In the cafe I go to every day, my coffee tasted tragic, really sweet and watery. These things happen, certainly, and I didn’t do anything hysterical like not drink it, but I was glad to have held out for almost a year and not accepted a loyalty card. It’s a hard thing to refuse when it is offered, people don’t quite understand, so I had to pretend it was a policy with me that I don’t ever accept them because they weigh me down or weigh my bag down and somehow interfere with my sense — ha ha — of being free.

The truth is, as I often have to wait 10 minutes for a drink when they’re not busy, or they are occasionally a bit sharp or get the bill wrong, I am just not ready to make that level of commitment. And what if they boasted to others of my fidelity? Can you imagine?

I have a horror of signing contracts in life, in any case, however much they exist to protect me. I have read too many American novels where writers agree to deliver more books than they have fingers and end up with no choice but to emigrate or disappear into the waves in order to stave off disgrace. That is the fear. Currently I am working on two books and a story for an anthology. April 1 may be a delivery date I can’t take seriously, but no doubt others will.

Supplementary pledges

I can’t take out supplementary pledges with coffee outlets. It’s too much responsibility. You shouldn’t let the tail of free drinks in life wag the dog of ... I have no idea how to finish that sentence.

One thing I do know: if we drink coffee in the morning, partly so that the little cup of dark liquid can feed its arm round our shoulders and declare to us in congratulatory manner, “You’re living the life, pal!” or whisper seductively in our ear like a dodgy Broadway producer trying to revive burlesque, “You, my friend, are a little bit special!”, these messages just don’t get through when the drink tastes bad.

“My coffee’s no good,” I said to my friends. I set my features to a comedy sulk. My friends sniffed at the cup. “Think they’ve given you almond milk,” was the verdict.

Almond milk! I slipped into a lengthy rant about almond milk, that so-called beverage that is mostly water and sugar, which people everywhere drink for health. “Even people who used to swear by soya milk drink it now,” I sigh. “I occasionally see it in my own fridge, for Pete’s sake. How does that even ...”

I silenced myself. “God I am boring,” I said. “I do apologise.”

“Well,” my friend said, biting her lip as her tact kicked in. “Not boring exactly, more, kind of ... soothing?”

A teenage friend of mine recently handed her mother a list of topics that are not to be touched. Top of the list was relationships. Next came work. Then “plans”. And, of course, “the past”. Apparently it has really improved things between them.

Boring topics

I am often baffled by the way the very young have the nerve to be so exacting. How did they get all the power? Still, I wondered about serving myself with a list of boring topics to be avoided in order to cling on to my pals, in order to stay awake myself. Part of the problem may be my own boredom threshold is nice and high.

That afternoon, as if to save me — something genuinely exciting — a long-lost relative contacted me out of the blue through this paper. He was a cousin of my mother’s, last spotted by her in 1956 — my very own first cousin once removed. I was in a play once called Temptation Sordid or Virtue Rewarded where the heroine had a dastardly cousin Sir Jaspar, “once removed and twice convicted” — my character was called Lady Lucre — but this gent seemed very upright and correct.

I am not short on relatives, truth be told. Pretty much every weekend it is somebody’s birthday in the family. Yet when the cousin wrote again, asking me to meet him in Pall Mall, I could not resist. I know almost nothing about him apart from the fact that he loves the theatre in general and musicals in particular, had been taught the piano by my grandfather, who was still wearing a silk dressing gown at 3pm, and that he has a picture of my mother and her older sister in their pram in the 1930s. He is about 20 years older than I am and worked for a chain of “departmental stores” and has a great fondness for the exclamation mark. Talk about perfect ...

My friends in the cafe are going to faint with interest when I tell them.

— Financial Times