William Donaldson's Week: Spurned again on my birthday

ALISON, my beloved, has acquired the habit of dropping a bombshell on my birthday. Last year, just before my customary birthday lunch with Michael O'Mara, she suddenly said that she'd been living with a man all the time I'd known her.

I squared my shoulders and carried O'Mara through lunch, which was no more than the stylish thing to do, since his troubles seemed worse than mine. He picked through the a la carte with tears pouring down his cheeks, though I did discover later that this was not because he'd inadvertently remaindered Diana: Her True Story on publication day (as he'd once, and quite sensibly, done with a book of mine), but because he'd caught an allergy from his boy J J's Thomas the Tank Engine pillow.

This year, I was wondering aloud whether we could risk asking old Mrs Matthews to the annual Superbowl party that Alison, my beloved, and I always give (last year, you may remember, Mrs Matthews took a crowd of squealing Tatler girls on to a barricaded drug den in Ladbroke Grove, thus almost causing me to be excluded at the last minute from Tatler's socially acceptable hot hundred for 1992), when Alison, my beloved, announced that she wouldn't be attending the party herself, since she'd be in Miami for the next three weeks, researching the book on American football she's doing for Michael O'Mara.

'I hope to discover,' she said, 'whether, at this late stage of the season, Dan the Man can expect to receive any protection from the bunch of big daisies who call themselves his offensive line.'

As Alison, my beloved, is on record - in the authoritative pages of the Independent, no less - as calling Dan the Man (Dan Marino to you and me) a tosser and a big girl's blouse, it seemed to me unlikely he'd be granting her an interview, but I was too grief-stricken to say so. Instead, I struggled off to my birthday lunch, which I was having this year with my friend Craig Brown.

Young people. Brown writes 16 columns - all of them good (though am I alone in finding the occasional derogatory references by one of his pseudonymous characters, 'Wallace Arnold', to others, such as 'Keith Waterhouse' or 'Enfield Senior', a bit too much of an in-joke?) - he's married to a woman even cleverer than himself, and no one minds any of this too much because he's the nicest person you could hope to meet. And yet I found him with a face like thunder - the upshot of a humiliating experience at a recent book-signing session with other contributors to Private Eye.

His pile of books, which at the start had been half the size of the others', had by the end been twice as big, and when he'd offered to sign a copy for a fellow in a suit, the fellow had said he wanted it signed by Ian Hislop.

'But I wrote it,' Brown said.

'I know you did,' the fellow in a suit said, 'but I still want Ian Hislop to sign it.'

In spite of my own burden of grief, I tried to cheer Brown up, reminding him that when Sir John Mills had been due to sign copies of his memoirs, Chocks Away] Gentlemen Please, the management of Hatchards had instructed its staff to circulate like quick-change artists on a theatrical revolve, pretending to be customers, with the happy result, for Sir John at least, that the entire stock was signed, before being banished for ever to the basement.

Brown smiled at this, but he didn't really cheer up until I said that while it's nice to be invited to write for Tatler - as had recently happened to me - it was a little dispiriting to be asked, once the commission had been effected, what one did for a living.

Quizzed as to the purpose of the inquiry (having engaged some chap in Harley Street to remove your appendix, it would be a bit late to ask him what he normally did for a living), the young woman on the telephone had said that it was the policy of the magazine to put an explanatory job description at the end of a contributor's piece.

Otherwise, she had suggested, readers wouldn't know him or her from a bar of soap; still less, after they'd read the piece, how he or she generally made ends meet.

'We're held in contempt,' said Brown. 'Surely it was Schlegel who said that 'commissioning editors are to thinkers as abortionists are to the first kiss'.'

'Not quite,' I said. 'But it is time the worm turned.'

'Right,' said Brown. 'You said: 'Up your bottom, madam'?'

'No. I wrote the piece - providing the info at the end that I was a busy quantity surveyor who lived in Gloucestershire, where my vivacious wife, Jocasta, bred miniature dachshunds.'

'What happened?'

'The piece was rejected.'

'Hmm,' said Brown, who was beaming happily now. 'You could go on one of those writing courses, I suppose. 'Learn to write publishable articles in 28 days'.'

Later, I rang Alison, my beloved, hoping she might cheer me up.

'Brown's advice is good,' she said. 'I can't chat, however. I've got Dan the Man on hold. See you around, I expect.'