Hungry: The highly anticipated memoir, from Celebrity Masterchef’s new judge Grace Dent

by Grace Dent

I was fine with being pretentious in the privacy of my own head, but in public? With people looking? Writing felt much more like a job for me. That’s showing off in private. But how?

We remember rarely having a clue about the feelings of strangers, neighbours or celebrities. We remember people being mysterious, elusive, unavailable. And we remember not knowing things: how the definitive answer to the question we had in the shower that morning was probably on the top floor of a library in New York and we’d never know within our whole lifetime.

Oddly, he complied, and soon we were all in his lounge as he DJ’d for us by playing his CD single of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos again and again, while I necked shots of tequila and slid down the stairs on the back of a framed poster of Cannon & Ball in panto. I left at 7 a.m., stopping the minicab driver halfway down the drive so I could be sick in John Leslie’s hedge.

Despite all this, I wanted to stay at Marie Claire. I rather enjoyed these London high-society girls’ whims and weirdnesses. Their lack of touchy-feeliness suited me; unabashed Nineties bitches were far easier to navigate than today’s duplicitous blowhards staging elaborate Women’s Day events and presenting as living saints with one eye on an OBE.

I’d been sent to Vienna. I wasn’t really sure why. Or even really where Vienna was. Aside from hearing Midge Ure scream about the place on Top of the Pops in the Eighties, I knew no real facts about the place. It meant nothing to me.

Maybe the greatest difference between being rich and poor is the number of instances per day that strangers inform you that you’ve been seen or your needs noted.