Oscar Humphries

My dinner parties are an exercise in patience. People used to tell me how much money they’d made buying in Islington when they did. ‘Good for you,’ I’d say, hating them just a little. I’ve noticed that recently my friends have stopped telling me how much equity they’d managed to suck out and try to change the subject whenever I bring house prices up — which I do with increasing pleasure and regularity. The other day I woke up to shouting. ‘Sorry isn’t good enough.’ Her voice was shrill with hurt, anger and profound disappointment. ‘What good is saying sorry? You’re not sorry. Not as sorry as I am.’ Sara, my fiancée, is normally a kind and forgiving person. I wondered who had so grievously wronged her.

It is unspeakably pretentious and whips some of my more fashion-conscious friends into a frenzy of wild-eyed insecurity. Have they been invited to the right parties? Does everyone else know which parties they chose to avoid? Fashion has no mercy apparently. London Fashion Week seems to have very little to do with fashion. There is a schedule of shows where young and suspiciously young-looking designers display their often unwearable cloths on dysentery-thin models. The Americans and the French don’t take it seriously. It ranks somewhere below Tokyo Fashion Week and above Kazakhstan Fashion Week, which by all accounts was a disaster. I went to the Luella party because Fashion Week mania is contagious and I got that ‘If I don’t go, I’ll be missing out’ feeling.

The smoking ban approaches with terrifying speed. I fear that all my righteous indignation, my libertarian instinct, is merely the frightened whimper of an addict whose last crutch is being kicked away by the men in grey suits. When I drank — and I drank a lot — I couldn’t imagine a life for myself in which I wasn’t drinking. When I eventually stopped, nearly four years ago, the reality of life without debts to bars, being slapped by women I was sure I’d never met, and a perpetual hangover was so pleasant that I wondered why I hadn’t stopped sooner. I want to stop smoking so should be grateful to a government that is making a decision for me. I can’t, however, imagine myself not smoking. If I didn’t smoke, what would I do? Jog?