating beauty that allows her to travel from plain (Ironweed) through to radiantly glamorous (Manhattan, Heartburn, The Devil Wears Prada).