I have been manifesting. Tirelessly. Every day I take a deep breath and recite: ‘I always have more money than I need. I always have money coming into my life.’
Well, that hasn’t worked, but I did have a stroke of luck last week. The oak parquet in my sitting room is finished and then, embarking on the kitchen, the carpenter unearthed, beneath the paint-splattered concrete, a few inches of flagstone. ‘Should we take up the concrete, see what’s underneath?’ I asked him. ‘It might disappear after a few inches, but we might have a floor of 18th-century flagstones!’
I sent the photo to Nic. ‘I think you should do it,’ she said. ‘Or you will always be wondering.’ I asked the project manager what he thought. ‘Well, flagstones will be cold.’ I honestly don’t know why we bother asking men anything.
So he hacked up the concrete. And there, stretching out, was the creamiest, dreamiest, really huge, just as though in a church, entire floor of flagstones. It dips slightly in the doorway where people have walked across it for hundreds of years. For the first time in my life, I’m ahead. As Basil Fawlty would say, ‘Thank you, God! Thank you so bloody much!’
All the flags needed was a good wash. The concrete had protected them from paint splotches and man feet. I cannot tell you how having a perfect ground floor – the way it catches the light, the way Missy Puppy, who up to now has had to wear little socks as she was scared of the slippery concrete, now trots in and out of the garden all by herself! – has changed my mood. I’m like Carrie Bradshaw, wafting around her huge, gorgeous Gramercy Park apartment stroking things.
I am really sad that this season of And Just Like That… is to be the last. I have written about Carrie, how her life has reflected my own, since the very first episode in 1999. Episode two was entitled, ‘Models and Mortals.’ My editor knew I had dated an Italian male model, so I was duly commissioned to write a piece. Christopher was beautiful but, as a new Gwyneth Paltrow biography alleges she said of Brad Pitt, ‘He’s dumber than a sack of s**t.’ Christopher came to visit me in Carnaby Street, where I worked on the dear, departed Company magazine, and I told him Pinewood Studios had just burnt down. ‘Oh, no!’ he cried. ‘All those trees!’
Carrie wasn’t afraid to be disliked. She spent too much money on shoes. She wrote a weekly newspaper column about her life, which she always filed late. She used to hide from her editor. It’s unsurprising my ex-husband despised her. He hated I always had to watch the show, telling him to shush. He wrote recently of Carrie that she had ‘a face like one of those knobbly root vegetables that make the news for resembling human sexual anatomy and an intellect Wayne Rooney would look down on’. Never mind he called me an old hag, a paedophile and a racist with no friends, do not disrespect Sarah Jessica Parker!
He continued, ‘Carrie did the utmost possible with what nature cursed her with, spending a dragon’s hoard in pursuit of love – fooling the likes of Liz into thinking the same might work for them.’
Men, and my relatives, are always fine when I’m spending money on them. It’s when I spend it on myself they have a problem. After I moved into my rented flat in Primrose Hill, as we walked to Lemonia for dinner, which I paid for as a thank you for putting the TV on the wall, David 1.0 noticed a branch of Space NK. ‘Don’t spend too much time in there!’ he jested.
Well, my ex-husband ate enough to fund a small army, while David 1.0 smoked like a chimney. What I aspire to most about Carrie is her selfishness. Her refusal to be unhappy. When the male writer in the apartment below hers lists the number of books he has published, she trumps him. When Aidan breaks an ancient, as-original-as-my-flagstones window, she makes no bones about being furious.
All men seem to want to do in my life and Carrie’s is trample over us before emptying our bank accounts. Well, no more. I’m done. I’m dressing up every day and wafting. For my own pleasure, not anyone else’s. Chippy bastards all.
JONES MOANS… WHAT LIZ LOATHES THIS WEEK
I feel sorry for King Charles, his Highgrove gardeners moaning. It’s hell being a boss. I told an employee (pre-Nic) that unless she got the fur trimmed around her dog’s eyes, she could no longer work for me. She duly saw the vet, and when the dog got home his eyes were red, crusty and sore. She told everyone it was because I hadn’t allowed her time off to see a vet…
People who walk behind my car when they can see that I’m reversing.
