Helen D’Vorcee

As seen in the Times ‘Oh, sod the glass, let’s have a bottle.’ Our lunch at Daphne’s in Chelsea is entering its third hour. The waiter, a real dash, soon reappears, popping the cork of a Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque. Rebecca has been having a terrible time of it recently (her husband, ‘the bastard’, walked in on her bonking his business partner) and I’ll see no expense spared in cheering up an old Somerville gal pal. We gossip, we bitch, we whinge. We have a bloody good time. But when the bill arrives, the colour drains from my face. ‘It’s 534 quid a head!’ I shriek, launching into a bout of effing and jeffing about bloody Andy Burnham and his tax-mad Chancellor. No doubt about it: the jig’s well and truly up.

As seen in the Times ‘Sodding sods!’ I exclaim, as I discover that I’m £16,000 overdrawn. Between the tweakments, the Berry Bros deliveries and the maintenance of a feckless toyboy in rented digs in Hove, I’m deep in the red and digging deeper. I shoot Emilia Cash-Barings a WhatsApp. ‘Babe, have you got any comish for me? Something on the new scourge of Athleisure or a righteous skewering of Soho Farmhouse?’ ‘Look, Helen,’ she replies. ‘All I’ve got is something on this “AI” stuff. £2,000? What do you reckon?’ That’s the problem with tech journalism. It’s all done by dorky pale men who want to hide from women AI? Moi? I’m no incel.

As seen in the Times I’m fiddling with my phone when a news notification pops up. Another independent school has closed, the latest atrocity in Labour’s unrelenting Khmer Rouge-style anti-middle-class genocide. Seething, I knew it was high time for me to spend a few weeks away from Britain, Andy Burnham and mad, bad Ed Miliband. But where to go? Husband Simon’s place in the south of France? No, much too hot. Sardinia? No, can’t risk running into Georgie, not after what happened in Sexy Fish on New Year’s Eve in 2012. Then I remember. Emilia Cash-Barings has been raving about this saucy sex cruise she’s just been on. A week of pure hedonism that made Tiberius’s palace on Capri look like the Women’s Institute AGM.

As seen in the Times ‘You young people, I don’t even know where to start!’ My phone call to my daughter Isabel is entering its 40th minute. ‘You’re all too busy donning keffiyehs these days to do any BONKING. ‘When I was your age, it was snogging to Duran Duran all night, then onto the couch for an hour’s kip, then into the office for a full day’s work at the PR agency or Tatler or wherever I was then… the point is there was no whingeing, just working hard and having a bloody good time.’ I then ask about Tom, Izzy’s long-term boyfriend, but interrupt with another harangue: ‘The thing is, Tom is very sweet.