I was on my knees yesterday, elbow deep in muddy water, cleaning out my pond and generally having a good think; and the question that occurred to me as I was rescuing the last frog from the fetid depths was, ‘Why aren’t I Plum Sykes?’

As I sat with the Sunday papers that morning, devouring toast with crunchy peanut butter and idle gossip with equal relish, I read about a rich English socialite called Plum Sykes. She’s just written a book, and apparently said book got her a fat £350,000 advance. What’s the book about? Well, obviously an advance of the magnitude would suggest a ground-breaking work of staggering genius, so I read on, eager to know what I was doing wrong. And then it came to me - I’ve got to stop writing books on bereavement and start writing something really useful. I’m going to copy Plum, and write about vacuous New York blondes who visit Bergdorf Goodman to get their highlights done. Plum’s book ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ has apparently taken New York by storm, and I can see why. People clearly want to read that kind of stuff – they don’t want to read about bad things like death and loneliness, because they really aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things; but getting a French manicure and choosing the correct shade of bootie for your Yorkshire terrier, now those are things that can really make a difference to the world. After all, nobody wants to see an incorrectly dressed lap dog – it’s almost as distressing as finding the deli has run out of Shitake mushrooms, or discovering that your fabulously rich boyfriend is wearing a clip-on tie.

My name is also clearly an impediment. I don’t think I could hope to mingle with the cream of New York society with a boring name like Kate, so I’m going to combine a suitably fruity Christian name, with a book about a woman who breaks a nail whilst saving the life of her choking toy poodle with the Heimlich manoeuvre. ‘Damson In Distress!’ will be a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a novel, chronicling the rise and rise of a girl who knows what’s really important in life. Damson is a girl who knows that it’s far more socially acceptable to be seen carrying the Ebola virus than last season’s handbag. She’s a girl who understands that vacuous self-obsession is a good thing – you can walk around in a catatonic post-lobotomised state, spouting gibberish and looking vacant, because you have Louis Vuitton and Manolo Blahnik to do all the talking for you. Life is good when you’re rich and blond. Which leaves me with one small problem – I’m neither.

What have I got to crow about anyway? All I do is write about cleaning out my pond and being a failed author, and that just makes me a bitter little nobody with muddy knees and happy goldfish. But I figure that as long as you are happy to read about my unimpressive, unimportant little life, then I’ll continue to chronicle it. (It may interest you to know that I don’t get my highlights done at Bergdorf Goodman - in fact I have never had my hair dyed, which is as startling as it is sad) And despite not being rich and blond I do have something to look forward to this morning – I’m getting a garden shredder! I bought it off E-Bay and I’m looking forward to adding it to my impressive collection of power tools and instruments that can damage my digits. I’m going to start by turning all the spare twigs and brambles in my garden into lovely, useful chippings, and then I’m going to throw in a book called ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ and turn it into fodder for single cell organisms, which I’m sure is just who it was written for in the first place.


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