Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

face.
    I rang the doorbell again. The door was yanked open a second time.
    ‘That’s B!’ the woman yelled at me. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you read?’
    ‘It’s very dark out here,’ I mumbled, squinting at the buzzer. That champagne really had gone to my head. The woman pressed the correct doorbell for me. I heard a door open upstairs.
    ‘Jake!’ the woman called out. ‘Would you come down here? There’s some drunk girl here to see you, she keeps ringing my doorbell.’
    Jake leaned over the handrail on the stairs.
    ‘Sorry, Mrs Blackburn. Would you send her up?’
    I climbed the stairs, swaying ever so slightly as I did, wondering if in fact this might have been a bad idea.
    ‘I believe I may have upset your neighbour,’ I announced, holding up the cans of cider as a peace offering. He didn’t look impressed, but he took the cider from me.
    ‘Come on in,’ he said.
    Jake had a one-bedroom flat on the third floor of a converted Victorian house near Chalk Farm tube. Cat-swinging was out of the question, but it made up in character what it lacked in size, with an original working fireplace in the living room and a little balcony at the back looking out across manicured lawns towards Primrose Hill. The walls were covered with his photographs, the furniture all looked as though it had come from second-hand shops. There was a reassuring lack of anything that looked remotely as though it might have come from IKEA.
    ‘I’m sorry I cancelled on you last night,’ I said, collapsing onto his battered red leather sofa.
    ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘Do you want one of these? Because I have a feeling you may have had enough.’
    ‘Mmmm …’ I replied. The sofa really was very comfortable. I stretched out a bit, leaning my head on the armrest.
    And then I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was three thirty in the morning and I was still on the sofa, covered in a blanket. A pillow had been placed under my head. Oh, God. The memory of the encounter with his downstairs neighbour cameflooding back to me. Oh, God, oh, God. Had I really turned up at his place, drunk and disorderly, and then passed out on his sofa? Why oh why, Cassie? As quietly as I could, I got up, folded up the blanket and searched around for my handbag, which was tricky given that I’d no idea where I put it, and it was pitch dark in the room. Eventually, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I spotted it, over in the corner. In my eagerness to retrieve it, I didn’t notice the magazine rack next to the sofa, over which I tripped. I reached out to steady myself, grabbed onto something in the darkness and brought a standard lamp crashing down on top of me as I fell. Shit.
    A figure loomed above me in the darkness.
    ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Jake asked.
    ‘I was trying to go home …’ I said weakly, as he pulled the lamp off me. ‘I’m so sorry, Jake. I’ll just get out of your way now.’
    He pulled me to my feet.
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ he laughed, wrapping his arms around me. ‘I don’t want you out of my way. I want you in my way. It’s the middle of the night. Stay.’
    ‘Really, I should go …’ I started to say, but he shut me up with a kiss. So I stayed.

19
     
    Cassie Cavanagh loves Paris in the winter
    Ten days before Christmas, the Cavanagh clan (including Celia, Mike and the kids) descended on London for their Christmas shopping trip. They do this every year, and every year I tell them not to. They insist on coming up two Saturdays before Christmas (the final Saturday is always spent wrapping and preparing food) and they insist on going to Oxford Street which, at this time of year, bears a striking resemblance to the ninth circle of hell. I have tried telling them they’d be better off coming in November, but Celia insists that the kids want to see the lights. Actually, I think she likes leaving it so late because it then gives her ample opportunity to moan about how horrible London is.
    ‘I don’t know how you can stand it, Cassie. Dirty, busy, everyone’s so rude. I honestly don’t see why anyone would want to live here,’ she announced as they arrived en masse, exhausted and fractious, for dinner at my flat on the Saturday evening.
    I had been stressing about this dining all day. Usually when they came to London we would all go out somewhere, but I’d decided this year to prove that I could do the domestic goddess thing just as well as Celia could. And just to dial up the