Diary - 24 February 2007

I arrive at David Bailey’s Clerkenwell studio. Bailey is doing a shoot for Lancôme; I have been asked to interview the Spanish supermodel, Inés Sastre. The shoot is the usual story — unidentified people with ponytails roaming round stained boxes of mini-croissants, a friendly, normal make-up artist, loud, cool music and a simultaneous air of tension and bohemian confusion. Inés and the make-up artist troop to the window to check her make-up in the better light. They sit back down and the make-up artist grasps a brush like Picasso, staring as if to X-ray her brain. All I can see is Inés’s back, slumped slightly in a Valentino coat. It turns out there isn’t time for me to actually interview her, and tense discussions result in me retracing my steps to Notting Hill, with the promise she will meet me later.

***

Which I don’t have much faith in, knowing that the minute you take your eye off an actress or a model they pop on a plane and vanish into rehab or somewhere like St Barths. In fact, Inés is off to Paris in the morning for the baptism of her baby, but to my surprise she turns up to meet me, that night, in the oyster bar Bibendum. She is early. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, a glass of wine is propped in front of her, a cigarette burns in her hand. She doesn’t seem worried about the potential damage to her skin. ‘No, my dermatologist says that the really bad thing is pills,’ she says, nodding seriously. I wish I could begin a sentence, ‘My dermatologist says...’ It is Valentine’s Day, and it isn’t lost on me that having a date with a supermodel at an oyster bar could seriously mess with your head. In fact, she is a sweetie and David Bailey, she reports with her trademark gleeful grin, assured her she wasn’t at all like the ‘freaks’ who usually trooped into his studio. ‘I always spend Valentine’s Day alone at the cinema,’ she informs me calmly. So reassuring from one of the world’s great beauties.

***

The director Nick Love has made a movie called Outlaw, and I find him perched by a fire in the Soho club Blacks. I haven’t been here for ten years and it is nicer than I remember. Love is a vision: gold teeth, an air of hygienic geezerness and a pink Hermès jumper knotted perkily on his shoulders. He is 37 and my favourite kind of interviewee — the type that has had a huge crash, come out the other side, and is totally normal and straightforward as a result. He reminisces about being 21 and obsessively studying film at college in Bournemouth. ‘Why would I want to go into the student union bar and have a half of lager when I was sitting in a f***ing stairwell at 12 taking heroin?’ he inquires. Well, absolutely. I wholeheartedly admire his drive but then, as he points out, not many people get the chance to do what he does. ‘I spent all of my twenties preparing for a big moment. When that moment came I was not going to chill out for a few months, I was f***ing there at five o’clock in the morning — you need to get up very early to get on set before me!’ These days he lives on the estate of a grand mate, grows carrots, and shoots at weekends. It does occur to me that if he was a character in one of his movies, he’d probably shoot himself.

***

It’s been ten years since I started doing celebrity interviews and these days I often find myself interviewing people I have interviewed before or, if not them, their wife, or ex-wife, mother, son, or boyfriend. Eight years ago, as it happens, I interviewed Nick Love’s ex-wife Patsy Palmer. They had just split up and she was at the height of her fame as Bianc-uh in EastEnders. I remember her greeting me cheerfully with the words, ‘Don’t you feel empty all the time?’ I do wish someone had told me at 18 that life was a real-time version of an Anthony Powell novel and that you would meet the same people that you casually chatted to in clubs, at drinks parties or at dinners, aged 20 or 23, at five-yearly intervals for the rest of your life. Worse, that they would remember all the incredibly embarrassing things you said.

***

The best bit about writing a novel might easily be the launch party. I am not sure anyone will come to mine but I suppose some people must — my agent at least, hopefully my publisher, possibly my father. Everyone asks if I am excited. I’m sure I should be excited, and I do have fleeting seconds-long feelings of excitement. But mostly I just feel strung out, as if I have gone four days without alcohol, and faintly alert, like a dog who keeps hearing a distant whistle. Everyone is being amazingly kind, though, probably because the novel — The Lotus Eaters — took so long to write that they are just thankful it actually made it into print.

***

Contemporary poetry is like the theatre, in my view — mostly dull and frustratingly untrue to the reality of your life. So I have been thrilled to discover Sharon Olds. Sometimes art does make you sit up and pay attention: sometimes it can put you on the edge of your seat. The Killers did that for me at the Brits, and so, when I came across it on the internet, did Olds’s poem, ‘True Love’. I am in love with ‘True Love’.

In the middle of the night, when we get up