So there I was sitting in a Japanese restaurant with Mary who was spiking lumps of green tea ice cream with her chopsticks. I was quietly crooning Mother Kelly’s Doorstep for her because she had asked me to provide the dinner jazz. It was 11.55 on a Wednesday morning. Life doesn't get much better than this, I thought. ‘Do the bit about when the girl had a hole in her sock, a hole in her shoe, Mum, ’ Mary ordered. As I sung about the stocking where the hole peeped through I thought,as I often do, that just as I have finally reached the correct level of organisation and sanity required to look fairly neat whenever I want, neatness itself no longer garners any respect. Do people gush, ‘Oh, but don't you look wonderfully neat!” when a really tidy person enters the room? No, in the main, they do not.

Only the other day I heard of a billionairess American philanthropist who decided that her immaculate Oscar de la Renta couture ball skirt was shown off best by a little cashmere sweater in which there was a small moth hole. Her admiring friends nearly dropped dead at how chic that hole looked. Knowing the fastidiousness of its bearer they could see straight away It was no oversight. Indeed it was as desired and deliberate as if the garment itself had been dispatched to a moth farm in the Hamptons for a late summer spree. Oh the elegance! Oh the daring! Perfection in clothes, as in people just isn't necessarily that attractive any more. A wonky mouth, a suggestion of an unravelling hem, a little flab, a strawberry birthmark, a sight stutter, say, these, I resolved, are what we should all be wearing to parties in the Spring. (Perhaps not all at once, though.)

As I dressed myself for New Year’s Eve in Luisa Beccaria amethyst panne velvet, my hair having been coaxed into the kind of curls that would not have disgraced a Charlie’s Angel, my toe nails gleaming through my seven denier tights in Dior rouge de fete and my features hidden by about half a ton of makeup, I suddenly realised that I looked a bit stupid. Not stupid exactly, more as though I didn't quite have any thoughts or feelings or personality to call my own. This is an effect I have long strived for- a clear, smooth and irreproachable demeanour, a reaction , I presume, to a lifetime of having been thought a little too intense. But it wouldn't quite do. if the truth be known, being this well turned out actually made me look a little OLD. I took off all my eye makeup straight away and scraped my hair into a ponytail that was less Farah Fawcett and more Grange Hill. But that was no good either, I just looked like someone in a bad mood who didn't quite want to go to the party, a person with a tummy ache or maybe someone who slightly disapproved of her hosts or was worried, even, that attending the party somehow implied that she fully condoned her hosts’ flamboyant lifestyle, when in fact she did not. I redid my eyes and fluffed my hair again. Perhaps what this outfit really needed was a smile. But I did not feel like smiling. I tried different shoes, some crazy bracelets, four different dresses, scent, a hat, but every time i looked at the mirror one awful phrase kept popping back into my head, “Hello Aunty.”

We don't have to go to the party, I thought. But the amount of planning that had gone into the complicated baby sitting arrangements was easily enough to have launched a new product worldwide, including the Scandinavian countries, and I just didnt have the heart to change things at this the eleventh hour.

Then I noticed a disposable propelling pencil on the mantel piece. I picked it up and thinking of the American heiress and her rather incredible attempt at dressing down, I made a small pin prick in my tights to the side of my left knee and traced the ladder down into the strap of my patent sandal. It wasn't bad. In fact the delicate vertical stripe was really rather flattering. It looked sweet, the whole effect suggesting that I was coping with my life, but only just. (True. True.) Then I downed a scant inch of whisky, reached for my handbag and my husband and slightly emboldened I began to hope for the best.