IDENTITY CRISIS

When you find yourself on a cold March night at 10.30pm hiding in a wheelie bin at Norwich station car park from @benjohncock with your iPhone telling you that you’re 5 hours late for a meeting at UEA just before it runs out of juice, you have to ask yourself- ‘what went wrong?’

But before that - I now have some more ‘life firsts’ to add to first kiss, first book deal and first client being poached by the Wylie Agency, thanks to World Byng Night. These include wrestling Maeve Binchy into her lycra abseiling gear for the descent down Nelson’s Column, explaining to Alan Bennett how to pronounce ‘Booyakasha’ and helping Ish, Amis and the James Paterson triplets on to Harper Lee’s shoulders for the human pyramid we made for the finale. As the crowd sang ‘Feed The Word – let them know that we love Jamie’ we all looked skywards as Byng and the Pope dived 10,000 feet from the Quercus Blimp as riot police held back hysterical crowds. I signalled to Colin Firth to pull the lever releasing the million books and they shot into the airspace over the UK ready to land in pre-designated spots. The pigeons in Trafalgar Square weren’t that pleased – or that alive - afterwards (Boris – you’re welcome) and I had to leave before the after-party as I had 25,000 copies of Life Of Pi to deliver to my ‘contact’ on the North Peckham Housing Estate because they make great coshes, apparently.

After a morning altering all my unsold thrillers to take place in Sweden not London and adding those weird forwards slashes to all the letters ‘O’, I headed off on the train to my ‘Lick The Agent’ session at UEA. Having forgotten to buy a copy of Heat, I thought, ‘what the hell’ and decided to sort my manuscripts into two piles: pretentious and preposterous. My favourite was, ‘a coming of age novel which re-imagines Catcher In the Rye in a post-apocalyptic landscape reminiscent of the future we are struggling to remember’. My note was: ‘set in Sweden? Better?’

I soon lost interest and succumbed to the siren call of Twitter. After a bit of banter with @DruceyDrama about prose, @CaroleBlake about shoes and the whole world about what total Hell authors are, the train ground to a halt, so I crossly tweeted ‘stupid train has broken down just outside Cambridge’. Within seconds I had a reply from @BenJohnCock:

‘DAISY – I AM ON THAT TRAIN TOO’. COMING TO FIND YOU’.

I actually hemorrhaged. Daisy’s reign as Secret Agent would be over. I would be cast out in a hail of stones from the publishing community, drowning in an avalanche of lawsuits and – worst of all – probably lose my Groucho membership. I threw myself down the corridor and into the loo as Ben barged into the carriage, managing to lock the door just as he banged on it. When we finally pulled into Norwich, I squeezed myself out of the window and jumped straight into the car park wheelie bin. However, the lid was thrown open and before I knew it, Ben had busted me on his iPhone camera shouting ‘GOTCHA!’ before I could cover my face. Alas, les jeux sont fait.

I have now spent the last week agreeing to his every increasingly ridiculous blackmail demands (it started with him wanting to write a book with James Paterson but now we have progressed to the insane order of an invite to Kate and William’s wedding) and he tells me that he is going to reveal my identity to the world today. So to pre-empt that I have taken the big decision to do it myself on Twitter at 11.59 This maybe be the end of my relationship with The Bookseller but I will just have to throw myself on the mercy (and lap) of Neil Denny and see whether he will forgive me....