Talking to Addison. Jenny Colgan

myself in a desperate, excited rush whereby no matter how I tried I couldn’t seem to get it together to leave the house. I’d forgone the Alice Cooper style for a prolonged attempt to whiten it out, which was now making me look like one of those eyebrowless sci-fi entities. I toyed with buying an eye-patch and pretending I was starting an early eighties revival, but it would take too much explaining, and, given that I’d only met this bloke for two minutes, I wanted to appear as non-mad as possible.

      I still hadn’t decided what to do about the nurse thing. After all, I had kind of got this date under false pretences, and it also meant he was a bit of a perv. I hummed and hawed and stomped around a bit, which was clearly annoying Kate. Normally on Saturdays she was up at eight, dashing to gyms and swimming pools and popping into the office and Joseph and the Fifth Floor at Harvey Nicks and going to exhibitions whilst Josh and I lay on the two squashy old sofas in the living room, watched black-and-white films, and ate Jaffa Cakes, but it was eleven thirty and she wasn’t dressed yet. As well as the mobile, her pager was placed on the kitchen table and she seemed to have been reading the same page of the paper for some time.