I've got half an hour to get to Wagamama's. Frankie is having a - oh god I cannot say it - hen night. It's the first one I've ever been to.

(Well, there was Lisa's, of course. Hi sis! Not to say that your hen night didn't count, but .... having the hen night on the night of bloody Saint Princess Diana's funeral was not especially conducive to good cheer. Neither was me taking class A's in the toilets with your frankly quite scraggy future sister-in-law. Nor was the sweepstake our other sister and I set up on how long your marriage would last. And most of all, you were marrying that horrible 20-year-old Skeletor lookalike from Ashford, a fact which didn't seem to fill even you with joy. Sorry, babe.)

Anyway. Frankie. There are lots of pretty girls in the world. Not quite so many beautiful ones. Frankie is beautiful and all through college she insisted - mistakenly - that I was too. I was entranced with her.

We'd bunk off classes and sit in the Marquis of Granby or the Rosemary Branch drinking vodka, eating toasted cheese sandwiches, smoking SilkCut (rollies when we were poor.) She had red red hair and pale green eyes.Sometimes she'd wear contacts that darkened them to an unnatural mossy colour.

She never wore makeup but every day you could find traces of obstinate glitter on her face. In the evenings she worked at the Raymond Revue Bar in Soho where she'd have to wear a clown mask of cosmetics - inch thick false eyelashes; a mouth painted twice as big as her real one. We never kissed, but we might have, in a different universe.

Um, anyway. Happy hen night, Frankie White. And I'm late. What a surprise.

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